dbqp: visualizing poetics

--e- Ee--e-e--

2012-01-27T22:31:00.003-05:00

Fred Eederkens, "A very short story"

His name is all e's for vowels and r's in each half. No letter dares to jut below the imaginary line that holds the letters in line, so there is a straightness to it. The name. His name.

But not the art.

It is about twisting and bending, about creating shapes that will write something in shadow upon a plane, a surface flat and plain.

There is a disjunction, a discontinuity, between what we see, its two parts: between the chaotic twistings and the stylish longhand that rests upon the wall. The photograph must be taken from the side to allow us the conflict of sight.

We might not, ourselves, alone, left to our own feeble devices, be able to imagine this text because we live in a three-dimensional world but we see and think in a two-dimensional one.

In our world, there is no understandable connection between the loopings of metal out of the wall and the gentle loping shadow text on the wall.

We cannot understand how the real thing, the hard and fast metal, could not be the focus of our eyes, how the shadow can take such an uncharacteristically prominent role.

How does the static of this twisting metal become a message? How can shadow become ink? Is the message vague and unclear, or perfectly clear in all ways?

Can we tell why the source of the message can be chaos yet the story clear?

Who are we to ask questions?

We are the watchers. The makers make us watch.

Fred Eerdekens, "Something vague and unclear"

ecr. l'inf.

I Thought Poets Were People of the Word

2012-01-26T23:21:00.000-05:00

"The Sky is Aqua on Thursday Nights"

Actually, it was Susana Gardner's comment that started this: her point that mIEKAL aND and I were "the wordmeisters," meaning, I think, not just the stringers of words together, but the makers, the inventors, of words. But it seemed to me that word coinage is merely the most elemental act of poetry, especially the way mIEKAL and I practice it, and that we do this because we are in the thrall of language, slaves to meaning and the flying buttresses of meaning (the sounds and the shapes) that hold it temporarily in place.

So I spoke and recorded a little extemporaneous aural essay today, one that began with the idea and the sentence, "I thought poets were people of the word," but which moved into more general considerations of language before moving to poetry (which is almost a return to the poet). This essay is one of my more rambling aural essays, though also one of the shortest, but it is also one that can't be reproduced on the page. The sound of my voice, and the sound of my voiceless mouth, are essential to the essay.

Listen, if you will. The photograph above I snatched from the film, Wristcutters: A Love Story, while it was playing on my computer, and now the image is all mine. As I say. Appropriation is appropriate.

ecr. l'inf.

The Small Time with Font Boy

2012-01-25T23:27:00.000-05:00

Distorted Version of the Cover to Geof Huth's a book / of poems / so small / I cannot / taste them (2006)

I'm writing about reading. The reason is twofold: First, I generally write about only two things: writing and reading. Second, today Goodreads, a social media platform for people to document and communicate about the books they have read, sent me a note that I had to rescue two of the books I had written.

"Rescue" seemed a fairly dramatic term to use, especially since all that was happening was that Goodreads was changing the source of its database of book titles from Amazon.com, which apparently listed these two books, to other sources. Without a link to a database of bibliographic information, any book would essentially disappear from Goodreads. My ratings for them (which were no ratings at all, since I shouldn't rate my own books) would remain, as would my reviews (also nonexistent), but they would be attached to a book without an author's name or a title. Even though Goodreads knew my name and that I was the author (and even though they had ISBNs for each book).

I rescued the books by adding a tiny bit of bibliographic information, including a link to a relevant webpage for the book. After finishing with the second book, Goodreads forwarded me to a page declaring

Great news, all books you have authored are safe.
There are 15 books from your bookshelves that need your help:

Now, I could take the time to save two of my books from disappearing from the Goodreads universe, but I hadn't the will to save fifteen other books. Ironically, though probably due to the protocols Goodreads used, the last book I had listed as "read" only a few days ago was at the top of this list: Rae Armantrout's Extremities, one of the books I have recently "reviewed" in this very space.

This reminded me of a couple of small events from my life, one of which was that someone interested in visual poetry friended me the other day through Goodreads, explaining to me afterwards that she did it so that she could see what I read. I explained that only a small fraction of the books I ever read are actually recorded in Goodreads, so the source is mostly holes, so many holes that there seems to be no edge to them.

The books I write are the small time, and even most of the books I read are the small time. This point leads, eventually, to my second thought. To think that Rae Armantrout's book (granted, out of print) could be in need of rescuing meant that I had to wonder what was the hope for the rest of us. Not much.

Back in 1987 or 1988, when I lived in Horseheads, New York (the place where I insisted we live, and only because of its name), I received a note from The Nation explaining that they had a column in their magazine called "The Small Time," focused on such topics as underground literature, and that they might be interested in running a short piece on my micropress dbqp. Most of the publications I published were handmade: each copy of each issue typed or rubberstamped or handwritten or linoleum-block-printed, and all by hand. So I sent off a small package, at my expense, to the magazine, and never heard a word from the place again.

Over the past few days, even before this interesting Goodreads development (or undevelopment), I had remembered that story, so I chewed over it and came to a conclusion: dbqp was too small for the small time. Maybe I could have been small, but by adding "time" to it the concept became too significant to include me. This could have been a sobering thought, if I had ever believed anything else, or wanted something else.

But I like the small time, or the nano time. I am not interested in what people in general are interested in. I know nothing about sports, but I think the Super Bowl (if that is how it's written out) is this weekend. I'm not sure, but I've seen a few signs that suggest that. I've never watched a football game, except ones I've played in at school. When people ask me if I've read certain mystery novels, I say that I'd never read such middlebrow stuff. (Yep, obnoxious, I know. But mystery novels?) No, I have not watched American Idol on TV, and I have no desire to. All of these are of bigger time than most of what I'm interested in.

What I like about the small time is that it is filled with the people I know, even if I rarely see them. I've seen mIEKAL aND only four times, I think, over the course of more than twenty years of knowing him, yet I consider him one of my best friends. My dear friend Karri Kokko is Finnish, and I've seen him in person only twice (though once for two weeks), yet I can count on him for kindness and a good run of English punning anytime I want. I like that the small time is filled with crazy people (even I am sometimes referred to with that adjective) and cranks (one of whom I actually identified as such yesterday on this blog and heard from, crankily, by this morning). I like that the small time allows for absolute freedom of expression and effort, because there is nothing to prove. Something might be proved, but it's not required, and we can decide what it will be.

Of the books I've had published (a strange collection of poetry, as viewed through various distorting lenses), I don't think any has been published in an edition over 100. And I'm fairly certain that at least a couple of the print-on-demand titles of mine that have been published have actually been made into printed copies under 50 times.

I have to conclude that this means our effect on the world is relatively small, but if I look at it from within the small time the term "relative" reverses its dimensions. We may be the small time, but my part of the small time reaches across the world. There are people in my part of the small time that I could fly to meet in dozens of countries, if only I had the money to pay for all that travel. The small time connects at the human level, the personal level.

The small time used to be relegated to the postal system and occasional personal encounters, but now we are tied together by the Internet, and we communicate with each other daily. I sent off an email yesterday to my friend Anne Gorrick with a poem of mine attached to it, and by today she had responded with this helpful message: "About yer poem: okay Font Boy, pick another font because this one is superhard to read!" Which really helped me understand how the poem was working and gave me the opportunity to tell her that her computer didn't have that typeface installed, so she wasn't actually looking at my font.

I laughed pretty well over that message of hers. Writing is a connection with an audience usually unseen, but writers of the same stripe find themselves connected and they form relationships across the boundaries of space. That's what I like about the small time. These are my friends.

ecr. l'inf.

Bus Ride through a Drizzly Winter

2012-01-24T23:19:00.000-05:00

Geof Huth, "tient" (23 January 2012)

A few days ago, while talking to James Belflower, he asked me what I was reading at that particular point in time, and I said, Nothing. I was, at that point, between books, so I said I was waiting to see what I would be reading, that what I choose has to feel right as I prepare to read it, that I never know what it will be until I look at my bookshelves (and I have many of them) and choose something to read.

