Red, Green & Black

Olivier Cadiot, trans. Charles Bernstein.

Much like Albiach in spatial organization, though perhaps more inventive

retain well this

the how, the when, the where, the why
enough, also, as much, a lot

better 'n' better

regret

adieu! pardon!

AH!
Ha!
Oh!

appear, risk, etc.

I am certain to succeed

A corpse decomposes & a postmortem is peformed through the duration of Red, Green & Black-- this is dealt with clinically and absurdly; the rendering is constantly interrupted by a cacophony of asides, definitions, exclamations. Reading this I feel frantic. Everything's examined: the body, the crime, musings of childhood, verb conjugations, slang. I understand that something is dead and being examined (less for cause of death, I think, than sheer curiosity)-- but what's dead is unclear. If pressed, I'd guess something along the lines of classical form, literature (is the title a play on Stendhal? further, is the whole poem in response to Stendhal?) esp. given the radical form the poem takes on the page.

Rosemarie Waldrop's blurb:

"The game is grammatical, but the arrow hits: a real corpse decomposes. Between repetition, tautology and quotation, falls dead silence. What seems a sort of ready-made language (in which Charles Bernstein's playfulness matches Cadiot's) turns out to be a carnival on top of `catastrophe/catastrophic'. Need I add: a poem for our time?"

Daily Sonnets

Laynie Browne.

These are really lovely, fun to read out loud, deceptively simple and so playful with the sonnet form. Eschewing "conventional" (Shakespearean, Petrarchan, et al) rules: rhyme scheme, iambic pentameter, but keeping others: 14 lines (or an acknowledgement if broken, i.e., "half sonnet" etc.), musicality, and the turn. It's hard to say what fixed forms are, exactly-- they really are so elastic, that it's hard to define their essences-- sometimes it's easiest through negation. "A sonnet's not a sestina," maybe, "a sonnet isn't long." But I think Laynie Browne has really captured the essence of the sonnet in this book-- because I think sonnets are like weight training. I think you have to perform them regularly to be any good, to make them any better, to understand the form and be skilled at performing it-- this is partially why I think the iambic pentameter rule is an optional one; it's just a skill you become adept at with practice. I don't think it's presence is an integral part; musicality is. Specific meter=not. Anyway, these sonnets pick up ideas and examine them, letting in other voices and questions (from, most recognizably, her children), the news, memories. Here's one, 103:

Why Wolves Aren't Famous

It's not an idea (I forgot)

What should the title be?

I'm tired of pure form

Pass me that framework

The knight of the ox is very famous

He destroyed the dragon's cape

All I know about capes is water

Ghost and mud bring it back to life

Now eat your pancakes and stop

dreaming about syrup crystals

The flowers have pink, yellow, purple all I know

You might find a password

in one of them so look carefully

Did you write this in a whispery tone?

This poem is conversational ("what should the title be?") and meditative (I'm tired of pure form"), playful ("all I know about capes is water") and serious ("pass me that framework").

It feels like trying to write a paper or poem or something 'serious' and 'grown-up' while feeding a child breakfast. ("The flowers have pink, yellow, purple all I know/ You might find a password")-- storytelling, invention and fantasy, tools any good babysitter possesses-- but the speaker seems to believe it, too, a bit: "water... Ghost and mud bring it back to life" which does give the poem a more serious underside: these fantasies are not divorced from reality but seem to possess some secrets which color our reality-- the password's in the flowers, the water's brought to life; of course this is not left un-played-with: "Did you write this in a whispery tone?" but the effect isn't undermined, just tickled.

Her writing is quick, witty, loaded and transparent. I love this project and these poems.

A Geometry

Anne-Marie Albiach, trans. Keith & Rosemarie Waldrop.

in 3 sections: Vertical Effort in White, Incantation, and Figures of Memory

VEW:

I like the way this piece moves across the page; italics and quotations used frequently, suggesting multiple voices; they/you relation

"you there

somber"

on the median line, they seek their bodies; "you make gestures of

approach or withdrawal" it is not in your power

to delete the outline

so she seems, like Bergvall, interested in tackling artifice and code in a way that really visibly links "content" with "form"-- not in your power to delete the outline but everything must be? is rendered in language, in a code, in hers vertical:

the law of succession the blankness of symbols

vertebral distance turned

pale and broke this kind of logic

so she asserts that this spatial play, the use of white space is some way to interrupt the code

she abstracts the object; she deflects the gesture that

catches in the gap between, faced with food and its names in

the extreme; a greed for offerings, words of sacrifice

"thus proffered, the telluric image, a disparity"

"she engendered her son in stubborn silence or generating

a stylistic figure" and a memory likely to come undone at

the slightest change of a vowel, an abstraction of origins; her

face reflected the homonym of an earlier loss the cues

this archaic episode carries consequence

the abstract is connected to-- defines-- experience; memory is reforged when language is lost or changed (but what about images-- not sure if the point holds); language is used almost reverently, 'words for sacrifice' paving the way for the next section, Incantation

quickly, my favorite part of this poem:

nevertheless she recalled fabrics, scents,

chains--there where the night birds broadcast

their cries dangerous to ignore:

how they exacerbate the place

(gorgeous)

Incantation:

actually more of an engendering; something is being birthed, feels like text

She

impregnates my face

...On every side strokes appear, whence a voice approaching incantation.

Three outlines and a pallid erudition. She gives birth in the

lineage of chance; premonition of data: night annihilates

objects o an incantatory solitude, thinned by sleep

"this excitement of the first days"

...I dressed this unprecedented wound in its last stage. The

night was gasping and its fruits even to oblivion. A sketch on

the bosom, this color cast anew on the earth: heat suddenly

in the margins. Repetition of absences

"this complicity

to the point of injury"

what 'happens' in these poems seems to be both a deliberate creation and a product of chance-- informed by data but trying to break the coding, the system.

FM:

this poem is much sparser-- lots more white space. Again involving a relationship, this time him/her/them

the term specifies movement

...they spring up

...confined at the boundary

outside implied a prohibition

the notch scans

the same alliteration

...from the liquid element the myth sprang up

"mouth open beyond the bruises"

subjected to this elucidation

their word

alternative

"sleep

where the censor menaces"

not sure about the 'liquid element'-- mercury? or the liquid among the 4 elements, water?-- but again, this poem does its work inside a 'boundary', always aware of the boundary, not even escaped in sleep; but growth and movement happens nonetheless and words determine creation and reality itself

I'm unsure of the title-- A Geometry-- it seems less about relationships between things and more about creation/control and language... but perhaps it refers more to the limits, confines, only so many things are possible in geometry...?

