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.

Agoraphobia and the Internet

So my internet modem died. A pretty valid excuse for getting a little behind. I'll try to get my posts up soon. It's just so difficult going out into the world. That, and dealing with any of the people I'd have to talk to to get the situation fixed.

Fenollosa

Fenollosa is afraid of dead language seeping into poetics, static language that is no longer capable of indicating process and wholly concerned with expressing contained and complete states of unbecoming: “My subject is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language.” He continues to assert by comparing Gray’s line with a Chinese line that poetry is the process contained in a “necessary order” which is permitted by “a regular and flexible sequence, as plastic as thought itself,” of words. This sequence allows “a reproduction of [the transferences of force from agent to object which constitute natural phenomena, occupy time] in the imagination requires the same temporal order.”

Fenollosa recognizes that a transcription of the experience of a process determined spatially and temporally is often at odds with traditional/grammaticized descriptions that follow their own rules divorced from the logic (or lack there of) of material reality and experience. The notion is that the poetical does not appropriate structures that were created for a different and equally individual experiences: content and form are inextricably intertwined in unique and “necessary” combinations. By following this order, Fenollosa expresses belief that the original work done, mimed in the poem, is somehow maintained, that the audience coming across the poetical will experience that same effort of production that stimulates rather than an experience of the static which dulls: “the purpose of poetical translation is the poetry, not the verbal definitions in dictionaries”; “In reading [the poetical] we do not seem to be juggling mental counters, but to be watching things work out their own fate.”

The poetical nature of the Chinese character that is so intriguing to Fenollosa is encompassed in the character’s tendency to express experience through “the meeting points of actions,.. The eye sees noun and verb as one: things in motion, motion in things.” In the examples he presents, the definition is clearly dependent on the particular definitions syntactical functions in/on reality.

This understanding of the poetical, especially the description Fenollosa gives of different understandings of “to shine” on pg 372 espousing the Chinese “sun-and-moon” reminded me of Shelley’s description of the poetical as the apprehension of similitude. When Fenollosa asserts that “languages to-say are thin and cold because we thing less and less into them. We are forced, for the sake of quickness and sharpness, to file down each word to its narrowest edge of meaning” I get the feeling that he is criticizing a trend to pin words down into generalities, dictionary definitions of states, rather than allowing them their “plastic” possibility and widest “edge of meaning” which might be narrowed to the specific context, “order of causation,” by syntax, by the meeting without denying the shadows and wind, which unseen chill the air.

I feel like my highschool english teacher who told us successfull essays came from a dance between the general and the specific. Time to stop.

well it is after now,
the procession to white
all run out, spilled
on concrete at these feet.

hands at the neck
and throttling lilac.
androdgeonous
lain out porceline
in the grass, after touch
finding fingers too rough
or leeching capacity’s pallet,
whored out, it was a struggle
for the window.
tossed out for breath
coming to the concrete,
used petal simulacrum
cut by the window
sieve after touch,
after chaste waif contrast
‘gainst the grass,
finding blades and fallen
sky, in whole reflections
spilt milk’s broken mirror.

but it was after now,
the refuse gone, well
ground in.

boxing bruises like violets in film
well indigo and salt storms
all the mars

and they don’t like us speaking
of that which doesn’t bind us up
of the ways unravelling our lips

flesh bit in exposure
rapture come

the dirt that comes of the turning under

for mother
gumption drawn

some thoughts, redundancies.

not so much blue bonnets
and the grass kept
recognized for pleasure

but the dandelions
coming up against
and despite

and not so much the blue
bonnets or the dandelions

but maybe the stepping
cross acres
through them and past

well still standing
and through all that pollen

it is something
to still be standing

and in the flesh of it






by no light given,
i can force you to
stumble, spend more time
and leave with skinned
knees.

when you go home, it
will be to lover's questions
and you will have to
reckon with me again.

me because those words
are not water, rather
choice.

when you are through with
me, in the window
box, there is time
for you, and he,
and she.




And a word on Hallmark and cliche. If those, sentiments, are the words i need, the very words, i will take them back. I am jealous of people who can speak and use these words without the guilt.

Olson's Space

Yes, Olson is yelling. But it is about the "PROJECTIVE", the "projectile", the "percussive", and the "prospective." He does often say nothing. And when he does say something, he sure goes about it funny. For all his talk of breath and his own hot air, I do still have to appreciate the material points he makes and the discussion he's opened up. I mean, we liked reading O'Hara didn't we.

We all learned from Lear, nothing does yield something. Despite this knowledge, in the day it's often easier to ignore the productive qualities of "empty" space. Olson voices a defense of space, even the "empty," the negative. It seemed to me, he almost feels that by respecting the space of the marked and the "empty" he might not create a transcendent order, but at least create some physical order of meaning that is other than him, larger than him, and with the capability to impinge on him. These poets speaking of channelling words, hoping they are speaking another voice that is greater, they seem to be after this dictate. For all his yelling, he seems to be after humility, even if it must be forced.

I really like the idea that physical space can provide this dictate, the idea that syntax and poems might replicate large forms that we might fling ourselves against and push off of, that space might create an order I can follow. It's an idea I'd like to work with in my chapbook, the notion of bearing witness in a poem. Be it form's witness of content, the poem's witness of the author, the poem's witness of the reader, or the reader's witness of the author.