Last night, I found myself about to take a short bus ride in the dark. It is winter here, but it's been drizzling because the world is too caution to fall completely into the thrall of winter this year. While preparing for this trip, I ran to my bookshelves and scanned them quickly wondering what I would read and how I would know what it was. The answer ended up being a paperback copy of Bill Knott's Selected and Collected Poems. The first reason for this is this was a paperback book that I wouldn't worry about damaging during the bus ride. But other reasons are that an old friend of mine from college, David Daniel, knows Knott and has enjoyed his poetry; that I've always meant to read Knott more carefully, and I have enjoyed a few of his short poems; and that I've been talking, for the past week, about how frequently poets are cranks, and Knott certainly counts. And maybe the idea of a book of both selected and collected poems (in two separate sections) intrigued me.

So I headed out into the night. Once on the bus, I pulled out a pencil and a copy of Knott's selected and collected, and I began to read. There was a 1960sishness to the poems, a few echoes of Ginsberg, echoes of the New York School, but also something entirely different, something a bit wild, in love, destitute, despairing, and even life-affirming. Knott was a romantic, but with his crankiness starting to show. And the picture of him on the back cover (showing a man disheveled, slumped, and looking up at the camera with a bit of gentle despair) sits atop a biography that both indicates Knott is unemployed and looking for work and that mentions he has two manuscripts in his possession and "is seeking a publisher for either or both."

During the bus ride, I was able to read through only the selected poems, not the collected, so I'm responding only to that slender section of poems pulled out of his nearly collected poems up to 1977. In this group, I find a number of poems of only a few lines that are actually fairly effective lyrics, and among his most famous poems. I've run across references to them. He has a fascination with death and cemeteries, though I've no idea why. (Poets' biographies are not my interest, so I'm lucky even to know Robert Creeley walked around with one empty eye socket.) His poems are never sweet but sometimes plaintive. And they have variety. Some are written in a stripped-down lyric voice and others are written in a strangely formed dialect that resembles (neither visually nor aurally) one would be likely to hear. Some poems are filled with strange neologisms and latent words, like "cobblebubbled," "foreverth," and "visionvulsions." And he has some powerful, often powerfully sad but poetically so, lines. I underlined those lines and those strange words (with my pencil) as I read. When I was done, I concluded that the book could have been called Love and Death, if that were not already a comedic film by Woody Allen.

Today, I decided to write a poem using the lines from Knott that I liked the most. I had no idea what this poem would be, but I knew it wouldn't be like the poems I had been writing this year, spare and gentle, if sometimes guided by a stark view of life. I knew I had to write something different from what I was writing, because Nico Vassilakis had complimented my poems twice in the last week, on Sunday saying, "O, very nice. Good magnetics returning to the margin. Reads like a poem reviewing a poem which I always seem to like. And the sound is pleasure. Something is changing in your word poems that I've noticed. Enjoying." Whenever anyone tells you your poetry is good, it is time to change. That is why, as I've said in the past, we must kill Tony Trehy.

After choosing this poem, I decided to use the stolen lines (with changes, if necessary) in the order they had appeared in the selected. When I began to write the poem, I thought the poem would have long lines and be something of a ranting, a rending of clothing and wailing. But I wrote almost four lines that way, knew it wasn't working and created something else, the lines were shorter, but much longer than my lines have most recently been, and the voice of it has something of Knott in it, but not quite much, or not often much. If anything, this poem is most like Bill Knott's rant "To American Poets" (which I kept thinking was the poem Philip Booth recited to our poetry writing class once, but I really can't recall if that is so). This poem is a bit flip, which is something a little too easy for me (I have been accused of glibness more than once, possibly because I am glib), so I'm not sure I've abandoned my tendencies very much. I've simply chosen tendencies I usually exhibit outside the bloody arena of poetry.

So I'm posting this poem here because this makes my experience more one of writing than of publishing, and because this poem serves as the capstone to this my strange review of Bill Knott's poetry. (I don't go in for standard reviews.) To give you an idea which lines I've taken from Knott, I can tell you that most of the first line and the last line of the poem are from Knott, as are lines using these phrases: "your nakedness," "a petition for my death," "no shore to," "the world has no experience at being you," "filler for suicide notes," "both spectator and projector," "Therefore it must still be night," "if you are still alive when you read this," "the world is not divided into your schools of poetry," "the poems you broke away from," and "bread that weeps as you gently break it."

I hear a little echo of Knott in this poem, so it is a "Knotted Poem," but it is also otherwise knotted, as if into itself, into its twisted arguments, into my bones. And it may be the only poem where I have used the word "Geez."

Knotted Poem

I have never been in anyone’sdreams, or left

anything behind there either, andI am

breaking into morning using theshards left

from smashing through the night andinto

your nakedness. Your white skin,

paper, and upon it written

a petition for my death. Youcannot leave it

behind, you cannot remove it,

and when you disrobe I can seeit. There is no shore

to your opening. Why

have I never noticed before this

message, which is a birthmark onyour inner

thigh? How have I never seen you

before? I remember the world hasno experience

at being you, but I thought Ihad an idea

what that being would be. How didI

never see that note on you? notfeel it whenever

between your thighs? Truth is, Iam a poet. So what

I do is write filler for suicidenotes. Like

“I love you.” It is not aparticularly successful

career

for anyone who might want to beanything, so

my goal has been to be nothing,which requires me

to use every word up out of mybody. Poetry

is a great exhalation over anextended period of time. I must

remember not to take a breath in

ever. In this way, through thisact of poetry, I become

both spectator and projector,both the movie and

the audience that believes itsits in the darkness,

yet it is covered with an oily yellowlight and peers

intently, but slightly upward,into that movie sloshing

over it. If you are stillalive when you read this,

then I feel sorry for you, for Iwrote this

only for your dreams. It seemsbest, to me

at least, that you perceivethese words as something

only half-real, and that you likelywill forget

them, forget everything, forgetthe words

between your thighs, the words

of that plea for mercy. Oh, theworld

is not divided into your schoolsof

poetry. Each army clearly knowsits enemy,

but they are fighting against everyone.Sure,

one side might say that thispoem is

a lyric (I think I hear theplucking of a lyre

as I type this), yet the otherwill say that

I am exhibiting a distastefulmien

(well, if they know the word),that I

am, that my voice is, far tooironic to fit

a poem. As if this voice fitsanywhere! As if

I am even here! What even makesthem think

I am here? Is it the fact thatthe word “I”

keeps appearing? Geez, don’tthey know

that is just my penis standingin for me? Synechdoche,

they call it. I used to livethere until I moved

to Metonymy. It’s closer to workand

reminds me of my hat. So don’t

fret about the conflicts. Poetsdon’t

know what they’re workingtowards. They are like

bats swinging their pickaxesblindly in a goldmine

while waiting for the canariesto expire. (We call

that metaphor, and it is particularto the province

of poetry. Reality, I believe, iscalled phor.) I

am thinking about the poems youbroke

away from, and how

they were too sharp for you,like shards

of night, yet they were yourmost special

children, because they were theones you

didn’t favor, the ones who hadonly themselves

to depend on. I know, I soundlike Frank

O’Hara before the dune buggy,but

right before. I am the gutturalscream, the

hands held before the face as if

the flesh of palms

could hold off the metal and themotor. And

I know this poem is a piece ofcrap. They all are,

but we can write only with our ownblood, and I

am coprosanguine. Everybody Icannot see

is sleeping around me, and Icannot hear

their breathing. Therefore itmust still be

night. I chose this time to bestbe able

to worm my way into your dream,and I am

surprised by what I see here:Sunlight. Water

filled with sunlight. Glasses ofwater filled

with sunlight. The bread that weepsas you

gently break it into ears. Thesound of

people hearing. (I cannotexplain it.) Not

any smell, so no smell toopungent or

putrid. White linens, whitelinen pants, white

linen tablecloth. Three stacksof white

paper with a petition on each.Then

the smell of pine, resinous, thescent of lemon,

bright, and the mouth puckers,the tongue

almost speaks but can’t. Singingthat I cannot

see. But nothing happens. Where,

I wonder are the chases? thenearly failed

escapes? the spurning ofadvances? the

succession of failures? I find nothing

messy. So nothing poetic. Atleast

not in the manner of this poem.And

everything beautiful. Again, notlike

these words. In your dream, youturn toward

me and face me, and I see youseeing me,

even though I am not dreaming. Iam

merely entering a dream. Somaybe you

don’t see me and see rightthrough me

to a red wall with some deepgreen moss

growing between the bricks. I amlying

on the wall, so it is really apath to

a doorway, and you are up highin the maples,

maybe holding on with yourhands, your

right leg wrapped tight around abough, or

you are floating in the barebranches

beginning to bud. I cannot see

you well enough to tell. Still,I am

astonished at you the way theworld is not.

ecr. l'inf.

