Recent Reading (chapbooks)

Robert Kelly, Devotions
A stapled mimeo chapbook from 1967, published by Kelly under the “Salitter” imprint. Ten poems from a series of “Devotions,” typewriter-set with some handwritten Greek words. A squiggly alluvial-looking line-drawing on the cover. Vintage arcane voluble horny Kelly, eating burned bacon and reading Lorca, polishing his wife’s shoes, meditating on the serpent form of the dii meilikhioi and the etymology of pomegranate.

Joseph Bradshaw, This Ocean, or Oppen Series
Dude this book is crazy! A work of apocryphal poetry and fake interviews and textual commentary, in the mode of After Lorca, Pale Fire and Araki Yasusada, but way more mixed up. There are fake poems by George Oppen (complete with variant readings), short essays on fake poems by George Oppen, a fake interview between George Oppen and Joseph Merrick (the “Elephant Man”) interrupted by an invisible Jack Spicer, a fake poem by Merrick, references to “the fragments of the Ancient Greek poet George Oppen,” real quotations from Oppen and Spicer (both attributed and not), numerous references to Gus van Sant’s movies, a transcription of Spicer’s first poem from “Thing Language” italicized and broken into disyllabic “feet,” and some other poems presumably attributable to the Ancient West Coast Cro-Magnon poet Joseph Bradshaw. The whole thing is very tightly knit together and often cheekily funny, but stays incomprehensible and unpredictable and spookily arbitrary too. Oppen and Spicer very different poets, both revered for extraordinary integrity and intensity, tied up in both their cases with a caustic skepticism and a capacity for silence and waiting. They sometimes feel like mythic, inhuman figures (though Spicer was also a master of parody and self-parody). This Ocean confuses the two of them in an unsettling way and excitingly walks a line between deadpan parody/appropriation and obsessive admiration. See also Chris Piuma’s review at The Agora.

Chris Piuma, The Old City
Folded loosely pamphlet, edition of 20! From back in 2001. My favorite is “On the Celebration of Men”:

I come to bury Caesar, not to stall his swagger, aggrandize support on ivory pedestal, or enervate him rugged yellow-lipped hooked up and fed through sub-woofer bellowing: “There I go”, a study, tense, Boccioni in this focused still frame, but if we study over a moment we’ll miss, disparu, gone west, manifesto in hand, seedy, he scattered hours ago, so not to squeeze out any of, a harmful solution even on theoretical terms, cream of wheat, leg of lamb, eye of newt, your basic acid . . .

This sentence goes on for another page or so, with some questions along the way (“does he mind?, is he straw?, of bendy will?”).

Joseph Massey, Out of Light
These poems are tiny perfectly-articulated perpetual-motion machines, kind of Niedecker-meets-Armantrouty-sounding Every syllable is subtly crosstied to other syllables. Nothing wobbles. My favorite poem is the longest and messiest one, “Shay Park.” But I also like this “Path”:

Weeds
whacked to pulp
between slits
in cinder
blocks laid
in gravel.
A path
to these
porch steps,
their chipped
blue paint
—the rain-
stained wood
cracked through.

Recent Reading (like, July and August)

Playing catch-up, so commentary will be spotty. And saving chapbooks for another occasion.

Peter Gizzi, Some Values of Landscape and Weather. For the third or fourth time.

Robert Duncan, Letters. For the second time. Beautiful Flood Editions reprint.

Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. 

Michael O'Brien, Sleeping and Waking.

From "Another Autumn":

the brick of meaning, the brick of money, you want to muss up their hair

if he says Do not hasten to bid me adieu he's not a cowboy 

And from "Ghosts":

Highway

     sign

Wrapped in

     burlap

It means

     Nothing

Robert Duncan, The Opening of the Field. For maybe the third time.

From "After Reading Barely and Widely":

Poetry, that must touch the string

for music's service

is of violence and obedience a delicate balancing.

And from "The inbinding mirrors a process . . .":

My heart despairs. For the poem

beyond all poetry I have actually heard

has words as natural and expendable

as a cold stream of the first water

thru which rocks of my resistant life

yield to light cleavages of what seems true,

white heights and green deeps.