Éclat

Caroline Bergvall, I love you.

I read Éclat a few years ago, and I remembered liking it-- as well as the visual/formal aspects, which I also liked-- but couldn't remember what it was "about." It was a pleasure to revisit, and I love Caroline Bergvall and everything she does.

The form of the book (should probably mention I read it downloaded as a pdf on my laptop, though it was originally presented as a guided tour then published in book form but is now available to the masses on ubuweb) is beautiful-- nearly each page (save only the penultimate, I think) operates within, transgresses, subverts, distorts, etc. the space of a box-- literally, a square box drawn on the page. This is a really beautiful move to express the limits of the page-- the confines she's already sort of working in (though I suppose if these were originally projection, perhaps they were serving then to mimic the page, but again, same idea)-- anyway, drawing attention to the form, to the artifice, to the constraints we take for granted. The colors are simple: mostly white (page) black or occasionally grey typography, yellow accents. I would decorate my house with these colors, speaking of: much of the first part of Éclat describes a house, the progression through a house, the spatial relationships w/in (another gorgeous choice, where content and form seem to determine each other).

She also plays with language, jamming words together to make new words (below, water rare let us move back ... I LOVE her bilingual wordplay)

Andbreakingwateràreculons&asthoughwewerent

And in other instances, she removes letters (but often leaves a period in the place of the stricken letter, so you know she's doing "found" or erasure)--

WELL is an occupation COME to the foreign guided a short round of observations. now you s.. now y.. don'

Which reminds me a bit of the beginning of her "Say: Parsley," though in Say: Parsley the goal seems to be to render the English language (mother tongue to a lot of her audience) foreign, other, or to distort it, make you stumble over it-- which ties in nicely to the theme and context of the poem. Here, it seems that she wants us to recognize the pieces of language she's picked up and repurposed-- inside this box, these are the tools she has and we see but she's made them say something different.

The entire time I was reading the beginning of Éclat, I kept thinking, there's something really sexual about this, am I really pervy? she's talking about a house and language and there's so much great play with language and space etc. Then it starts to become more apparent-- she's playing with ideas of 'normativity' and what was starting to feel like a guided tour of a vagina explodes into a scene where a gay son is bargained for a daughter then masturbation then sex ('was a sist a mist' echoes as a refrain through these scenes) which climaxes in prayer liturgy

You fill your throat and think of Mary immaculate Your saintly unvaginal envelope bless me the saintly silence of blessed be as I traverse bless me the saintly bloodless of Your bless me Your saintly lipless lopsided you fill your bless me Mary throat Your saintly vacated throat saintly vacated occupancy bless me bless me I move to bless me occupy some profound Mary occupation Mary she un fuck fuck she un she un she unpacks Your saintl I Marymary slitless I discharge charge banged across the plastered all over the banged across the throb from every piece of banged all over her banged all over her beat into her all over her bang bang bang what bliss what splendid c.... I say blast what splendid cunts Mary saintl never let it be never let it be said are inward inwarded so bless me bless me Mary pleine de grâce for to extend inout one’s outsides out

then ends with this:

Your

skin

pops

back

to its

curr

ent

conv

entio

nal

dime

nsio

ns

with

a

shlu

rpy

soun

d

(next page):

schlurp

(final page):

In the landfill of your fr... the landfill of your frock there is occupation which in the landfill of your frock there is occupation which occupies occupies there is occupation which occupies. And the sight of no pussy cat is so diff e rent that a tobacco zone is white and cream.

A thinker once said girls make a gorgeous margin, did you believe that, crmonies of sweat ‘n .isibility. I did. (But really). Behavioural accumulation. Adjectival distentions pooled into spectacles recombinant, now that’s what I’d call morphing. What I’d call. Morphing. And a sightly occupation at that.

Mobility of Light

Nicole Brossard.

This felt like time wasted, perhaps because of the TERRIBLE translations alongside the originals. Atrocious; luckily this wasn't only a book of translations, so I could read the originals. These poems are trying to be very dramatic, wistful, erotic-- and operating on the side of ambiguity that's more 'vagueness' or 'imprecision' than slippery du or + plicity. They feel amateur, and the work says its invested in contemplations of form and artifice, but... it's mostly taking both for granted. I flagged 3 poems that were more interesting:

entre code et code l'espace est illusoire

point de lieu propre à la dénonciation

la terminologie modifie

le code s'infiltre

la moindre tentative finit par rompre

désormais le sens en a deux

un de trop

l'artifice est inévitable

voilà comment

(the code filters in, the slightest attempt ends by breaking [down], from here sense has two, one of many, artifice is inevitable, here's how)

ce sont toujours les mêmes mots

grands objets de paroles

lumière nuit ou silence

les mêmes oiseaux l'après-midi

le bruit de l'automne un autre

paragraphe en deça des mots

quand je respire

la résponse qui fuit

always the same words, great objects of words, light, night or silence, the same birds the afternoon the noise of autumn an other, paragraph on this side of words when I breathe, the response that flees

--interesting, esp. 'le paragraphe en deça des mots/ quand je respire'-- seems to be addressing the wariness of language-- the thingness, the banality, the code we can't escape-- can't signify without, it names our everything-- but the other, more intimate side of words, almost the ineffable side? that holds for a moment, fleeting?

Suggestions le coeur serré

1.

l'idée de se balancer au bout d'un je

suspendu

aux joies fiévreuses de juillet

ou salivant devant l'obscur

d'un présent rempli de

pourquoi qui ruissellent dans les pensées

2.

alors fais-moi le plaisir

de tracer des mots impossibles à trouer

remonte le cours du temps

entre les dialogues ne vacille pas

...4.

une idée absolu

emportée d'un mot d'un coup

par le vent

pose ta question

do me the pleasure of tracing words impossible to perforate, go back through the course of time, between dialogues don't waver

--words impossible to perforate? isn't that our job? to perforate them?

an Absolute idea, brought from a word from a blow from the wind, ask your question

Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes.

