Yearbook (2.5)

What else did I see? One long dry vine, with little opposite curly petioles coming off it and lengthwise greenish and yellowish striations, stretched across the ground under dead leaves and twigs for several yard to an abrupt constricted (chopped off?) end. As I left, the sun hit a side of the roof so that the tufts of moss sporophytes between shingles lit up like a field of luminous greenish-red eyelashes. And so, for many years, in a tale, on a peak, in their spacious separateness, he carried on a life devised in the free spaces of that vinyl siding, “sorbet” bra strap, mentholed awakeness, while she remained richly unconvinced, with one knuckle in her mouth. Snow the last day of February, wish I had a camera. Saw a psocopteran (bark louse), a green and orange spider, a Heliconias I mistook for an Ithomiid, a mealy bug and its shed vesture,big holes connecting two plants where the branches touched—Azteca ants?

Sleep Is Critical

The one lucid thought I had last night: Poetry-as-landscape is perhaps always poetry teasing landscape, or being teased by it.

*

Poetry, then, remains a defined enough activity that we can play with the conceit of its being something else. This is impossible, and thus endlessly fascinating. Take Clark Coolidge's, or anybody's, poetry-as-music. Then take the strangeness of the moments in Nathaniel Mackey's poetry where poetry-as-music becomes poetry-as-description-of poetry-as-music. From "Andoumboulouous Brush":

                 . . ."Mouth that
           moved my mouth,"
                                              he
     soughed, hummed it,
        made it buzz . . . Hummed,
  hoped glass would break,
walls fall. Sang thru
                                     the
            cracks a croaking
                                            song
        to end all song . . .

*

Or the way a brief passage by Barbara Guest can, in a complex and gorgeous irony, all at once tease and be teased by the terms of (abstract-expressionist) art, art-criticism, and music. From "Musicality":

                                    two trees leaning forward
the thick new-made emptiness



                      Naturalism.


              Hanging apples               half-notes
in the rhythmic        ceiling        red flagged
rag clefs

                     notational margins

Where it is the very "notational margins" that emphasize and bind together "notational margins" and "Naturalism"; where anything is Naturalism if and where you say it is—as though a painter daubed on a patch of naturalism near the middle of the canvas; where the notational spacing of poetry gets wilfully mixed up with the literalness of musical notes which are also apples; where words require, like paintings, the material quality of their material: "the thick new-made emptiness," "red flagged / rag clefs."

*

Maybe this is all obvious and only seems worth repeating because it came in through half sleep. A little later towards morning I became interested in the phenomenon of the descriptive poem-title, as in: "Poem Described by Its Title." "Poem Anxious to Begin." "Poem with Some Dogshit on It." "Exit, Pursued by Words."

Now I'm awake, it looks like spring, and the last thing I'm going to have is another idea.

Yearbook (2.4)

Dude, guy, boy or man? Conical stipule at shoot tip. I dreamed Herman Melville worked at the Museum of Modern Art. He got rid of, composed, dug up, a history "Of Traffickers". I heard it singing itself through various river mouths. Leathern tomes “murble.” Is she singing “moon fudge fragment”?

More

More about Portland's big poetry weekend from Chris Piuma and Rodney Koeneke, here and here.

Yearbook (2.3)

Passioned out. Your style appears to be thawing out. The mud of ancient lakes is like a history book, its pages being the thin layers of mud; and all the historian needs is a drill to collect a column of mud from underwater and the ability to read these muddy pages. The words are there to find their voice, the acrid copious dye that mells blue with snow white through their fringe and fray, the only one at the party they wanted to meet. It’s a world of solids, liquids, gases, gels, pastes, colloids, vapors, baby. The critics were obliged to take a metaphorical detour, produce their own hesitations, play with the picture’s recalcitrance, before they declared it a nude of some kind—comic perhaps, or obscene, or incompletely painted. In Olympia, it’s February now for new osoberry leaves.

Reading Reading

My friend Rich and I are both reading Robin Blaser's book of collected essays, The Fire, and since we live in different cities, we started an internet book club called The Fire on tumblr.com in order to talk about it. Anyone interested in those essays is welcome to join us around the virtual hearth. Email peachesandbats@gmail.com or vbstope@gmail.com and we'll "invite" you. 

*

Check out Delirous Hem for a bunch of people's thoughts about "Numbers Trouble" and sexism in poetryland.