And from "The Structure of Rime XII":

The structure of rime is in the rigorous trees repeated that take on the swirl visible in the coast winds and the outcroppings, the upraised and bared granites that define sentences of force and instrument.

Jennifer Bartlett, Derivative of the Moving Image.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. I can't stop puzzling over her very peculiar version of what politics is—or rather was, since she more or less restricts the phenomenon to classical Athens and directly opposes it to any socioeconomic, legislative modern activity. "Politics" means showing off, goofing off, making speeches, making sure you get stories told about you after you die, but not necessarily changing anything. The closest I think I've come in my own experience were at a hippie summer camp in my early teens, and at various summer-camp-like indie-rock fests. I've never been to a poetry conference, but I suspect it's the same vibe. I'm not quite comfortable with these examples, or with Arendt's nostalgia, but her politics of self-revelation do very helpful to me for thinking about Agamben's deal with the politics of gesture, and various poets' stated desire to make cities with their poems (Olson, Blaser, Spicer, Oppen.)

Still puzzling.

Michael Palmer, First Figure.

Eléna Rivera, Unknowne Land.

Robert Kelly, Her Body Against Time.

Michael Palmer, Notes for Echo Lake. For the second time.

"Alogon" (5):

These feelings

are imaginary.

These feelings

are images

of things.

These things

are felt

as real.

These things

are imagined

as real,

"head and

neck, face

and eyes,

arms, fingers,

nipples and

hips." These

imaginings contain

no ideas.

David Rattray, Opening the Eyelid. This guy was amazing! I'm very grateful to David Abel for giving me a copy of this book, which he published in 1990 when Rattray was still alive (and working for Reader's Digest!).

From "A Division of Water":

The hebrew word araphel means

"thick darkness, secret or high place."

But there is no such thing as obscure

poetry. The objects of a poem

are as bright and clear as can be.

The boast that its

words come from the heart

is true of each real poem, each

word written in blood.

Who wants to look at a color 

so bright it hurts the eyes?

With an elevated serum nitrogen level

at above 12,000 feet,

Tibet favors a mix of

bright reds and yellows.

Red stands for raging energy,

yellow for light.

. . .

On the Williamsburg

at 1:15 of an afternoon on Sunday,

April 17th, a sunny day,

60 degrees with a light breeze,

I counted fourteen flattened

Prince's Plastic Weld glue tubes;

two syringes, one with

and one without a point;

countless broken pints, Smirnoff, Ron Rico, etc.;

plus an intact Wild Irish Rose empty.

Michael Palmer, Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks.

Michael Palmer, Sun. For the second time.

John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance. 

And the voice replied to him again and it was now so low and yet so searching that it was like a wind stirring the horns of snails and touching the hairs on the throats of night-jars, and moving the antennae of butterflies, and lifting the gold-dust from the cracks of puff-balls, and blowing the grey dust from the droppings of weasels, and rippling the brown rain-fall in the cups of fungi, and fretting the light scurf on the brittle skulls of the newborn, and the rheum-drops on the eyelids of extreme age, and the sweat-drops on the forehead of death.

The man knew his way around a hyphen. I was pleased to carry this dark blue brick around all summer for sentences like that.

Recent Reading (June-July)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief
Not LW’s lecture notes, but the notes of three of his Cambridge students. They sure knew how to take notes back then, and the terse, shorthand quality of the texts (with abundant ellipses, brackets around students’ objections, and footnotes where two scribes differed significantly). He’s very good on the intrinsic, unequivocal, experiential qualities of art, and the problem of description.

Very many people have the feeling: “I can make a gesture here but that’s all.” One example is that you say of a certain phrase of music that it draws a conclusion, “Though I can’t say for my life why it is a ‘therefore’!” You say in this case that it is indescribable. But this does not mean that you may not one day say that something is a description. You may one day find the word or you find a verse that fits it. “It is as though he said: ‘. . .’,” and you have a verse. And now perhaps you say: “And now I understand it.”
. . .
The mistake seems to me in the idea of description. I said before, with some people, me especially, the expression of an emotion in music, say, is a certain gesture. If I make a certain gesture . . . “It is quite obvious that you have certain kinesthetic feelings. It means to you certain kinesthetic feelings.” Which ones? How can you describe them? Except, perhaps, just by the gesture.