(6) the photo is always invisible-- it's not what we see (framing device is invisible)

(13) Riley/Dickinson: anxiety at sight of 'self' on piece of paper

(14) moment when subject feels he's becoming an object-- being photographed-- "I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object"

(21) wound sentiment-- I see, feel, hence I notice, observe, think

2 things photo must contain:

1) participate in something or other (not banality)

2) affect- affective intentionality

2 elements of the rule

1) has the extension of a field (perceived as consequence of knowledge, culture)

can be stylized, more or less successful, refers to a classical body of info

2) average affect-- studium-- application to a thing without special acuity

punctum-- element that pierces, pricks, mark made by a pointed instrument; usually accidental/chance but poignant

studium-- the order of liking, not loving; a half desire, "all right"

functions of a photograph-- to inform, represent, surprise, cause to signify, to provoke desire

in a photo, always something that is represented

(28) contrary to sentence-- can shift from description to reflection

Daguerre-- running a panorama theater animated by light shows (photo more closely tied to theater than painting)

(31) theater and cult of the Dead: simultaneously living and dead

(34) photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs

(34) every photo is contingent (and thereby outside meaning)/ photography can't signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask

(38) the object speaks and induces us to think-- risks being perceived as dangerous

(36) Brecht-- hostile to photography because of its weakness of critical power and no critique except among those who are already capable of criticism

(42) detail that detracts (in 'unary' or 'unity-ed' photo) is the punctum

(55) punctum adds what is nonetheless already there

(53) revealed after the fact ('what sticks out') -- affect

Personal Writing

Johanna Drucker. Figuring the Word

Collection of talks and essays about her own, personal experience with language and writing.

"For in the making of the thing, the object, language itself-- as writing-- became objectifiable and thus discoverable and recoverable as something not invented but inventing, bearing, writing, living to insure my own sense of it for its own sake, to be reviewed as an exercise in which the acting out and through makes, by that pattern and patterning, the very shape it mimics in its form." (243)

"Is there an essence of things? Beyond representability? Or is there only meaning in materiality? Is meaning death-- or is on-meaning a condition of complete destruction? Neither, but resolution into any closed sign is a kind of death, as the static representation of desire is a death." (247)

from "Other than Linear:"

"While many of these works push aggressively against the limits of language as a conventional system of communication and by so doing begin to break down linearity in terms of the possibility of achieving the closure inherent in the process of signification, the mechanics the operate through and against are not, in fact, structurally different from those of so-called 'normal' language.... Works which compose themselves as a field, without an apparent sequence, and spatialist compositions which literally hang suspended or displayed so that the relations among the elements shift constantly and change, also pose extreme disruptions to the norm of communicative language. Whatever they may achieve in terms of disintegrating the linear authority of language seems minor compared to the degree to which they undermine control over their own authority as texts in so doing." (249)

Not sure I agree with her here-- what 'control over their own authority as texts' should they be maintaining? It's not that these texts are illegible; they're just challenging-- or interrogating-- the system within which they, too, are still working.

Her talk, though, is more about "women's writing"; she poses the Q:

"Is it possible for the Other who is woman to occupy a position which is not defined through opposition? To what extent can the concept of complicity be drawn into this discussion in a positive way, rather than a pejorative one, so that women's use of normative language can be demonstrated to make use of the destabilizing effects of non-linearity from within that language rather than being required to position themselves outside of it?"

("...in addition,... women's Otherness, is a part of the Whole of language, is in fact the Other which makes the Whole appear to be so.")

--ties directly into Glissant then; a bit of a narrow view, though, that women are the Other-- as in only?

"the phrase 'Other than' implies that representation always implies an Other, and that Otherness is always in relation, though not necessarily oppositional." (252)

-- interesting because it seems to oppose Glissant there; I think he would suggest that Otherness is oppositional and rhetorically it's a trick of understanding; this is hot because it's not cold, high because it's not low, etc.; I'm not sure I agree with the model (or idealize it) but JD also seems to be contradicting herself-- if Otherness is always in relation but not opposition (necessarily) then there could be more than one Other-- which she doesn't ever address

A to the Q: "It is instead by showing the already present Otherness within Linear forms and the complex authority and power structures already extant which permits the reworking of these relations between form, language, and power." (253)

I should mention: she doesn't really provide a model (or any examples) of what this might look like, save a few excerpts from crappy novels she wrote aged 12-- one, for instance, written in letters, a blow she tries to soften by calling them 'let-hers;' ouch. She does show a lot of beautiful typography/design prints-- but since she's so invested in language, I'm not sure why there aren't more text examples.

Poetics + Expanse & Filiation

Édouard Glissant. Poetics of Relation.

"Poetics" was a much more useful chapter than "Expanse & Filiation"-- though only the latter is on my list-- so I'll focus on the former. Glissant is positing that the way poetics work-- in French lit, particularly-- is Relational model, rather than, formerly

1) poetics of depth: think Baudelaire who "quashed romantic lyricism's claim that the poet was the introspective master of his jos or sorrows; and ...it was in his power to draw clear, plain lessons from this that would benefit everyone.

Rather, knowledge in the matter (of inner-depth-delving) is the goal, "first dispossessing it of the sovereign subject (requiring the knowledge-- the gaze, or the hearing-- of another) then surrendering it to this subject (speaking 'in' the structures of any expressed knowledge" (24)

2) poetics of language-in-itself: Mallarmé? "The poetics of language-in-itself strives toward a knowledge that by definition would only be exercised within the limits of a given language. It would renounce... the nostalgia for other languages-- or the infinite possible languages-- now germinating in every literature."