No Olson Yet

I was house sitting in the hills off the grid.  I dont really want to come back to Ashland yet, or Olson.  Instead:


schizophrenic witness

yellow breasted 
bird Werther
Goetha 
             and you say
of the bird 
flown off the barbed wire

houses without halls
but the walking places
and in theirs

chair architect
adirondack chairs
no
          ajdrionjdrack 

i found something
Ginsberg's sunflower
to put it in my
                  book

grass chimes
how far are you
                     glowing

wind win
       will the leopard cat
wind crossed
here to the clock 
                              fall

wind chiming wire

raw almonds

isn't 
it 
delight
     and full

watch over this
it's empty

i am

and then order
if we could hear 
the cloud massed
memory

mushroom fellow feeling
          the horses are
          having none of it

hmm fallow
follow

watching it
our conversation grow

down the window line

and half is
translating my own script
                                   sands

Semi Trucks

and bison
transport
sheep or
maybe it
was only
wool

the sheep
still run even
if we've made
the pastures
hum mud

the blight

First, something a friend of mine, Nathon Garton, wrote. Once upon a time he went to school here.

Eventually Pandora became like a wayward child; she showed promise, but the more I tried to filter out the bad and combine good influences, the more I tried to mold that bitch, she rebelled and kept on bringing home the same trash, time and time again (namely Jack Johnson and 12 Stones), so I ditched Pandora in the river and picked up something new -- she should be the new village bicycle: try it out: last.

Now, from me.

And the other day one said to another, "You are a warrior poet. Always finding where you are." The boy really is. There is proof, a picture of him discovering his hands and capability. So there is a thought of it.

you walk don't you?
no, i stumble.
for the river to be gone
rather not to think of it,
content. nobler, for the light trash
to be gone. i like the laterns,
old fashioned. a moment, i'm tied.
and you would take your telephone
to the top of the eifle tower?
if it wasn't one of rope.
if it wasn't this old rotary thing.
if i wasn't hoping.
but then the stars.
and what of the river.
same awkward echo. to not be after
another place. still. i'm no better.
that's why you stumble,
always looking up. and flesh changes
and the ground moves.

mother's boy

the mother's thoughts for that little boy
of that warm room he should find among the hard
wood hallways soft in time

and then that fright and trembling
overtook by looming
cold and creaking indifferent
to the steps
it is lip biting
and bleeding to go sorting through
the steps and mirrors
after that place
in his mother's mind and fairytales

and when he is looking on the porceline blooming
and his passion after her pleasures
and he finds it lovely
and he walks through the halls
looking for such warping in the woods
and staining in the grains
and finding such wailing devotion honest
greater comfort than the ease

and then his mother that he loves
on finding him one night in tears
lain out long the way in his
can only petition him to mind her bones
hips and ribs that bruise along such
and other obscurities

and what is he to do
but pain that he could not stay in that room
lofty by the window sun
and pain once again that his breath is edgewise
and into corners down the flights
and along the halls
and every other seam holding
against the salt flood that would take the tulips
and his efforts after flowers to bind up and onto paper
into paper cuts on porceline

and then take breath again at the sea still holding
and then take breath again out
searching for those trees that take his fingers
captive like a smile
and then take breath again

she does smile at the blooms he finds for her
in those fits of his

prescribed

after sun
and that day writ before
where i pulled at weeds and shores
muscles in my back

what about that law
which pulled hair
and cotton

for rich words

gosh
still after pulling threads
for marred glass panes, views
of adonis in the streets through
and though the season

On Shelley

When I first read Shelley, I got the idea that Shelley's ideal poem would be like the tip of the iceberg, the "approximation of the beautiful," that is able to contain, to point out the meaning of the chunk of ice menacing below. The ability for a poem to fold meaning in upon its self seems to come from Shelley's understanding of experience and representation: "and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects and of his apprehension of them... language, gesture, and the imitative arts, become at once the representation and the medium."

Shelley seems to qualify the success of a poem by its ability to encourage productive harmony (I guess the iceburg fails here. But it still sort of works because it does impinge). The poem should interact with, I would say even impinge upon, humanity in a manner that might spiral out of control, but bears the pleasure of discoveries which precipitate further discovery: "every inflexion of tone and every gesture will bear exact relation to a corresponding antitype in the pleasurable impressions which awakened it; it will be the reflected image of that impression... so the child seeks, by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause." I think this is how the poet becomes a legislator. A successful poem will dictate a perspective which is in itself a sort of law. But if Shelley thought he and his contemporaries were "unacknowledged," it might be fair to say that popular culture is opposed to poet legislators that suggest alternative and even oppositional attitudes.

This is where the word elitist seems to always come up. I would propose that this isn't such a bad thing as long as the poet, while believing his ideas to be elite, does not impinge on individuals who do not share his understanding through forms of more direct violence. This "bad word" gets brought up and suddenly there is hesitation or even refusal to make judgments. I think this can be as detrimental as elitism itself. If poets are elitists, there is at least a discussion of the fact, which to me suggests and inclination towards humility and the sense that even if poets believe their ideas are elite, which they should, that these elite ideas are better.

Okay, that's starting to ramble.