Suppose you said: “This phrase in music always makes me make one particular gesture.” A painter might draw this gesture. A man, instead of making a gesture, would draw a gesture. “Wittgenstein, you talk as if this phrase gave you sensations you couldn’t describe. All you get is sensations in your muscles.” This is utterly misleading. We look up muscles in a book on anatomy, we press certain parts and give these sensations names, ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ etc. All that would be needed for a piece of music would be the description ‘A,’ etc., giving the sensations in each muscle.

Jasper Bernes, Starsdown
This book is way more depressing than the new Heath Ledger movie. And often annoyingly clever, but always dead-on in its satire of the present Spectacle and its Society. His prosody, and his tendency to “load every rift with ore,” remind me of Hart Crane, or of a G. M. Hopkins in a world not “charged with the grandeur of God” (though he mentions “God’s blinking cursor”) but surcharged by the glamour of capital. I copied some lines into a notebook from “Desiderata”:

The horizon is a second skin, seeing
Sheathed by being, swallowed whole.
It kings us eye for I. It brings what
Flings us far near, an myopia, a fat
Cataract where the ocean pours over
The edge into threshing, blent serrations, scales.

From “Index”:

you can smoke anything: shoe leather
ethics, Nixon, Bastille Day, quiet.

And from “Alarum and Moral”:

Walking in Los Angeles is like dancing in wet cement.
The distances cheat. You make the city up.
Channels of light and dark symposium on squirm and offer
something glorious about to happen, a kind of art or tar
whose hardening a steady, moderate movement postpones.

And:

Has it really gotten to the point where you can’t slice the monuments from
the moment without
taking off your fingerprints too?

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
A real adventure story, with piranhas and capybaras and a seven-page description of a sunset. The first sentence: “I hate traveling and explorers.”

Recent Reading

Bill Berkson, Sudden Address: Selected Lectures 1981-2006. True to the title, these are not “essays” at all, just the poet-critic-“art historian without portfolio” being chatty and wise about Philip Guston, Frank O’Hara, Walt Whitman, Dante, and other dead friends. “Rhetoric is a bobbin-tension. Can’t we have a simple active thread?” Most of the talks seem to have been accompanied by slideshows, and one misses the illustrations here. Guston is a major presence in nearly every talk (in company with Piero della Francesca, Cézanne, Chardin), and I kept interrupting my reading to go find a photo of the picture it was telling me about.

Marcella Durand, Western Capital Rhapsodies. I lucked into this at the library, and wanted to read it twice, but now somebody has it on hold. Poems of incredible sharpness and intricacy of visual detail, rendered in a fluid, constantly surprising syntax. Way entertaining. The book balances on two 25-part sequences, “City of Ports” and “Machine into Water.” The former is my favorite, perhaps because it distills so many themes that I’ve been interested in in my own recent poetry (traffic, construction materials, architecture, geology, landscape) with a precision and freshness that humble and challenge me, and a formal grace I don’t even approach. Here’s a sample, “City of Ports 14”:

An annoying noise, a buzz
penetrates miles of quarry rock

and weakens basalt structures:
the flying buttresses think of

falling, taking their grainy wings
and centering angles back

to the ocean floor they first
spilled out of, that and the

meteorites flashing inward,
drawn mothlike to the trembling

blue green glow of a living
atmosphere. In impact the tiny

heavy spheres, drilled by another
thousand smaller bits, spark

off a swell, a wave, an undulation
in the crust of beaten gold, and

speak messages deeper to the inner
planet circling on its own,

wrapped in a field of
direction.