3) poetics of structure: creator of a text effaced to be revealed in the texture of her creation

"The neutral rather than harsh reality of the object; the tightening of the locus; the low regard for any thought claiming falsely to be final; the literal and the flat-- these are a few of the factors linked with the works of numerous contemporary French authors that provide access to them w/in the context of poetics" (26)

a poetics of relation is about influence, but not always neatly, traceably so; and "the consciousness of Relation [is] widespread, including both the collective and the individual. We 'know' that the other is within us and affects how we evolve as well as the bulk of our conceptions and the development of our sensibility... a sort of 'consciousness of consciousness' opens us up and turns each of us into a disconcerted actor in the poetics of Relation." (27)

Relation informs not simply what is relayed but also the relative and the related; movement for France "a culture that projected onto the world (with the aim of dominating it) and a language that was presented as universal (with the aim of providing legitimacy to the attempt at domination)" (28)

central also to this idea is M. Samir Amin's global theory of worldwide economy: Centers produce & control, Peripheries receive

says Glissant: "the poet's world leads from periphery to periphery; ...that is, it makes every periphery into a center; furthermore, it abolishes the very notion of center and periphery." (29)

so the "movements" or described "relation" Glissant is tracking through contemporary lit seem to be more rhizomatic (but I can't help myself, the theory makes so much sense to me that I can't understand how else it could work... but perhaps because [and Glissant mentions this too] it's because our poetics owe so much to accumulation and duration)

side note: Glissant mentions something about the peripheries all forming not an Absolute but a Totality, which I understand as-- not a monolithic ideal (see French colonization) but an inclusion of all components and byproducts of what G calls a métissage-- interbreeding-- but seems to be the same as Deleuze and Guatarri's rhizome idea)

to be completely reductionistic and simplistic, then, the ideas of filiation and expansion fit in thusly: filiation is linear, centered around the mythic idea of a 'root' or 'source' that can be traced to-- heritage, lineage, etc; but the expansion of Relation provides a more accurate model or description of what actually occurs (or presently occurs) in that, see above, not everything is so tidily traceable-- and the quest to trace origins in such a linear fashion often isn't productive

Muse Poem

there’s a skelton in my closet

Heaven knows what should cause it

bound out with ugly claws it

opens ugly jaws to posit

that chrysanthemums are owls

licking bony jagged jowls

leaning in the windy howls

stems that bend and snap

fall into her velvet lap

green and mossy where they fall

if they even fall at all

like the stringy gossip thrall

whispered lips into the wall

(through a crack inside the wall)

like the lovers’ clandestine call

but thinner, violent and small

bound up inside my closet

nightmare composite

with a murderous Electra wit

if I even could control it

but the lock won’t split

light still unlit

press my ear against the grit

the tongue inside spits dictation

the door muffling its rations

shallow recitation

syntax broke against negation

prison-cell plantation

musing visit’s exploitation

my skelton’s teeth a constellation

beauty heaves inside her breasts

lingers on her breath

sweet sigh c’est

plus puissant que la mort

unchanged in Death I’ll take a listen

mumble barely above a frisson

(she says nothing else rhymes with listen)

save her eyes which surely glisten

at the thought of what I’m making

from the thoughts of hers I’m taking

with her knees aching, mind breaking

I’m making her

art unfinished, she’s waiting.

Ghost Poem

Oh no, she’s a Gasper (mouth hung Open she’s seen a Ghost)

très noir still breathing in spiritus

vessel be filled un réceptacle (un récepteur?)

passive but lucid but passive

how frightening! c’mon, baby, have no fear

cause Baby, the Ghost is near and it’ll getcha getcha getcha

one way or the other, get got hot possession, posturing revelation

strummed like a fiddle and played like the Magician you know you are not

idle but passive, passed over no blood on your frame

fat on your lips Death, come quick I have flowers for You, my Cups are stacked in 7’s and 8’s there’s a motion, it’s leaving time wilting staticky

inside the car hot foggy bent over neck craned or laid out before

on the table un cadavre exquis life brought to

mouth to

in the beginning the Verb breathe resuscitated vivant respire

an afterword after words

Derek Beaulieu.

I suggest that concrete poetry can also be closely read in conjunction with Sianne Ngai’s idea of a poetics of disgust as a ‘inarticulate mark’ that

deliberately interferes with close reading, a practice based on the principle that what is at stake in every textual encounter is a hidden or buried object, a concept of symbolic meaning that can be discovered by the reader only if she or he reads ‘deeply’ enough.

Says DB:

Concrete poetry momentarily rejects the idea of the readerly reward for close reading, the idea of the ‘hidden or buried object,’ interferes with signification & momentarily interrupts the capitalist structure of language.

Gomringer argues that concrete poetry is an essentially modernist gesture that “realize[s] the idea of a universal poetry” & can “unite the view of the world expressed in the mother tongue with physical reality” (see 'inarticulate mark' I suppose)

As Marjorie Perloff says, though, this

call for what Eugen Gomringer has characterized as ‘reduced language’ for ‘poems [...] as easily understood as signs in airports & traffic signs,’ runs the risk of producing poems ‘poems’ that are airport & traffic signs.

The concrete poetry which I endorse here — & which stylistically is of most

influence on my own work — is a poetic without direct one-to-one signification. It is rhizomatic in composition, pointing both to & away from multiple shifting clouds of meanings & construction, where writing “has nothing to do with signifying [...] it has to do with surveying [&] mapping”... Instead of a single, arborescent (think of branches forming around a monolithic centre) historical & critical framework, rhizomatic writing is “a map not a tracing”; & as a map it has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back to the ‘same’. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involved an alleged ‘competence’. (Deleuze & Guattari)

If “Capitalism begins when you / open the Dictionary” (McCaffery “Lyric’s Larnyx”), then concrete poetry is a means of political & economic critique upon both reading & writing practice & the Capitalist means of exchange.

...Any movement to refuse or oppose Capitalism in writing only serves to reify it as theother, reinforcing its grip on representational language. The best we can strive for are momentary eruptions of non-meaning which are then co-opted back into representation by the very act of identification, pointing & naming. These brief eruptions

disengage with the idea of transmission of meaning through heavily codified & linear language in favour of ambiguity [...] disrupt[ing] the possibility of a transferal of Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of Capitalist ideology through text as regulated by grammar & syntax. (Christie)

The matter of the restricted economy shifts from an investment in communication through the visual mark (the grapheme) to an investment in the mark itself, the grapheme & the container of communication.

These texts are the documentation of the waste & excess produced through non- prescribed use of business machines. The documentation of this libidinal excess, of this waste, categorizes “the letter not as phoneme but as ink, & further insist[s] on that materiality” (McCaffery “Bill Bissett”)

What radical concrete presents to the reader is a record of the waste produced by the consumption (reading) of a text by a machine. If “[t]o read [...] is a labour of language. To read is to find meanings” (Barthes), then the consumption & expulsion of texts by machines such as photocopies & shredders also finds meanings where meanings are not expected, fracturing the text at the level of the seme. In a text where “everything signifies ceaselessly & several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure” (Barthes) even waste becomes poetically charged.