Since

2012-01-24T03:19:00.001-05:00

Geof Huth, "Since" (23 January 2012)

Since there is evening.

Since there is morning too early to rise from.

Since there is language.

Since there is text.

Since text is physical, not ethereal like our tongued language.

Since text can be marred by physical acts and situations.

Since text can be environmental.

Since there is color.

Since text appears to us in the human landscape.

Since text carries meaning, even after we have forgotten how to find that meaning.

Since sleep is impossible.

Since text sometimes releases light during the night.

Since text may surprise us.

Since we assign to and find meaning in text based on its physical form.

Since text is not merely ink, or inked.

Since we experience text in a physical act of apprehension.

Since we accept text into our bodies.

Since we are people of text.

Since street signs and placards are text.

Since text is within us.

Since text is without us.

Since text persists without us but exists only with us.

Since we see the cracks in any textual meaning.

Since there is always a gap, however small at times, between meaning and meant.

Since a light rain in the winter can melt the snow.

Since the light that illuminates best may be the dimmest.

Since glowing is a powerful illumination, filled with warmth without being warmth.

Since the best discovery is the least expected one.

Since general statements cannot be true.

Since you didn't ask me.

Since you don't care.

Since it is the writer's job to make you see.

Since there are too many things waiting to be seen.

Since a text is a thing.

Since text can be of any size.

Since even tiny things can be meaningful.

Since words are a lungful but text is an eyeful.

Since my stomach is churning.

Since I fell asleep on the couch.

Since it is too early to wake but I am awake.

Since I can type in the dark because the text I make is aswim with light.

Since words in a row are the clearest way to make sense.

Since I sense a text in the darkness.

Since imagination is the search for the pre-forgotten.

Since I may not sleep.

Since you may not wake.

Since I am making loud burps that do not constitute a part of language but which are spoken by my voice.

Since all attempts are praiseworthy if made with real effort.

Since all failures are expected.

Since any language is too large to be understood.

Since error is everywhere.

Since a doryphore depends on a precisely defined set of expectations.

Since expectations are dashed.

Since text is fading when it is least ornate.

Since the light rises out of it.

Since the light seeps into it.

Since eyelids do not completely block the light.

Since every eyeblink is the disappearance of the world.

Since I merely walked away from this text afterwards.

Since you will walk away from this text, or already have.

Since text is patient, but history unkind.

Since everything is the unexpected.

Since when.

Since I said so.

Since we need it.

Since you must accept it.

Since you must accept it into your body.

Since always.

ecr. l'inf.

A Certain Friday Night in Albany, New York

2012-01-22T23:27:00.000-05:00

Coming into the middle of the first third of the reading, I am hit with a story, one slowly told and with no perceptible point. Things happen. The end. But things don't even happen. We are told they are. The narrator tells us people believe he is dangerous without demonstrating his danger.

I shift in my seat. I've been here only a few minutes.

The second reader was a musician for many years. Now, a poet, teacher, student. He says he will "read from a number of my favorite poets." He says, "I only brought lady poets." I cringe. Then he says "lady poet" again, in case I missed it the first time. He reads the first poem to us. Declaims it. He stops to tell us: "Poetry works on a spiritual level other writing can't." I don't believe it. I want evidence. He reads the poem he says is his mission statement for the night. It is a dead poem. It arrives dead. He buries it. He reads another poem, the title of which may be a reference to Aldous Huxley or to the Doors, or he doesn't know the reference. The poem includes the line "feeling safe in the rapist's embrace." He reads the poem jauntily. I bow my head slightly and rest it on the tips of my forehead, preparing myself to continue, quietly, in my chair against a wall. He reads Sylvia Plaths' "Tale of a Tub." Also jauntily. He reads everything the same way. Maybe we all do, and I simply haven't noticed.

His reading continues. He says, "I told myself I'd never write a hangover poem," just before reading us his hangover poem. This poem, all of them, are filled with adjectives. I have no aversion to adjectives, but there are so many that there is no poem; adjective-noun, adjective-noun, adjective-adjective-noun, goes the poem. The pattern seems like prosody, but the poem is empty of poetry. He tells us that the next poem needs some explanation, and gives an explanation that the poem also gives, but the one he gives us first is much longer than the poem itself. We need a library's worth of explanation for a line's worth of poem. His next poem with a one-word abstract noun as a title, and says, "I learned today that it will be in the Something Review, a pretty good little magazine, am I right?" I hold myself in place. There is another poem after this, then he ends with "Thanks for listening, guys." I am empty, like one of his poems.

Between the first and the second and the second and the third reader, I hear the intros. These are beautiful, read by James Belflower. Short bios followed by a beautiful reading of a poem that the two organizers have fashioned out of the individual poet's work. And his voice is beautiful, deep but rich, and always in motion, always changing its stance. At this point, his is the best reading by far.

Then Anna Elena Ayre appears. She is tall, with a strong nose, more striking a presence than the men who preceded her. She begins with poems from a pronoun series: "He," "She," and "I." Each line of each poem ends with the pronoun that is its title. This causes as strange sonic discomfort, but good discomfort. We are thrown off. Almost every end of a line has to move to a verb, but instead we are stopped. And every poem has an AAAAAAAAAAA rhyme scheme. I begin to write down lines to remember: "is is is was was," which is fully "says is is is was was were you he." Her language is inventive, disjunctive, urgent. She reads with a voice that trips and rolls over itself as the words do the same: "word a word collapsible i," "press body against body to feel strain i," and "i / can't think to think what that thought is." By the end of this poem, her i's are gasps, orgasmic, coming, done.

I am awake again. Those, I later discover, were from her chapbook "are me."

Next, she reads from her "first book with a spine." She begins with letters written to William Carlos Williams about his "Kora in Hell." The poems are numbered. She reads "six." "bloodoranges interbreedable citrus" and "snowless mouth." (With the book in hand, Faceless Names: Two Books of Letters, I discover she has misspelled this word: "pairingknife.") She reads "nine": "the scare is invisible," "best words are written beasts," "thumbs in your anus," "your third eye is color-blind."

She reads from the second section of the book, "Nameless Mail." They are letters written to a grandmother she never knew: "one can live off air and light on mesa land." At this point the older woman two seats to the left of me starts snoring loudly. After a while, Anna realizes it and looks around. The man just to my right says something like "It is what you think." We all laugh loudly. When the laughter dies down, we hear the snoring again. Anna looks at the woman and says, "It's kinda sweet." And she finishes reading her poems to Evie—"lost in rhetorical abandonment.

It was a good night.

ecr. l'inf.

The Regeneration of Rae Armantrout out of What Rae Armantrout Would Eventually Become

2012-01-21T16:50:00.001-05:00

Rae Armantrout, "Generation," from Extremities (1978)

Gretel is not among us, never having made it out of the woods.

I am entranced by the words of women. Their voices may be so much different from each other, as is their eyesight (vision), yet those are the voices I yearn for, lean into, require. Women seem to have an advantage over men with language, for which reason I (so pathologically verbal that I function well only within the realm of language) spent much of last night talking to James Belflower about the fact that all my favorite living poets are women, that I don't even know which male poets to read. Even though I do read them.

Rae Armantrout has been putting out books of poetry since the year I graduated from high school, and I read that first book of hers (Extremities) a couple of days ago, hearing in it the voice she has today, and finding within its too few pages all these recollections of poems I'd never read. As if her voice 34 years ago was an echo of her voice today.

One small poem, her forte, that stopped me was "Generation," a brief retelling of "Hansel and Gretel," by my reading, and focused on Gretel. The brevity of this is stunning to me. Its power in so few words. And how those words are used: the first line presented as a whole sentence; the severe enjambment after "turns" and "the"; ending with the unexpected but revelatory "undergrowth."

