Shadow Work

Lyn Hejinian suggests: “He distinguished the individual animals, discovered the concept of categories, and then organized the various species according to their different functions and relationships in a system” (626). She continues, pointing out that individual experience and cultural education determine the sorts of relationships that will be recognized or blindly passed over. For instance, she recognizes the paradigmatic expectation that perfect language “will meet its object with perfect identity” (626). Her suggestion that this state of language would be insufferable is supported by Coolidge’s description of Aram’s one word poems. Although there is a certain wonder in Aram’s capacity to actually go through the editing process, to engages with his one word, this image becomes comic and insufferable to Coolidge. Within such a complete language, the space for individual play and expression is lost. The attempt at sameness between word and world that she suggests is an instinctual desire, if realized would prevent the positive recognition of difference, of individuality; only “the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other” (628). Aram’s poems motivated Coolidge’s work at putting things together—highlighting both similarity, a willingness to come into relation, and difference, the resistance to come into relation.
The inability to to say what one wants to creates an anxious space. One function of poetic writing seems to be engagement with this anxiety, Stein’s notion that writing must go on, and attempts to communicate despite the private natures of individuals’ languages, the desire to close the gap: “To myself I proposed the paragraph as a unit representing a single moment of time, a single moment in the mind, its content all the thoughts, thought particles, impressions, impulses—all the diverse, particular, and contradictory elements that are included in an active and emotional mind at any given instant. For the moment, as a writer, the poem is a mind” (Hejinian 620). Poetry becomes the communication of a consciousness rather than a reality.
How a poem might mediate the space of translation between poet and reader is a good question, especially in time following the numerous descriptions of the failures of language and artistic constructions, such as Watten’s reiteration of Smithson’s: “The possibilities of language in art are described as fictional and illusionistic” (79). Watten suggests projects that reflect on their own incomplete state. Using Smithson’s mirror sculpture instillations to illustrate mimetic failure, Watten points out that these objects create their image out of their surroundings. It is the syntactical arrangement of objects with consideration of how they will interact in the world at large that allows the poet to “do something.”
Combining my reading of Watten and Coolidge, and probably all the others, has created a model in my mind of the poet as the arranger of words as objects in order to come to something new. However, for this productive quality of poetry (and I feel each poem should produce something distinct) to be understood and appreciated by external consciousness, the poet must control the work to account for the space of translation between himself and others. I see the poet arranging specific objects not only for himself, but with and understanding of how the light of others will create a shadow. It is not the poem the poet needs to be conscious of per-say, but the shadow.

Starting Again Somewhere

I like the way Clark Coolidge begins by suggesting his possible “use” to be “to give you some options.” Along the lines of this purpose, I appreciate the example of poetic relationships he provides in his comparison of Aram Saroyan’s one word poems and his own work at putting things together during the same time. This example illustrates just how broad the field of possibilities of places to take options from is (I also like the way he uses vectors to describe them). Not only consensus. But resistance. Evolution. Metamorphises.

This notion of resistance seemed to be that of torque. His description of the “ohm” is a definition of torque that works for me: “You could talk about art being insistent emphasis. The words really came to me very strongly, as things. And I began to think: but I want to put them together with that kind of intensity. I want to see what happens. Also, another thing I was interested in, at the time, was making a poem of words that don’t go together in some ways, that have resistance, that they don’t go. That kind of energy. As that word ‘ohm’ has to do, in a way, with electrical resitance” (163). There is a sentence on 148 that struck me as having torque: “And I remember being in there one day and there were these guys and they were all working with Bunsen burners and blowup pipes and everything and they were smashing wrocks with hammers and they were taking a test, an exam.” The narrative this description is part of describes the tension of the specific and the general, I think, that I talk about later.

This made me think of Lyotard talking about language games in The Postmodern Condition: a Report on Knowledge: “In the ordinary use of discourse--for example, in a discussion between two friends--the interlocutors use any available ammunition, changing games from one utterance to the next: questions, requests, assertions, and narratives are launched pell-mell into battle. The war is not without rules, but the rules allow and encourage the greatest possible flexibility of utterance” (17). I know the word “rule” might be a problem for Coolidge. But it was also one of the first things I wrote down while reading. I think Lyotard’s understanding of rules is similar to Coolidge’s conception of pattern and action that Mimsy Were the Borogroves illustrates so well. This idea that when things are put in there very specific place, that can only be described generally, they do something. Here he is able to reconcile the arbitrary nature of language and meaning, junk, and the continued desire and belief to use that junk to do something.

I also appreciate his poetical ethic. He also includes in his introduction: “This is going to be quite rapid in places... I think it’s very important to know how many possibilities there are for an artist, and there are almost too many. There are to many. So, if the information goes by you quickly or there are things, names, that you’re not familiar with, I hope you’ll ask me and I’ll be glad to try to amplify” (144). This suggest the notion that despite there being too many and his attempt to give us the experience of the overwhelming too many, he would like to be understood. He deserves the respect not to be misunderstood and the options he is transmitting, often from relations with other poets, deserve the respect and patience necessary. Like Aram at is one word poems, editing.