The voicing of these texts [texts utilizing or produced by photocopier degeneration], like the texts themselves, is “pulled off the page even as [it] disintegrate[s], a double thrust of text into silence” (Nichol)

A poetic of disgust includes both the “the figure of the turn, or moment of exclusion [...t]he movement away from the object as if to shun it” & the “negative utterance” (Ngai)

I extend Ngai’s formulation of the “inarticulate sound” to print- based media as well as the ‘inarticulate mark’...Concrete poetry – the ‘inarticulate mark’ – treats language as “raw matter” without a reinforced referent as a means to briefly interrupt capitalist exchange-based signification byinsisting on the disappearance of the referent while at the same time refusing to defer to other terms. It won’t coagulate into a unitary meaning & it also won’t move; it can’t be displaced.

Concrete poetry as an ‘inarticulate mark’ is a formulation of a poetics of excess; an excess which is not one of desire, but instead one of revulsion & rejection. ...It actively attempts to interrupt language’s making of capitalist value through the dis-assembly & re-assembly of the mark & the grapheme. Concrete poetry as a momentarily non-signifying map is an always impossible system of inarticulation, caught in the double-bind of the creation of meaning.

Rule and Constraint

Marcel Bénabou, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature.

(41) The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant-- Queneau.

It is as if there were a hermetic boundary between two domains: the one wherein the observance of rules is a natural fact, and the one wherein the excess of rules is perceived as shameful artifice.

...to the extent that constraint goes beyond rules which seem natural only to those people who have barely questioned language, it forces the system out of its routine functioning, thereby compelling it to reveal its hidden resources.

Also: helpful graphs aligning the objects of linguistics (letter, phoneme, syllable, word, syntagm, sentence, paragraph) and literary operation (displacement, substitution, addition, subtraction, multiplication (repetition), division, deduction, contraction).

As I'm reading through the theory in the section I labeled "Procedural Poetry and Poetics of Spatiality," I keep nodding as I'm reading that we can't escape form-- and as someone who responds really really well to limits, this all makes sense-- and I'd like to try some of these ideas, not as exercises, but incorporated into my practice-- esp. from earlier, Dan Zimmerman's anagram thing, but also play around with "fixed forms" whatever that means. This makes me appreciate Laynie Browne's sonnets even more--

Predetermined Avant-Garde Forms

Mark Wallace, An Exaltation of Forms.

This article is pretty short, and highlights 5 poets who have come up with forms for their poems-- the poems, perhaps, have created the forms (in some cases). Says Wallace:

...The goal of poetry was not to control experience by distancing oneself from it through formal devices, but to engage experience more openly and directly. Rather than seeing form as something that existed prior to the poem, such poets believed that shifts and disruptions of the moment of composition should determine form.

...That is, predetermined self-created forms allow writers to reveal their skepticism about the notion that any single form, or even group of forms, can offer a final solution to the problem of form in poetry, while making it clear that they understand that language structures exist prior to the act of composition.

Writers profiled: Jackson Mac Low, with one of his forties (I've read some of these but don't really get what he's doing with the form-- it's being ordered, somehow, or ordering, but I don't quite get the significance), Joan Retallack's AID/I/SAPPEARANCE (which seemed pretty good as a conceptual idea, but after the first rotation is kind of dull), Forrest Gander (trying to make his poems look like rocks or something, I don't know), Dan Zimmerman (awesome, more on him in a sec), and Tina Darragh, who models her text after an Ames distorted room on a dictionary page-- getting at, I guess, the recognition that must accompany reading? Making the reader aware of their own [active] participation?

So Dan Zimmerman is working with anagrams-- he starts with 4 words, such as

SKIN

WINE

ALTO

NOON

then finds words in them and their letters and composes a poem. I enjoyed his poems-- they reminded me of Jackson Mac Low's vocabularies or Gathas -- but more "structured" in that they were put together to make a poem, not just written down in a way that resists linear reading.

no lie is not known,

so on, like a non-twin,

I, a known stone lion,

now link one to a sin.

a silken notion now,

no lotion, a new skin,

a tension low on ink,

no oil in a news knot.

I skin no town alone,

know no one in a list.

I ink a sonnet, no owl,

ink sown onto a line,

a sonnet Loki won in.

I like that this is both a commentary on language's innerlinkings and doing its own thing-- I think I might try this, as Zimmerman says people will, get bit by the bug.

Bunny Poem

Let me sing you

a waltz

Out of now-

here, out of my thoughts

There is a bunny

in this little poem.

hop hop

the bunny’s name is

Mortimer, but that’s

not a lone just a loan

name.

She is a bunny

Like everything else

Mortimer’s just a synonym

For naming her self.

She’s a good bunny

All honestly bones.

All honestly hearts too

All honesty

Foam. She’s not good for eating

She’s not good for much

Sometimes she eats carrots

When she has her lunch.

Do you believe her

Eating her hay

Did anyone ask her

If she’s got something to say

(she does)

Stranger, I had you for dinner

tasted like vellum

When Mortimer eats this

It won’t go away

When Mortimer pees this

It’ll never spray.

The Changing Light at Sandover

James Merrill.

from The Whole of the Book of Ephraim:

(32) (I)

He didn't cavil. He was the revelation

(Or if we had created him, then we were).

He and his partner, David Jackson, make a Ouija board that connects to spirits or 'patrons'-- first Ephraim then Mirabell... along with Wallace Stevens, family members, etc. The whole thing is written in verse, describing the experience (which spanned many years, I believe) only occasionally interrupted by what the spirit says (which is all in caps).

(53)

Making clear (to anyone with eyes)

That blockhead nudities encipher

Obligations it is bliss to suffer;

That selves in animal disguise

Light the way to Tania's goal:

Stories whose glow we see our lives bathed in--

The mere word "animal" a skin

Through which its old sense glimmers, of the soul

(72)

I WAS NEVER ONE FOR BLURBS

TAKE WITH A GRAIN OF SALT JM SUCH PRAISE

A SCRIBE SITS BY YOU CONSTANTLY THESE DAYS

DOING WHAT HE MUST TO INTERWEAVE

YOUR LINES WITH MEANINGS YOU CANNOT CONCEIVE

Parts of this, in other words-- a rotten

Thing to insinuate-- have been ghostwritten?