Only a day before this, I had created my own allusion to the same fairytale in a strange long entry in my poetics and written as a response to Anne Gorrick's review of her life with Sylvia Plath:

Everyone is lost in the woods. We ate all the breadbecause we were lost in the woods. No crumbs dropped for the return. We don’twant to go home anyway. We want to make a new home, to find a new place to be,a new way to be. So we are searching.

In comparison, I am verbose and maybe even lacking in imagination. Still, I like these words well enough.

What amazes me most about Armantrout, though, is how little her style has changed. It is as if she were born a fully formed poet and merely continued in the direction required of her. The words are short, careful, arranged like china and silverware at a banquet, and somewhat elusive (when not allusive). She doesn't say as much as she means, and she does this quietly, efficiently, as the craftsperson and the artist that she is.

Originally, this book cost US$2.50, but I paid many times that much for the book, a dear price for a small book, yet a reasonable price for us. Her words make demands of me and they nourish me.

As a woman making demands of those in her care, yet always focused on that care.

_____

Armantrout, Rae. Extremities. The Figures: Kensington, Calif., 1978.

ecr. l'inf.

Hiding the Facts

2012-01-19T23:48:00.002-05:00

Geof Huth, The Makings of "eSSSSSSSSSS" (19 January 2012)

It has occurred to me that, this year, I have been intentionally hiding a number of the works I have made. Usually, I present quite a few of them, showing many of those that I like the most. But this year, I'm keeping them under wraps, showing just glimpses of them, to make the more erotic. Barthes notes, in The Pleasure of the Text, that it is more erotic to see a glimpse of skin through an unbuttoning in a shirt than to see a totally naked person. Hiddenness encourages the desire for me; having everything diminishes that same desire.

Today, I took a little accordion booklet that I've had for years, and I finally made something of it. I started with rubberstamped letters, then I wrote phrases around that text (and all of these phrases, I lifted from poems in Rae Armantrout's first book, Extremities), and finally I watercolored the whole thing.

I am not yet sure that I like the results, but I probably do. The phrases from Armantrout are ones I might have written myself. I pulled them together for unity. And they continue my focus this year, which has been on decidedly non-linear writing. I expect to send this to the next exhibition I'll be in, Handmade/Homemade. I've decided to send less sculptural work this time.

ecr. l'inf.

A Poetics (# 93) (Revised and Monstrously Enlarged)

2012-01-18T22:29:00.000-05:00

Anne Gorrick's Photograph of the First Book She Ever Stole (and from a Library): Sylvia Plath's Ariel

93.Converse

AnneGorrick sent me an interesting little illustrated essay of hers about herrelationship to the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She asked me to review it and sendher comments, so I made my usual copy-editing points, complete with too muchexplanation. But I was taken by the essay, by how poetic it was and how it didnot move linearly, how richer it was for being about her as well as Plath andfor being presented with some poetic honor to the word. All of this caused meto begin to respond to the essay in detail. Later, I selected additional scrapsof text from Anne’s essay and from her emails to me. Sometimes, I revised thesetexts slightly before responding to them in detail. This, then, is a non-linearpoetics, one built on response and argument with Anne’s words, but one indeference to that text that I slashed into tiny pieces so that she would stillbe able to publish her essay as the shimmering whole that it is.

a. [. ]

I'm sorry about the double spacing afterperiods. It's in my hands and I can't get it out now.

Poetryis language in all of its formulations, even the typographic, so I am sensitiveto typographic misfortunes: a typeface that presents more than it means, twoletters awkwardly kerned, two spaces trailing a period (like a tooth gap).Poetry pivots, swings, rocks on the smallest of linguistic events: therepetition of certain sounds, the look of words and lines of words on a page,the breath it takes to say a line, a certain conjoining or splitting of meaningin a single word. As a poet, to be a poet, I care about such things more thanmost people can even perceive the possible caring of. (The awkward phrasing ofmine, a leftover from the Russians.)

WhenI decide to change something, the change is immediate.

Oneday, Joe Singer, a printer who killed himself one day in the early 1990swithout any explanation ever reaching me, convinced me that double spacingafter periods was outmoded. He released a short essay, in his journal The Printer’s Devil, that noted thatdouble spacing was used when typing on typewriters with monospace fonts becauseevery letter (from the slimmest i to the widest W) was exactly the same width,allowing little visual dynamics across the line. Every line was, in essencepart of a grid, each letter filling one pre-ordained but imaginary cell on an xand a y axis. But in our modern world, where proportional fonts are those weuse almost exclusively, there is no need for the extra space. Additionally,those extra spaces cause holes in the text, holes made even more dramatic whenthe text was full justified. I abandoned that extra space that day.

Justas I changed my handwriting.

Oneday in the first half of 1977, during the year I attended the American Schoolof Tangier, I was walking in downtown Tangier and thinking about ElizaEastman’s handwriting. I admired her hand, how clear and definite it was, butalso how she had simplified her letterforms when she wrote them out inlonghand. That day, I decided toemulate her handwriting to a degree, eliminating certain extra swoops in thecursive construction of my letters. Primarily, I eliminated the first swoop offthe line, the one that began the letter. This change was most pronounced withthe f, which would from then on start at up far above the line, plunge down tothe farthest point under the line, swoop back in a loop to the middle of that vertical,and continue off to the right towards the next letter. By the time I had walkedback to my dormitory, without even having written another letter on a page, Ihad changed my handwriting.

Andthat is how my handwriting remains, though I often write letterforms in variousways while wrawing my doodled visual poems onto a page. Because differences inletterforms are differences in meaning. Because even a single lost rising of aletter off a line on a page is a meaningful absence.

b. book-stealing

Thefirst book I ever stole. (The wound in the book.)

The book is stolen by the taking of it.The book is stolen by the reading of it. No idea is self-contained, or containedwithin the mind of its author, or contained within a certain set of words.

Poems, as contraptions of language, arevehicles made to move a thought from one mind to another. As modes oftranslinguation, they are meant to transport the mind without moving itphysically. Forwardness of movement may be achieved through physical stasis,while the mind still moves within the carapace of the skull.

The word is contained nowhere but inthe mind, and the book cannot be stolen. Burn the book, and you can stillremember, still recite, words from it. The firemen can come to your house andburn it down, books and all, poems and all, for a house is just a book ofmemories, a poem of childhood.

Hayden Carruth once told us that hecould translate poems from languages he did not know because every poem wasencoded: poem = code. The trick to translation was not to understand theoriginal language but to understand the code. And a decoded message is neverthe coded message itself. It is a mirror to the language, and a mirror may besplintered and still reflect.

There is a wound in the book from beingstolen, a wound in the book from being broken, a wound from being read. Thereis a would in the book, and the reader made it, and from this would is builtthe finest of houses.

And even those houses can burn to theground.

c.cashmere

Facinganother wall of books. The old black coat was cashmere, way too big but warm.Probably there was something to flee. Something.

That is the form that thinking takes inthe dark, which is inky, and the inkhorned beasts beat each other back andforth in the evening, yet it never straightens out, and everything is askew,crooked, but not dishonest, merely curved, so that what light there is, and itis a small light, might ride over it swiftly and jump from the end of the horninto darkness, to become darkness, to become a part of the word horde. There isno running from the word at night, because the world then is nothing butnightwords, of ink born and bred.

With a little jam, we could stick themsomeplace from which they would not escape, until the jolt of an even biggerthought jolted them loose.

d. hair

I hadcut off most of my hair.

I cut my hair each week, there notbeing much to cut, and I am left with a smooth scalp, slightly rounded at thetop, not too unattractive, something, to me, like a domed strip of parchmentthat words might be written upon, but instead the words come up out of it, ahead half-encircled by the tonsure of this mise-en-têtê, but I see eachfollicle producing a hair as a pen or the pinprick of ink, that beginning ofword, and each week as those few hairs grow on the north slope of myself, Ifeel the words forming, the curvature of the scalp, that convex mirror thatfits up into the concavity of the sky itself over the deep blue earth, overwhich sky the universe itself in chartless space, in the three dimensions ofdarkness, is itself another convex mirror fit into the cavity of nothingness.

e.falsely

Shethought of the pack of Tarot cards that seemed important (as it turned out,falsely).