Benjamin Friedlander, A Knot Is Not a Tangle. A quick flutter of diaphanous lyrics wrapped in several layers of self-mocking apparatus. There’s a note on the manuscript, which was edited by Kimberley Filbee, then a note from the U.S. Postal Service in Buffalo (“The enclosed article was damaged in handling” etc.), then a prefatory invocation beginning “Dear Poet,” then the poems proper (“Vomit Scape,” “This Is Just to Say,” “Until It Sounds Just Like Philosophy” and “A Child’s Garden of Verses” among them), then the Editor’s Envoi in three parts: A, “Partial Objects” (poems with missing words indicated by empty brackets, á la Davenport’s translation of Sappho’s fragments); B, “Unused Titles” (“From the Mixed-up Files . . .” “Easier Said Than Done,” “In Basil Rathbone’sVoice,” “Rankle” and dozens more); and C, “Facsimile Chapbook Attributed to Bernie Fox,” supposed to be from the sixties by a dead and forgotten poet, with an editor’s afterword that pushes all the Borgesian buttons. The tone of the whole book is bitter, ironic, terse, offhand, funny-but-don’t-laugh, dead-on in its run through all the tones of our depressing cultural moment.

George Oppen, Selected Poems (edited by Robert Creeley). I saw Glen Mott read in New York last month, and he prefaced his own poems with three sections (10, 18 and 19) from Of Being Numerous, saying “I think this is absolutely contemporary” and of course it is. I wasn’t prepared for the speed and fluidity and almost hallucinatory quality of late poems like “From a Phrase of Simone Weil’s and Some Words of Hegel’s”—so different from the monolithic, jerky prosody of Discrete Series (which incidentally is underrepresented in this selection—only two short poems!).

John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance. I’m just getting started with this one, my doorstopper for the summer. Pure fun from the first impossible sentence. Of course Powys was a mystic and a crank (Colin tells me he claimed to be a reincarnated brontosaurus to boot!), but he was also a great realist, if that word has any meaning—an imaginer of nature and of human being in all its diversity and complexity, with all the senses, silly, daily, trivial, mythic, what’s there to be communicated.

Recent Reading

Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, and Laura Moriarty, Ultravioleta
I took these two very different books with me on a trip to New York a couple weeks ago and read them alternately. They are both, among other things, fussy investigations of the pronoun I. Agamben interrogates it discursively, with reference to the history of philosophy, and Moriarty allegorically, with reference to the history of poetry, using standard science-fiction tropes as a scaffolding. (In her novel, "the I" are a semi-disembodied alien race that feed on human and Martian emotions—perhaps by entering their poems—and that have colonized the solar system—"it was like an invasion of therapists.") Both make reference to Descartes's "I think therefore I am" and Rimbaud's "I is another," and both seem to conclude that "I" is a creature of, a creation of, a convenience of, language: the thing that speaks, the thing limited by language. Which throws a new light on Wittgenstein's dubious "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." I never cared much for poets' and philosophers' pronoun anxiety, but now it's starting to get interesting.

Clark Coolidge, At Egypt
A long strange trip through a solider cosmos than Moriarty's. One theme is the infinite gradations of blue sky:

But the blue now, the blues through the roof they intended
is a coal blue, as if radiation rates a mineral explanation
that hue of blue darkening past sunset seen through
sandstone gaps, in temple, past navy blue dye of a fountain pen
a metallic crystal I lost like its sickle to the earthshine
slice of the moon, near Islamic sun, and its one pilot star
its second one in reddish conjuction, such stellar cycles
I time through masterful space, sandstone laps
metered to meet on this silver against feather night
brought to plumb downtown under weight of no words

George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things
A meticulous little treatise on the methods by which we learn from and categorize human-made objects. Full of brilliantly offhand examples drawn from the whole history of art, craft and architecture (Kubler also wrote a book on 16th-century Mexican architecture), all illustrating rather sketchy schemes of categorization. There's also a beautiful index: Talent, Taste, Taxco, Tedium, Temperament, Teotihuacán, Text editing, Time, Toledo, Toltec-Maya, Tomb-furnishings, Topology, Trait, Tree-rings, Triviality, Twain, Mark, Typology.

Benjamin Friedlander, The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes
A disorienting poet. I'm just beginning to get my bearings. Scary, strained lyrics for a scary, strained America.

Oh it calls to me where I've gone
araft. A reft in the never placid
water wrapped out of tune.
In the picky lap of luxury.