(80)

Our famous human dignity? I-Thou?

The dirty underwear of overkill.

This aligns with what Spicer and Blaser are talking about--dictation-- though Merrill seems to want to be in control a bit more. Hence all the verse that isn't dictation--that's detailing the practice, DJ, his thoughts, etc.

My Vocabulary Did This To Me

Jack Spicer.

He's really formative for this thesis; I've read him before, but not this much work. I also read Blaser's essay on him and his essay on dictation, and that has really informed my own practice-- wait for it, wait-- but his poetry is something else. After Lorca is really major, but I enjoyed Language and The Book of Magazine Verse-- as well as Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, of course. His poetics are playful-- no, serious-- but taking jabs at everything. He's crass and rude and whip-smart, and he's not like Duncan, who seems to be actually trying to get a point across and hopes that you keep up; Spicer is making about 50 points and undermining them all, and fuck you if you can't keep up.

After Lorca

(121)

A song

Which I shall never sing

Has fallen asleep on my lips.

A song

Which I shall never sing--

...At that time I'll imagine

The song

Which I shall never sing.

A song full of lips

And far-off washes

A song full of lost

Hours in the shadow

A song of a star that's alive

Above enduring day.

from the letters to Lorca:

(122)

A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. ...Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it. ...A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.

Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across time. [he continues to talk about correspondence, which seems to be a paraphrase of the rhizome idea, but also gets to Duncan's idea of reality-- language is a tool (a faulty one) to try to communicate, but a really perfect poem wouldn't use it, maybe; and nothing is connected, but everything's relatable.]

Billy the Kid:

(186)

no, it is not a collage. Hell flowers

Fall from the hands of heroes

fall from all of our hands

flat

As if we were not ever able quite to include them.

His gun

does not shoot real bullets

his death

Being done is unimportant.

Being done

In those flat colors

Not a collage

A binding together, a

Memory.

Spicer is very much concerned with artifice-- his poems show all their seams, and it's declared flat-out that these things aren't real (His gun/does not shoot real bullets). But he also uses the artifice (line break, for one) to make his point (Not a collage/A binding together, a/ Memory.) Binding together both preps us for Memory-- because his (BtK) death would be a sort of shared memory but also it contradicts collage. Brilliant.

From Heads of the Town:

(264) Magic

Strange, I had words for dinner

Stranger, I had words for dinner

Stranger, strange, do you believe me?

Honestly, I had your heart for supper

Honesty has had your heart for supper

Honesty honestly are your pain.

I burned the bones of it

And the letters of it

And the numbers of it

That go 1,2,3,4,5,6,7

And so far.

Stranger, I had bones for dinner

Stranger, I had bones for diner

Stranger, stranger, strange, did you believe me?

------

Orpheus was never really threatened by the Underworld during his visits there. In this poem they present him with a diplomatic note.

Honesty does not occur again in the poem.

The numbers do.

[There's a lot going on in this poem, and I feel that this is pretty quintessentially Spicerian. He's playing with sound and doing lots of wordplay, but also using repetition in an almost banal way-- but it isn't. It evokes spell-casting (and it is called "Magic") and gives the poem a creepy, I'm not catching something feel. A transaction of sorts occurs (I think there's also a pretty solid narrative here) and we're asked twice, do [or did] you believe me? Then the footnote pokes fun at the poem and forces us to look at it again-- so we do, looking for clues that this is about Orpheus. And the whole thing is creepier. Then we see a progression: words, heart, bones; they're used up, eaten up, burned up, but they're still there, because honesty isn't. Because they're in a poem, and you're supposed to believe this voice, but it's not telling the truth... so the claims get more outrageous, because why not?

from Language:

(373)

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.

No one listens to poetry. The ocean

Does not mean to be listened to. A drop

Or crash of water. It means

Nothing.

It

Is bread and butter

Pepper and salt. The death

That young men hope for. Aimlessly

It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No

One listens to poetry.

[This seems to speak to the reality/artifice conundrum again--the ocean, which declares nothing, is meaningless-- but listened to. Poetry can never be this, or isn't this, and no one's listening, because it's trying to be so meaningful.]

(Sporting Life)

The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios

don't develop scar tissue... The poet

Takes too many messages.

...The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a

counterpunching radio.

Finally the messages penetrate

There is a corpse of an image--they penetrate

The corpse of a radio.

...In any case the messages penetrate the

radio and render it (and the radio) ultimately useless.

Prayer

Is exactly that.

...Their prayer its only connection.

from Book of Magazine Verse:

(423) (6)

The poem begins to mirror itself.

The identity of the poet gets more obvious.

Why can't we sing songs like nightingales? Because we're not

nightingales and can never become them. The poet has an

arid parch of his reality and the others.

Things desert him. I thought of you as a butterfly tonight with

clipped wings.

[First line= genius. We're limited by what we are-- it's not natural-- and hemmed in by our perception of reality (and insistence on it).]

Ground Work

Robert Duncan. I would just like to say that I love him.

on language:

(25) (Transmissions)

The language is not ours

and we move upward beyond our powers into

words again beyond us unsure measures

the poetry of the cosmos

transcending

speech and hearing... faltering.

on the Muse:

(41) (Santa Cruz Propositions)

Old Mama Mammemory long lingering

half in half out of it,

and yet we sing still to Her, to the

shadowy Big Presence of her,

to the Dumb Waitress coming up from below

...Yet we need her. We don't need her.

...It is to say we leave her, we leave

everything for her. The mind is not content but

must build even of discontent histories,

palaces, commands, grand

impositions --all for HER!!!

Duncan talks about this idea a lot, but the Muse (or Muses) seem to be just a word to name a concept-- namely, the Inspirer, or where Inspiration comes from. He grapples with this concept-- is it mine? Hers? Do we need Her? Yes but we're trying not to-- do we write Poetry just because of Her? What's ours?

(63) (The Museum)

Grand architecture that the Muses command! ...above the struggling mind.

O Muses, ancient and overwhelming sisters we have so long playd in whose orders,

you stand between us and our Father;

you lead us on into this vale between slopes flowery and sweet where

all our grievances and memories of love run into song;

...we are lost in you. Pain

enters Being

drop

by drop.