It is a root, I think, and in that waythe cards mean, by teaching how a search for meaning itself is not necessarilymeaning, by teaching that not all answers are true, and neither are allquestions. There were a pack of them, which ran all night howling not at themoon but at the image of the moon on a certain card, or they accumulated likedarkness on a deck looking out over black water, black air, solid black mud.And every message they scrawled with that ink, with their paws, disappearedinto air, earth, water the same color as it. To see what is important requiresthe identification of that which is not, for they are knit as one, woven in warpand woof, and that is their twisted cry.

f.graffiti

thebrutal fleshcut graffiti marking the days

The body is not palette; it is canvas.We write intentionally upon it of things “both wonderful & strange.” A bodyis a place for making and marking. Upon it are recorded the ravages of life:the whittled finger, the smashed thumb, the pierced ear, the splinter like astick into the fleshy bottom of the foot, the slices across the arm, thecutting and sawing through the chest, the thinnest of cicatrices just underthat girlish eyebrow, more a velleity than a wish of a mark.

These are our poems, the poetry of thebody, some made by ourselves, some made by the world, unbidden, upon us, somedecorative, some reminders, all cautionary tales. We learn by failing (the sliptknife) more than succeeding (the clean pierce).

g.breathe

barelydaring to breathe, I had to buy tissues

It seems a strange coincidence that Iran out of tissues today, my nasal passages so much clearer than they usuallyare because they have been blown clean, and it is as if I can smell the world,but I seem only able to smell the insides of my nostrils with every intake ofbreath.

Coincidences are meaningless, justsimilar actions that occur at similar times, but it is that connection betweenthe two actions that makes them memorable, or notable, to us, so we give themmeaning, which is the purpose of art. We give meaning to the world. We find themeaning that is hidden before us all. We provide that meaning to people, butoften it is obscured. We hide the meaning under shapes of colors, we submergethe meaning into film, we encode the meaning into poems.

We don’t simply want to show themeaning, because nothing meaningful is best appreciated after an explanation.The mind must find the pattern. The poet merely allows the pattern to be found,and found not too easily enough.

h.alarums

Helooked alarmed for a moment because he didn’t recognize me.

We take excursions into theunrecognitions of life. It is a battle we fight against but must also fightfor. If everything is too clear, if we understand it too well, we have no basisfrom which to make a poem about it. A poem isn’t an understanding (notclarity); it is a misunderstanding (obstruction or eclipse). A poem is notsomething shown; it is something hidden so that someone else can find it.Otherwise, why do I enjoy reading those poems that are unfathomable to me?

Maybe because they are music, as yourpoems are. Or maybe because they are codes, and it is the process of breakingthat code, that of decryption (almost descryption), that is enjoyable. Puzzlesof words designed to create puzzles of thought.

It was good that he didn’t recognizeyou anymore. That gave him the opportunity to learn who you were.

If he’d known that all the time, theexperience would not have been worth it to him. You were the poem in that event. He, the unwitting reader.

i. thwarth

athwarted Plath scholar, dashed at every turn

Art requires conflict, somethingagainst something else, maybe only resting against it, leaning, maybe. Ian Hamilton Finlay made this point,defining the pwoermd (a poem of only a single word) impossible as an artbecause there could be no tension with it against something else. He didn’tseem to realize that a pwoermd could have internal tension to give it meaning,or tension against the expected forms of the language itself, even tensionagainst the page.

Finlay was, still, a great proponent ofthe one-word poem, but only for those that had titles, thus the text of the poem(a single word) could be in tensional opposition to the title (of any number ofwords). His last issue of his magazine Poor.Old. Tired. Horse. (number 25,undated) included such one-word poems by a number of poets. One of these wasAram Saroyan, a poet famed for his pwoermds. One of his entries in that issuewas

lovely

Because Finlay saw the need for titles,the title of Aram’s pwoermd was always a repetition of the pwoermd itself.Maybe Finlay perceived some opposition of identicals in that. Or maybe heignored his own belief in this one instance.

So as we are thwarted by something,thus we have the opportunity to create against that conflict. I see yourprofessor here as one who may have actually produced great scholarship, becauseof this conflict, even if the conflict also kept her from publishing any of it.

Thus: a thwarth of action across theface of the conflict.

j.smith

We madea class trip to Smith College to look at the drafts of the poems we had pickedin the Plath papers and see how they had been constructed.

Archives, it occurred to me today, area purified form of knowledge-making, because they are chosen for quiteintentionally saving bodies of information, and this saving is not carried outby those who had originally created them. So Plath might scribble words onpaper, and Smith College might accession them into their holdings, but Plathcould not know if Smith ever would. Archives take in only what they want, onlywhat they believe in, and what they believe in is records that can be used tocreate new knowledge.

Within the records themselves (draftsof poems, let’s say, or notebooks, or diaries) there is some knowledge, that ofPlath herself, and the archives, the Smith Archives specifically, needed tobelieve in the value of that knowledge. But the value of that knowledge is inhow it can be used by others to create other knowledge, to understand her life,to understand her art (and are the two separate? or even separable?), tounderstand her times, the world of poetry, maybe even to know the officialverse culture of her era.

We make knowledge out of otherknowledge in the same way that we build poems out of other poems, just as artcomes out of other art, as life comes out of other life.

A small maple seedling growing from thespot where we buried our prairie dog so many years ago. I imagine its delicate whitebranching root as the heart of our dead Couscous, and the living heart insidethe empty chest of that small dead animal, who once was nothing but warmth andthe fiercest desire to dig, but who is now kept alive only in the form of thesmallest tree, which I will yank from the ground before it is too big.

Dig hard enough and long, and you willfind it.

k.great

Plath puta small cloth under her head to cushion her cheek against the oven grate.

Such a delicate thought. If we believein death, we want it to have a sweetness to it, even if it is a sucking in,through the tiny slits of her nose, that sweet natural gas as if it were thealmost-too-strong-for-us scent of a fragrant and gaudy tropical flower.

Or: We believe sometimes, as poets ofthe unrestrained word, the word unrestrained by emotion, that the entry ofemotion is the harbinger of illth, that only the compassion of objectivity, therestructuring of the word according to proscribed (and also prescribed)patterns allows for a poetry with legs, one that will last, one that will walkon its own.

Yet we are grounded by the human insideus, which is a little blood-red muscle sometimes larded with fat, but whichbeats out the numbers of our lives, so much so that the music of our lives goesaccording to the pattern of that ostinato, neverending, ever-rending, untildeath, one that feels like a bastinado of our every footfall.

We are blood and breast and bone. Thesweet edible meat of our skulls makes all of that work, but we measure bymeasures, and we count them by beatings.

l.blizzards

almostdone with sleeping out my own personal blizzards

The winter has just begun, and the snowfalls, lightly, a dusting, confectioner’s sugar, but we know the cold of it,the moisture trapped in the false form of whiteness. The blizzard is blindness and comes sometimes as words.Enough of them, black little inklings, and the world turns white before oureyes. Too white to see.

I don’t know what blizzards stop. Idon’t know which blizzards stop. They return, or their replacements do, when we don’t expect them, thepast merely preparation for the future, merely a different presentation of thefuture.

Maybe it is that blizzards are a sourceof poetry. That a blizzard of the personal life leads to a blizzard of right words,that the hardness of the cold, the wind blowing so hard, the snow pelting theface in surgings leads to a form of poetry, that the self’s response to suchstimuli can be poetry. And, as you say, whatever helps the poetry is good. Ifpoetry is your goal, of course.

If poetry is anyone’s goal.

m.dance

dancedance dance dance dance to the radio (“Transmission” by Joy Division)

I do have this song somewhere and canlisten to it when I want. It is a good song, but it’s not the one I considerthe only good Joy Division song. The name “Joy Division” being a self-madeirony, the artists themselves being the self, and the art, the songs beingmerely the vague representations of self. (TheRepresentation of Self in Everyday Art. Read it.)

The song allows for dancing but doesnot demand it. And it demonstrates Joy Division’s debt to the VelvetUnderground. We are haunted by influences, infected by them, infested, investedin them. When we write a line, it is a line of someone else’s, a line stone, aline misheard into something else, a line reworked into something else, aseries of lines and a personal experience and someone we loved into something else.We are repetitions of the original, though, building complexity as we go.

