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.