Here, the Muses seem to relate to the idea of the Cloud in the Cloud of Unknowing: standing between us and the Father, or the true inspiration, or the source, or something. I definitely get the sense that it's something Other--the transaction is usually described as inspiration coming FROM the Muse, so it's Muse, poet, public; here, Duncan shows another layer-- One, Muse, poet, [presumed Audience, I guess].

on Art:

(77) This is not a baby on fire but a babe of fire,

flesh burning with his own flame

...The burning Babe, the Rose,

the Wedding of the Moon and Sun,

wherever in the World I read

such Mysteries come to haunt the Mind,

the Language of What Is and I

are one.

--5--

He's Art's epiphany [the burning babe] of Art new born,

a Christ of Poetry, the burning spirit's show,

He leaves no shadow, where he dances in the air,

of misery below.

Pretty straightforward-- what Art should be, or what Poetry should be, is united with Reality-- language not just as a tool, but a new Language that is Real to describe and to be the Real. Not consumed but alive.

on poetry:

(151) (JAMAIS)

must extend beyond the throw of the dice "a" just now, yet

no throw of the dice may chance IT.

Let us take the excellence of the style to be

lucidity--

...Verse, linkt to the Idea of that Governance,

moves "beyond";

...given in the Nature of Sound

which is God's Art, the principle of recognition

--Man's Art, an other arbitration of the whole

"Nature of Sound" in which

the "sameness" of the note is dismisst.

Not chance (see Mallarmé, I guess?) but lucidity-- and sounds, each different/unique but recognizable? Yet verse has moved beyond governance--

and

(266) (Close)

I make my realm this realm in the

patently irreal-- History

will disprove my existence.

The Book will not hold this poetry yet

all the vain song I've sung comes into it

...one tear of infatuation follows

as if it were love

Let something we must all wonder about ensue

one tear I cannot account for fall

this: the flooding into the flooding

this: the gleam of the bowl in its not holding--

I think this idea is gorgeous. The Book will not hold this Poetry (cannot, will not, both the Good Book perhaps and all Books). He seems to contradict himself here; he'll make his realm in the irreal (not the Real) but no one will account for it and the Book won't contain it-- then he ends on this water-in-water image. Beauty in fullness and emptiness?

on the Self:

(175) (Circulations of the Song)

I shall never return into my Self;

that "Self" passes out of Eternity, incidental!

...Again you have instructed me to le go,

to hold to this falling, this

letting myself go.

I will succumb entirely to your intention.

Contend with me!

you demand.

...I am falling into an emptiness of Me,

every horizon a brink of this emptying,

walls of who-I-am falling into me.

How enormous to come into this need!

on the Authentic:

(186) (An Alternate Life)

So I love what is "real". How awkwardly we name it:

the "actual", the "real", the "authentic"-- What Is.

I have come to it as if I could have been "away",

flooded thru by the sorrow of the unlived, the unanswerd,

tho I knew not and had not the courage of asking

the question that calld for it,

the real I did see. The real so toucht me

I could not speak before it.

playing with form:

(54) (Fragments of an Albigensian Rime)

Abel was a butcher.

He dealt in blood and meat.

He burnd the bloody carcass

and the sacrifice was sweet.

And Cain he was a baker.

He brought cakes and ale.

Or was it the Bread, and ripend Wheat-Head,

And a grail of red red wine?

The Father threw his offering down

and trampled on the Vine.

This is so genius because he allows the form to show the Father's dissatisfaction/what's lacking from the sacrifice, due to the break in rhyme: with Abel, we get meat/sweet in 7 syllables; with Cain, his meter is irregular, sometimes too short, then too long, then the right number of syllables but the rhyme is off-- it's like something is being forced into a space it's not meant for. It could work (in the way that Cain's sacrifice should be fine) but it doesn't-- and it's rejected.

The Origins of Myth and Ritual

René Girard. Violence and the Sacred.

Parts of this were silly, but he made some good points-- here's what his main ideas are:

(92) I contend that the objective of ritual is the proper reenactment of the surrogate-victim mechanism; that is, to keep violence outside the community. and

(94) When relationships between men are troubled, when men cease to cooperate among themselves and to come to terms with one another, there is no human enterprise that does not suffer... Therefore, the benefits attributed to the generative violence extend beyond mankind to nature itself. The act of collective murder is seen as the source of all abundance; the principle of procreation is attributed to it, and all those plants that are useful to man; everything beneficial and nutritive is said to take root in the body of the primordial victim.

The 'pharmakos' (or victim) then embodies the symbolic role of the original victim-- by reenacting this violence, in a 'controlled' manner, tribute is paid but also violence in the community is kept in check. The pharmakos is a stand-in-- for the community itself, as an entity. ...'But the ritualistic mentality does not understand why they have accrued; the only explanations it can offer are mythic. However, this same mentality has a good notion of how these benefits are obtained, and it tries unceasingly to repeat the fruitful process.' (98)

(102) ... the rite is performed during periods of relative calm, as a preventative measure-- 'if it did not limit itself to appropriate sacrificial victims but instead, like the original act of violence, vented its force on a participating member of the community-- then it would lose all effectiveness, for it would bring to pass the very thing it was supposed to prevent: a relapse into the sacrificial crisis.'

Sometimes monarchs-to-be are required to take on the role of the 'pharmakos'... this is both to show their prowess (no evil is beneath them, they are privy to all things, rawr) and to turn something bad into something good... what sacrifice does, essentially.

(115) Given the fundamental importance to mankind of the transformation of bad violence into good and the equally fundamental inability of men to solve the mystery of this transformation, it is not surprising that men are doomed to ritual; nor is it surprising that the resulting rites assume forms that are both highly analogous and highly diverse.'

Girard also talks at G-R-E-A-T -L-E-N-G-T-H-S about incest as part of ritual, which I'll skip over here... and use Thanksgiving as an example. Aaron and I were taking a Buffy break during dinner this afternoon, and we watched the episode where it's Thanksgiving... um, Season 4 somewhere. Thanksgiving is the important part-- Anya says something about how she loves a good ritual sacrifice, everyone protests, and she says: 'You kill an animal and eat it. Ritual sacrifice.'