Every work of art is a reference toevery other work of art that came before it, and the trick is to find theconnections. Only find the connections.

Everything begets everything else.

The music is better than the singing.It is all beats, music and lyrics, and Ian Curtis has a voice that refuses tolisten. I am curt, is I ? (Now I’mlistening to all my Joy Division music, starting with “Love Will Tear UsApart.” Believe it.)

How could we ever live in Warsaw? Couldwe ever appreciate cheese enough to live in Wisconsin?

I will have to leave you hanging.

n.ocean

theearly promise, the early educational rigor, the way none of it mattered to theocean

Say, “ocean,” and I think so often ofthe Velvet Underground song, which is all atmosphere and no land, maybe becauseit is the sea, though foggy, so invisibly so.

So Melvillian, this idea, to beswallowed, as a pebble, by the ocean, recognized less than the death of an antto the mind of god. (There is the pearl of a thought in there somewhere.) Wewrite against a giant darkness of water that surges towards us. We are soslight, thin of bone and flesh, that we disappear into the first lapping ofwave, yet we go on because the choice is always simple: Yes or no. Do or don’t.

As you might have wanted, at some pointto have an academic career, I had never, for a second, thought of being anacademic. I was vassal to the word alone. Going off to college for English,people asked me if I were going to teach. I always said, No, because that Nowas always the true answer. My goal was to write, and I went to college becausethat was the next step in the life I led, because we build up what we can do bywhat we know, because the ocean is big, so much bigger than us, but if we canknow it, know it completely, or at least to the greatest extent that we can,then we can ride the ocean, rather than allow it to swallow us.

o.radio

I’dlisten to the radio and wonder, “Is this all there is?” Plath was a hint atwhat might lie at the far end of my poetic transistor dial. Plath was the hintthough.

“Rock and Roll,” The VelvetUnderground. We are looking for something (meaning, connection), and theworking out of art is the working out of these pathways, which we then follow,but which we then hope others will follow. Everyone is lost in the woods. Weate all the bread because we were lost in the woods. No crumbs dropped for thereturn. We don’t want to go home anyway. We want to make a new home, to find anew place to be, a new way to be. So we are searching.

Maybe some pathways move to Plath,maybe she is an answer. But when I read your words, I see the answer. It’s not“Plath was the hint though.”

It’s “Plath was the hint through.”

We have to get through something, ormany things, we must get past them. And we have to find that way. And we haveto make that way for others.

As poets, as artists, we have to makethat way.

Maybe I am infected by that same virusfrom the VU: Velvet Underground (my favorite band), Vanderbilt University (myalma mater), Volume Unit (the VU meter I saw as I played Lou Reed’s “StreetHassle” Vanderbilt’s student radio station, WRVU), déjà vu (all that I’vealready seen). Lou Reed and I even shared a teacher (Philip Booth) in differentdecades at Syracuse University. In the Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” Lousings of “rules of verse,” which I had heard for years as “Rooseverse.” Why the focus on theRoosevelts? I wondered.

Maybe that Rooseverse was just the signof the mutation.

Maybe that’s what allowed me to be.

p.voice

thesearch for a poetic voice died, allowing my work to become much bigger, sinceit’s no longer hinged on the self

I know that this is essentially apost-lyric, post-avant belief, but I don’t see the self as being particularlylimiting or freeing, even though I see it as unavoidable. I look at ChristianBök’s work, and I see Christian presented to me full bore. Mentioning not aword of himself, he is still fully presented in the poem. The self is thegenesis of all poetry and the conduit through which it comes to us.

I’m not arguing with you here. I’m justriffing off it, giving my own point of view. If I believed your statement here,I would have to conclude that your work is, logically, bigger (a vaguedesignation, I’ll grant you) than Lynn Behrendt’s, but I actually think bignessis more the domain of Lynn’s work than yours. That messy presentation of theself produces her broad-brush expressionistic shipwrecks smashed against therocky shore of self, and these are larger events, in that emotional and sonicway, than yours. Not morebeautiful, just beauty of a different, more visceral type.

Your size is atmospheric, ErikSatie-like, built upon the altar of repetition (the ground rock of minimalistmusic) and built upon the concept of music, so built upon the concept of time.I’d say Lynn’s are more sculptural, monumental, physical, the solid form ofmatter. Her poems are of the instant, even when they are long. They are stringsof instants. We are hit with the size of her poems, but we walk through thesize of her. What hits us feels bigger. A fist as opposed to a mist.

These are the metaphorical forms ofyour voices, as I see them, hear them, feel them. Voices come in differentmanifestations, some even mute. A visual poet, and I am a visual poet when myeyes open each morning, cannot forget the power of muteness.

q.suttee

poetryshould be a cornering of the false self by the true self until an essential voicehappens…well, any poet would kill themselves too if they believed that, or wassurrounded by people who believed that. It’s a form of suttee, a ritual killing.

I read this as an overstatement, so Itake this as a rhetorical stance. But I think that using the word “suttee” suggeststwo things: that society and Plath’s husband (as it is with suttees) is thecause of Plath’s death, that she is exonerated from her own act ofself-immolation.

Everything, meaning existence ingeneral, pushes people to kill themselves, but in the end it is the act oftaking power over one’s life, even if in the cause of ending it. It is theultimate act of self-control and it comes only after mere existence seems worthless.I don’t look at suicide as most people do, though. I don’t see it as a tragedy.I see it as a right, one that people take when they want nothing else, whenthey actually want nothing. It is cowardly in that it removes one’s ability todeal with the pain of the world, but it is brave in that it is irrevocable,final. Your statement here reads to me as an exoneration of Plath. There’snothing to exonerate. It was her personal choice. The people she hurt were herchildren most of all. If she “could live with” that, then that was simply herchoice.

We create, we destroy, we must decidewhich action to end with.

r.rabbit-hole

Theentirety of her final work acted as a spoken spell for the final trap. Therewas no other way out. I’m so very grateful and glad to write in a time whenmythomaning isn’t the only way into the poem. The self becomes a deadly, boringmatrix from which to begin. Deadly when it’s the only one.

This idea that a focus on the self ledto Plath's death seems an argument just to prove a point, especially given thatit ties into the post-avant rejection of the self as an opening to possibility.I don't see any way to argue this point or to prove it. The self always is thereason for the suicide, because she is the self. The self doesn't disappear inpoems not absorbed by the self.

I still see the self suffusing your ownwork. You are the eye and voice, and it is you, no-one else. I hear you in your poems, I hear yourvoice, I hear your words and how they sound like no-one else’s. And some ofyour poems are simply representations of your experiences, though told in yourfuguelike way. (And I realize theself is lost in the fugue. Contradiction is the nectar of argument.)

The self can be rejected, but notescaped. And I don't think rejection of the self is antidote to suicide. Afocus on the self might actually be a way to avoid suicide.

I must recognize the self as important,just because we are created by unique circumstances, meaning that each self hasthe possibility of making unique things. Whether the self is a focus or notdoes not matter. All that matters is that the self is—so that the creation isindeed possible. Possibility matters because the nurturing of possibility iswhat makes art.

s.Quietest

probablytoo smart and vibrant to languish as a Quietist poet

I doubt the people reading this will necessarilyunderstand this term. It does define things well enough, even though I thinkRon Silliman’s use of it often requires an over-simplification of reality. Forinstance, I think WCW was very Quietist at times. That’s the secret of hissuccess. But WCW cannot be Quietist because he railed against that strand ofpoetry in his attacks on TSE.

Whereas, I say, what we say and what wedo are never the same thing.

Why, I wonder, too, is the Quietist thequietest one? Why would the poet focused on personal experience necessarily bequiet. Wasn’t Plath louder than most, and wasn’t she also merely leaning out ofthe circle of Quietism? Isn’t she the definition of the lyric poet? agreat-granddaughter of Sappho? Wasn’t her loudness what made her work work? Wasn’ther self-making in her poems precisely her art?