*

It was an exciting weekend for poetry in Portland. On Friday, Lyn Hejinian, Joan Retallack, Marjorie Perloff, and Hank Lazer gave readings and a talk at PSU. I missed that, but went Saturday to Lewis and Clark for "What's the Use of Poetry?: a Symposium," featuring the former three. 

I came in late and caught the last half of a long talk by the famous critic, whose argument, under the rubric of "Unoriginal Genius," seemed to go something like: "Kenneth Goldsmith and Walter Benjamin have a lot in common, because they're both very fond of quotation." 

Then Retallack gave a reading that opened with a short talk on "Procedural Elegy," which turned halfway through into a practical example of same, a long poem of mesmerizing recurrences which seemed to be based on some alphabetical procedure. I don't know Retallack's work at all, and I suspect it's the sort of thing that takes some patient investigation and getting used to on the page in order to really "hear" it. As it was, I didn't respond much to it—but then, I'm not the brightest bulb on the marquee when it comes to registering a text's complexities in a live listening, and this is certainly complexly patterned, tough work. One poem, "Existence Is an Attribute," proceeded (she explained) from Kant's claim, in refuting Anselm's ontological proof of the existence of God, that "existence is not an attribute." It consisted of several versions of a narrated conversation, each broken up (usually midsentence if not midphrase) into smaller numbered sections, so that a slowed-down counting was continually interrupting a slowed-down account of one person's insistence to another, on a muddy road in the country, that "I am proving you do not exist." 

Then Hejinian came up and gave an utterly astonishing, delightful, funny, exhilarating  reading. There were two 14 line elegiac poems, and a number of poems from her ongoing series of "night works" The Book of a Thousand Eyes, an "homage to Scheherezade" — fairytales, "insomniac lyrics," lullabies, tractates in dream logic, and of course dreams. Favorite sentences:

She'll never believe she's too old to play in a band or make quick, vertical moves in the playing field to really quiet music.

Activity never sleeps, and no tale of crumbling cliffs can be a short one.

"Sport," says the lecturer, "is dependent on the occasional appearance of wild animals."

Perhaps this "Taskinlife" was a poor soldier with holes in his boots, a bad back, and warped arrows.

I'd looked into My Life and knew she was the real deal, but I didn't expect anything so full of immediate surprise, sharp perception, dead-on tonal shifts and parodies of traditional modes, and critical laughter. Now I'll go read everything of hers I can find. (Eventually. I'm slow.)

There was a Q&A afterwards. Hejinian: "It's actually very difficult to write only non-sequiturs." Retallack: "You must be trying to write good ones."

*

And on Sunday I got my chance to see Lazer read with Laura Feldman at the NAAU (a Spare Room joint). He interspersed readings from several books of poems with short passages from his new book of critical prose, Lyric and Spirit. I've never seen such a straightforward demonstration of the interaction and even interdependence of the two modes in a life's practice. Both poems and prose thought about and did music—with Coltrane, Monk and Cage as friendly presences—and responded by quotation and specific praise to the work of other poets—Creeley, Zukofsky, Ronald Johnson, Olson. At they same time they engaged with Jewish mysticism and numerology, southern cooking, videogames, and an attempt to reclaim the word spirit from our floppy cultural habits, our hazy enthusiasm or easy squeamishness. 

Laura Feldman gave a very surprising slideshow and reading about her two years in the Peace Corps in Uganda, a subversion of the conventionally informational "Peace Corps presentation" she was expected to give on her return. Excerpts from notebooks alternated with quotations from a bilingual phrasebook and from a book of poems, Labyrinths, by the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo. 

Yearbook (2.2)

He was a keen mountaineer and invented a detachable and reversible sole with studs or cleats to put on his boots: the short studs in front and the long ones behind for going uphill, the other way round for coming down. Of course he had loves and dislikes and perhaps hates, but these he did not indulge because he had not chosen them: the main tissue, vascular and structural, of his life was of likes. Like “a single crowing consists of four component notes, i.e., of four major energy peaks, sometimes rendered onomatopoeically as cock-a-doodle-doo”; like “Quantity Noodle and Cheese Loaf”; or the fortune-cookie fortune once:
          It is kind of fun
          to do the impossible.
Between the printed lines his eyes pined for and found—or penned—others. “To modify the library with a tiny incision”: the only serious reader is the pleasure reader. Threads, needles, eyelets like words, binding with care or roughly any body in here. The light went deep, the sea was clear, but he was lost.