From reading this I got the notion of, in a poem, arranging objects so that the shadow, in the right light (the right reader--willing/able to come to the poem), will resemble the desired image though they might not be the object that is generally associated with that image, so that the words will trigger in the reader a resemblance of the thought motivating the arrangement despite whatever slant of translation occurs within the space, and motivate that space to become productive, to encompass possibility.

i would post, but my internet only works sometimes, when im unprepared

procession

(choice and
not my choosing)

mar by
wind mercy
grateful when the
sun does hurt
it is only lime
stone pebbled
out by the aves
on the turning
tide
wing brought
arachnid
smaller folding
in worn away
places in my
feet
and turns
succeed
wind ‘round
the sedimentary
spine
lined up lived
down lived
erosion
and on the
current
harped by
the whistle
zephyr
through windows
after mate song
and lapped to
shore cliff
come to sand
sun for sleep
and arachnid
comes close
to her ear
to hear
the ocean
in her shell
he drives
the torrent stronger
the aves after
zephyr
or before
turning the zenith
low
and in the sun
bellow
the salt
and gallows ships
coral making
memorial
dribble castle
storied history
shroud for
a turning
atol marking
by mar
till the wind’s
mercy licks
level places
for sailing again
the transport
of deviance

Silliman Ramble

There is a passage in “The New Sentence” that I think I may have misread. But I liked my misreading, found it liberating. So I’ll stick by it.

“Contained in the sixth definition is the notation that in grammar, a sentence is either a proposition, question, command, ore\ request, containing subject and predicate, though one of the may be absent by means of ellipsis” (64).

This notion of absence, of delay. It makes me excited the way Dickinson’s dashes and Stein’s periods do. Then I started thinking of how words can come to function as grammatical markers. I think of the experience of reading Three Lives by Stein, the way words come to function as periods, places of rest and recuperation around which revolution takes place.

It seems that Silliman is after a syntax that confers this pause, this reflection that grammatical markers, dashes and periods, and words in repetition to the level of the sentence. He marks in a Coolidge poem, as a commendable achievement, that “the length of sentences and the use of the period are now wholly rhythmic” (88). Silliman is after an intrinsic measure for a particular work of language that does not rely on conventions in order to create torque. He wants the “poetic form [to move] into the interiors of prose” (89). He is concerned with the logic of the content, the argument, and the logic of the syntax.

Silliman offers a definition of language, from Wittgenstien, as “a manifestation or transformation of thought” (70). The poetic seems to want to treat this “or” as an “and.” It is, like Stein said, about going around the inside of a thing, of space so that the to know is a transformation, an exchange of energy, and experience. So I guess part of the notion about controlling the syllogistic movement is about delay the gratification of a complete sentence, about delaying the name that renders uninteresting, still, complete. Controlling the syllogistic movement is like setting out a trail. It is not just important that all the parts are there. But also that there is enough space in some places for wandering and in others for hitting heads and scraping knees. And that attention is given to the fact that water is appreciated more in a desert, that glass might be more interesting with flaws, or in the reflections and overlap, or maybe chasms.

End ramble.

a draft

stomach house fallen into belly
and body blushing caught
on a twisted eve
they come
and with the premise
no walls
one roof
they come dark
curled 'round kidneys
more and though all 's still
so to the door
to unfurl
it's no good and it will slam siren
and for the raid
to bring the black out curtains
stepped out wet
and then those eves
come sapped gems
for swallow
the smaller corners come
remedy bracing tendency to grass
then flooded the blush
all about the tongue

Stein and Dickinson

To start. I get the impression that Stein's period is like Emily Dickinson's dash. Both striving after something, as Stein says, "I felt that writing should go on." Both recognize the need to pause and fumble. Stein notes that verbs are more interesting because they allow for mistakes. Dickinson also seems to relish the ability to defend her position against the possibility of mistakes arising in it due to lack of investigation by continuing her sarcastic and caricatured correspondence with Higgins. Both women also seem to feel that this need must be marked out on paper (Stein likes the way they look) in a way that strikes me as a practical sort of field composition. Stein does suggests the practical necessity of these moments of not "going on": Inevitably no matter how completely I had to have writing go on, physically on had to again and again stop sometime and if one had to again and again stop some time then periods had to exist." This portion her definition is also interesting because it seems to use in terms of a cycle (ex. period of revolution) rather than as and end point.

I like the notion that the possibility of mistaking adds richness and interest. But this seems like a difficult effect. One that goes hand in hand with the suggestion that poems are names. That "slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known." That "this that I have just described, the creating it without naming it" allows one to go around the inside mistaking and then "discovering." This is what reading Stein or Coolidge's Polaroids is like for me--the feeling of mistaking only to come to feel that I've been somewhere, that I've learned something. There seems to be something in mistaking, ambiguity, over-definition that requires something of those who approach it. Taxing as this something might be, it takes us round showing each name has been and is being revived. Like sculpting till a finished work is in a museum and they have all come to sand.