My problem with “Quietism” is that theterm requires binary thinking. It makes the world of poetry black and white. Inthe world of microfilm, bitonal representation of documents is common; mostmicrofilm captures only black and white, no greys. Continuous tone microfilmthat captures the range of greys between the blacks and the whites is rare. Itcosts more. So documents are captured as black words on white paper, even whenthe paper is yellowed with age and the ink is brown.

Even if we cannot capture the fullcolor of the world in our representations of it, shouldn’t we at least capturethe greys?

t. L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E

[stealing, via the title here, theone-word poetics of Dan Waber]

Plathmight have embraced L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E once she tired of the self as beginning.

Wishful thinking. I don’t thinkanything like this ever would have happened. Otherwise, it would have happenedto Adrienne Rich. Most people set a course early and follow it through a seriesof changes, but they rarely veer onto other paths.

Should, maybe, Plath’s daughter, FriedaHughes, then, have taken this, or some other, more adventurous path? Wouldn’tshe have been the one to grow?

But who grows much after becoming a completedadult? In childhood, we are caterpillars. In pubescence, we are chrysalises,asleep in ourselves but becoming. In adulthood, we are finally ourselves,butterflies of sorts, moths some of us, some small and flittery, some withgiant dust-green leaves that allow us to glide, to float, but we don’t changeinto other forms afterwards, not into butterflies if we’re moths. The world candamage us, we may be blown into a different field, or a small grey lot in acity, but we are essentially the same. Even when we do change, we almost alwaysstay within the boundaries of acceptable change.

Rae Armantrout changes almost not atall over a long career, forty-five years or so, probably more like fifty. Apoem from her first book would not look out of place in her last. And she is aLanguage poet, one for whom we might think there are no traps of poetictendency. Yet, even without significant growth, she is a great poet. LarryEigner continued with the same poetics of personal observation guided by alineated poetry centrally concerned with the mise-en-page, yet his change isminor over the course of decades of writing. His lines do become shorter, his language more cropped, thediagonal leaning of his text distinctly more pronounced. But he did not escapehis own tendencies. Few of us ever do.

There’s no hope of knowing the answerto your mulling, though, without the continued living of Plath. Only theexistence of self makes the possible real. Or makes real the possible.

I’m not sure there is a differencethere, but I can feel one.

u.possibilities

Thesign that makes up the boy / his possibilities in terrible detail

We make possibilities out of signs.That is how we know we are poets. My entire poetics, of which these few wordsto you are but a fragment of, I can reduce to that single concept: possibility.

Deciding that one brand of poetry issuperior to another has no value in my thinking. Value accrues at the level ofthe poem. Still, I would agree that some types of poetry produce fewer goodpoems, but why would that require us to avoid all exemplars that poetry?Shouldn’t discrimination force us to do the hard work of finding those poemsworth finding in the broader spectrum of poetry?

Although my reading of poetry isomnivorous, even I tend to read poems in a particular realm, one where I ammore likely to find poems I enjoy, but to embrace possibility I have to embraceall poetries.

In my own work, you’ll understand this.I am a visual poet. Most people think of me as such, as opposed to anythingelse. (Binary thinking always requires the making of a single choice.) But my poetryconsists of one-word poems, poems written in unintelligible scripts, poemspainted onto canvas or assembled within boxes, poems spoken or sung and audio-or video-recorded during the moments of their creation, poems created withinnature and left to disappear back into it, and even syntactic text separatedinto lines. Each of my poetry performances attempts to use the full extent ofmy body to examine the limitations of poetry. I believe in the body as thepoem, the poet as the poem.

I believe in poems that you can tasteand smell and feel. I believe in rhyme and punning. I believe in meter andhumming, in the beat of the line of the heart at the center of the poem. Ibelieve in the poem of an instant, of the eyeblink. I believe in the poem thatis books in length. I believe in the poem with no opening to see it. I believein the poem that folds open to greet you. I believe in life as the poem, theself as the poem. I believe in the eradication of self, the focus on the word,the power of the concept or the shape or the sound over the word as amesmerizing whole. I believe in the mesmerizing whole. I believe in the hole,in the gap, in praecisio, in the poem unsaid. I believe in precision. I believein disorder. I believe in the beautiful. I believe in the ugly. I believe inmusic, in architecture, in opera, in the Gesamtkunstwerk, in the smallest thingwith the biggest effect. I believe in the game, the joke, the jest. I believe,in all seriousness, in seriousness. I believe in the word, in the language, incommunication. I believe in acceptance. I believe in refusal. I believe inaccentual-syllabic rhymed verse. I believe in the poem without borders, thepoem without words, the poem without letters, the poem of images alone. Ibelieve in the forged poem and the authentic poem. I believe in the forged poemand the found poem. I believe in the improvised poem, the aleatoric poem. Ibelieve in the made poem. I believe in the found and aleatoric poem. I believein the poem as a drawing, as a photograph, as the description of a poem nevermade. I believe in the poem carved into the flesh.

I believe in poetry. I believe inpossibility.

v. joy

what Ilistened to: Joy Division

Sorry about expending your time with whatmust seem like argument. I’m not a partisan myself (though I’m a member of aspecific brigade), so I don’t come to poetry from one pole of binary thought. Idon’t believe in experimentalism. Or the avant-garde. Or the hope fororiginality, or even unoriginality, both of which are impossible. My focus ison possibilities. My focus is plural, not singular, so it leads me to differentconclusions, or the rejection of conclusions in somecases.

Somethinkers require that their thinking be replicated, that their thoughts bebelieved, because they know the real truth, the false truth having beenuncovered by them. I have no need to be believed, or even a need, really, toargue. I place my thought in front of another’s thought for the purposes ofcomparison and contrast. I desire that my thought is known, but the mirroringof my belief in another is not important to me. If my belief creates adisjunctive thought in another, I have helped carry forth the process ofthinking, and that is the best I can hope to want.

Itake joy in these divisions of ours.

w. unlearning

I had to unlearn most of what I learned there.

Unlearningis most of learning. Be happy forthe opportunity to unlearn, which was made possible only by the originallearning.

Learningis just a way of talking about the representation of experience within aperson’s memory. And experience is the important thing. We can make only out ofour experiences. It’s not that our experiences have to be directly representedin our poems, but the broader our experiences, the greater our possibilities,so we must learn everything we can, everything wrong, everything right, everythingunknowable, everything accepted as fact but impossible to be true, andeverything we think we have forgotten but which we carry within our body as anunheard pulse.

Unlearningis a sifting. We sift through what we have experienced, and we dispense with it:the insignificant others, the signs of distress, the truths we cannot accept,the falsehoods we cannot abandon, the children we have, the children we didn’t,the children we lost, the pain, the pleasure, the abandon. Whatever it is wedon’t want. And we simply don’t believe in it anymore.

But,you know, we never abandon anything. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, the ending of it:

Because we don't know whenwe will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everythinghappens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. Howmany more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, someafternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive ofyour life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yetit all seems limitless.

Whatwe think we don’t ever think about is what we never forget. What we haveforgotten is all we will ever know.

x. intestate

Plath died undivorced and intestate, so theHugheses control her estate.

Shewas born intestate.

Ihate this kind of control over information, which has been the same for Salinger,and to some degree from Paul Zukofskyvis-a-vis his father. As anarchivist, I desperately want records be used and for something else to be madeout of them. I want people to gain insight by the records we preserve.

WhenI donated my papers to a university library (almost ninety boxes of it now, notcounting eighty-five boxes of books about words), I put no restrictions on anyof it. My private letters to people, the evidence of my successes and myfailures, the geneses of my poems, their exoduses, their final (conceptual)immolations, my work, my life, my art, evidence of my shallow footprints, noteven as deep as a shadow, upon the face of the earth are available for anyoneto see and use, to make knowledge of, and not at all necessarily about me. Weare not separable individuals; we are individual parts of different wholes. Soit is that my papers give evidence of what an archivist was, what a poet was,what a 1980s zinester was, what the literary underground was, what thenocturnal artist was, what it is, maybe what it might be, what a mailartist is,what a family was, what it wasn’t, even what I was, what I might have been,what I always had failed to be.