This got me thinking, and I explained to Aaron: the turkey, in this scenario, is the pharmakos, an innocent victim that we kill and eat not to celebrate, but to commemorate-- or duplicate-- the violence enacted upon Native Americans. The violence that our ancestors committed-- but we can't really face up to, so we have this ritual celebration where we give thanks then kill the runner-up-nt'l-bird and eat it. Perhaps we feel shame over what we've done, guilt, angst, hate, whatever-- it's kept in check with a good yearly ritual.

Become enlightened; go veggie.

St Augustine Poem

... .. ..... .... .. .. ... .... . .... , ... .. ..... .... .. .. ... .... . .... x

..... .. .. .... . . .... .... . . .... .. .... ....

.... .... .. ... ... .... .... ..... x . . ... ... . .... ..... .. .. .... . . .... ....

. . ... .. .. ....x

The Essentials of Mysticism

Evelyn Underhill, The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays.

First, Evelyn, thank you for writing this, and for writing in such a cogent manner. This is the essay where the concepts I've been reading about re: mysticism finally clicked-- her aim, in this (and others, it seems) essay is to find the connection between 'true' mystical experiences (she does some work to explain what that idea entails) but all this leads her to an overwhelming question-- "what is the essential element in spiritual experience?" (8)

I must confess some guilt, as I felt some when Spicer pooh-poohed 'procedural or Dada experiments' instead of listening (being active rather than contemplative, perhaps)-- when she says, "What elements are due to the suggestions of tradition, to conscious or unconscious symbolism, to the misinterpretation of emotion, to the invasion of cravings from the lower centres, or the disguised fulfillment of an unconscious wish?" (8 again) because, as I read all of this literature on mysticism and the 'divine' if it can be called that, the more it seems that this isn't about the self, but an escape of the self-- but not for selfish purposes. So to get to the bottom of this, if at all possible, is a worthy goal-- what elements are necessary, which are metaphorical, again, which are necessary?

(9) This central fact, it seems to me, is an overwhelming consciousness of God and of one's own soul: a consciousness which absorbs or eclipses all other centres of interest. (Love this part: Having said this, however, we may allow that the widest latitude is possible in mystic's conception of their Deity)-- this addresses the important question that is brought into question (and which Girard addresses, in Violence & the Sacred)-- what's important isn't who, really-- it's what, and when, and how. And why. Really any of the journalism questions besides who. (or to whom, I guess)... by name. But it is, I think, important that it's someone/thing besides you. She says:

(10) In the highest experiences of the greatest mystics the personal category appears to be transcended.

Moving on:

(11) What is essential is the way mystics feel about their Deity, and about their own relation with it, for this adoring and all-possessing consciousness of the rich and complete divine life over against the self's life, and of the possible achievement of a level of being, a sublimation of the self, wherein we are perfectly united with it, may fairly be written down as a necessary element of all mystical life.

Since these experiences are so hard to talk about, many rely on negations. Guilty again:

(13) [Union between God and the soul... This is one essential of mysticism and there are as many ways...] But, on the other hand, when anybody speaking of mysticism proposes an object that is less than God-- increase of knowledge, of health, of happiness, occultism, intercourse with spirits, supernormal experience in general-- then we may begin to suspect that we are off track.

Another essential: the spirit/ acts/ disposition of the mystics themselves.

normal v. mystical life mimetic in normal v. unconscious mind-- the mystical experience is a glimpse of reality as it really is. Says Plotinus, 'The One is present everywhere and absent only from those unable to perceive it,' and when we do perceive it, 'we have another life... attaining the aim of our existence, and our rest.'

So what's the connection? 3 stages, not to place to much emphasis on that number, but it seems to happen frequently this way, suddenly or gradually:

I can't find the terms Underhill uses, but here are Jacob Boehme's:

1) the 'deepest Deity, without and beyond Nature'

2) its manifestation in the external light-world

3) the outer world in which we dwell according to the body, a manifestation, image, or similitude of the Eternal

So, sort of beginning, middle, end but reversed, for him-- not Underhill and others-- could easily be written backwards. Deity in its purest state, mix/awareness of this Deity/reality/ recognition that it exists, which starts the whole process.

End goal? Glimpsing reality. Then living. Says the Súfí mystic: 'I never saw anything without seeing God therein.'

Sidenote: look at this: 'How, then, am I to love the Godhead?' says Meister Eckhart. 'Thou shalt love him as he is: not as a god, not as a spirit, not as a person, not as an image, but as a sheer pure One. And in this One we are to sink from nothing to nothing, so help us God' or Jacopone da Todi to see 'I was mistaken-- Thou art not as I thought and firmly held' (32)

This connects, I think, to Simone Weil, and The Cloud of Unknowing-- a true mystical experience transcends the desired goal and makes you realize what reality is-- perhaps that it's more mutable than you thought, or less so-- or that we're only seeing and processing one tiny snippet of it, in a certain way, but it's not bound to those confines.

A mystic who has reached the 3rd stage is then called to a life both active and contemplative. Says Ruysbroeck: 'Then only is our life a whole, when contemplation and work dwell in us side by side, and we are perfectly in both of them at once.' (34)

Or Plotinus' example: 'We always move round the One, but we do not always fix our gaze upon it. We are like a choir of singers standing round the conductor, who do not always sing in time, because their attention is diverted to some external object. When they look at the conductor, they sing well and are really with him. So we always move round the One. If we did not, we should dissolve and cease to exist. But we do not always look towards the One, When we do, we attain the end of our existence and our rest, and we no longer sing out of tune, but form in truth a divine choir about the One.'

Ark

Ronald Johnson.

poems as blueprint-- for monument (akin to Watts Tower in LA) but very playful, constantly interrogating language and its latent possibilities. A blueprint for what might become of language? Or how he envisions it being used? (Drawing the parallel between Watts tower and language, if this is the case-- broken things or things cast aside collected and used to make something 'whole'?) A monument to this created history? "about" Eurydice, Orpheus, KS, biblical imagery (psalms used as found text or written through as 'palms')

Look here at an excerpt from Beam 30, The Garden

...they sing

sense's

struck crystal clarities

to knock the knees

(or scarlet hollyhock, against a near blue sky).

No end of fountains lost among the shrubberies full eye may bare.

Fixed stars

with fireflies jam the lilac.

Much, much detail of color-- and beautiful language ensues. He has a sharp ear (a soft ear? whatever) and his language is punchy-- but not sure what the purpose of this project as a whole is?