Somany of the donated papers of individuals (imagine the papers of politiciansfor a moment) and of organizations are no longer corporeal wholes. They havebeen gutted. Their skeletons are left, and that exterior shroud we call theskin, but the heart has been removed, and the spleen. My papers are notcleansed or sanitized. Everything is there. It is my memory, my own memory ofmyself, a memory becoming hazier now in my second half-century of life, and Idon’t want it lost. I say that I cannot regret my life, not my shortcomings,not my failures, not my disasters (you must try, sometime, losing control of acar approaching 100 miles an hour and turning and turning and turning, inmotion so slow you can count each hair on the back of your hands, until yourcar slams backwards into a telephone pole, and you are still alive and totallyunhurt until the police officer snaps open that membrane of skin clinging to yourskull with a billy club).

Ibelieve in openness. The truth of the matter. The inability to sidestep a badlife. The need to accept what cannot be escaped.

Similarly,I believe in fair use, the practice of taking something and reasonably makingsomething else with it. I believe in copyright, but with restrictions, andnever permanent. Copyright, as it is now practiced (as an act of aggression) inour culture may be the death of art, and the weakling we call poetry might bethe first to go. Those who try to control the future by controlling theevidence of the past eventually lose, but rarely soon enough.

y. I(art)

I… One reason you are my friend isbecause you understand that art is supposed to make more art.

Quoting:“Could you turn it [that camera] off? This is not art. This is life!” (CharleneSwansea to Ross McElwee in his film Sherman’sMarch [1966], repeated in his film TimeIndefinite [1993])

Artcomes out of art. I art art. To be that art, there can be a lifelessness. Focusis both nourisher and depriver of nourishment. But could artlessness be better?Is balance better or the abrogation of responsibility? Or are we—I shudder tothink—beset with too many responsibilities (personal, familial, societal,human, profession, artistic) but with no way of meeting each? Is time soindefinite to us that we live fully whatever life is closest to us because wedo not know when it all will end? Is our only thought, the only mover of anaction, the realization that we cannot recall our beginning but that we knowour end without ever seeing it? Are we ready for the surprise of thatrealization?

Canan art be made well without the obsession to make it too much, too often, toocompletely with the body and the mind? Does that create a friendship of artthat occludes a friendship of the beating, or beaten, blood?

Inthese terms, I think of Robert Creeley, who, one-eyed most of his life, sawwithout any depth but guessed at it from the size of things, who could not seethe dimensions of things, their particular roundnesses, and how light,therefore, wrapped around them, who wrote a crabbed line, in fits and stops,and clawed from that language an originality that befalls the smiths of theleast word, a focus borne forth from an inability to focus elsewhere. I thinkof the human evidence in these poems of his, amulets, maybe, possibly histalismans against his leftward focus, maybe touchstones to prove his connectionto three families. All of this in a string, as every life is, a pulled threadtaut enough through the cloth so that it holds two pieces together. But whatholds in place that thread? What threat did he encounter from the living oflife that the living of art protected him from?

CanI be a friend without being also a poem?

z. ☞☞☞☞☞☞

really gets me thinking about this stuff—the relationship ofour work to our selves, how the self might emerge in the work, is that animportant goal/endpoint or a moment?

Weare only here for thinking and for making people think and for allowing them todo the same with the little thoughtthings we create.

Ilive by building something atop something else. My poetry is a poetry ofaccretion, but all poetry is. It is merely the fact that I have been able tolive on the beach in the Caribbean, close enough to snorkel out into thosebands of blue ending in ultramarine, and to swim among the corals and to watchthem build their cities atop one another—it is only that that pushes me harderin this direction. I know no other way, and unlike coral I am mobile.

SoI build these words, a poetics, upon relationships, comparisons, extensions. Iam divesting myself of words, of memories, of thoughts. Put enough words down,and I might find I have come to the end of talking, of writing. Or not. ElieWiesel once wrote, “I write to understand as much as to be understood.” JohnSteinbeck once said that he wrote in order to know what he thought. Maybe I writeto understand what I think. Or to confirm it.

Iam sapiens, thinking, made for it. Poetry is made for the thinking, for thetinkerer, for the engineer. We set free these contraptions of words to travelwhere they might and mean as they can. Comprehensibility is not ensured. Success is unlikely. Yet the travelentrances.

We still have the thinking, we still have the thinking ofit, the thinking through. The thread, the line of thought, the impulse in thepulse of a thought. The reason Irarely publish anything is that publishing is an act unrelated to thinking. Itis not the thing I want. I want the writing, the writhing body at the desk, thewrinkling of the brow in contemplation’s temple. All poetry is a philosophy,sometimes ecstatic, sometimes subdued, sometimes considered, sometimesslapdash.

These words are a poetics, a poetry, a philosophy, a person.

Me. I am still here, self, selfless, and selfishing. Mywords are indistinguishable from me and will persist, at least for a whileafter me. Yet persistence doesn’t matter, not mine in trying, not my words instaying, in remaining present, even in the future. What matters is theexperience of the thought, the running-through of an idea. The richness of that intellectualexperience, that purely human living in the realm of the abstract, the concept,the idea.

In that way, we go forward.

Followthe fist: forward.

A Poetics (# 93)

2012-01-17T23:59:00.000-05:00

Anne Gorrick's Photograph of the First Book She Ever Stole (and from a Library): Sylvia Plath's Ariel

93.Converse

AnneGorrick sent me an interesting little illustrated essay of hers about herrelationship to the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She asked me to review it and sendher comments, so I made my usual copy-editing points, complete with too muchexplanation. But I was taken by the essay, by how poetic it ways and how it didnot move linearly, how it seemed richer for being about her as well as Plathand for being presented with some poetic honor to the word. All of this causedme to begin to respond to the essay in detail. Later, I removed even more bitsof text from Anne’s essay, sometimes, slightly revising them, and then Iresponding in detail to those. This, then, is a non-linear poetics, one builton response and argument with Anne’s words, but one in deference to that textthat I slashed into pieces here, so that she would still be able to publish heressay as the shimmering whole that it is.

a. [. ]

I'm sorry about the double spacing afterperiods. It's in my hands and I can't get it out now.

Poetryis language in all of its formulations, even the typographic, so I am sensitiveto typographic misfortunes: a typeface that presents more than it means, twoletters awkwardly kerned, two spaces trailing a period (like a gap in a tooth).Poetry pivots, swings, rocks on the smallest of linguistic events: therepetition of certain sounds, the look of words and lines of words on a page,the breath it takes to say a line, a certain conjoining or splitting of meaningin a single word. As a poet, to be a poet, I care about such things more thanmost people can even perceive the possible caring of. (The awkward phrasing, aleftover from the Russians.)

WhenI decide to change something, the change is immediate.

Oneday, Joe Singer, a printer who killed himself one day in the early 1990swithout any explanation ever reaching me, convinced me that double spacingafter periods was outmoded. He released a short essay, in his journal The Printer’s Devil, that noted thatdouble spacing was used when typing on typewriters with monospace fonts becauseevery letter (from the i to the W) was exactly the same width, allowing littlevisual dynamics across the line. Every line was, in essence part of a grid,each letter filling one box on an x and a y axis. But in our modern world,where proportional fonts are those we use almost exclusively, there’s no needfor the extra space. Additionally, those extra space cause holes in the text,holes made even more dramatic when the text was full justified. I gave up onthat extra space that day.

Justas I changed my handwriting. One day in the first half of 1977, during the yearI attended the American School of Tangier, I was walking in downtown Tangierand thinking about Eliza Eastman’s handwriting. I admired her hand, how clearand definite it was, but also how she had simplified her letterforms when shewrote them out in longhand. Thatday, I decided to emulate her handwriting to a degree, eliminating certainextra swoops in their construction. Primarily, I eliminated the first swoop offthe line, the one that began the letter. This change was most pronounced withthe f, which would from then on start at up far above the line, plunge down tothe farthest point under the line, swoop back in a loop to the middle of thatline, and continue to the next letter. By the time I had walked back to mydormitory, without even having written another letter on a page, I had changedmy handwriting.

b. book-stealing

Thefirst book I ever stole. The wound in the book.

The book is stolen by the taking of it.The book is stolen by the reading of it. No idea is self-contained, orcontained within the mind of its author, or contained within a certain set ofwords.

Poems, as contraptions of language, arevehicles made to move a thought from one mind to another. As modes oftranslinguation, they are meant to transport the mind without moving itphysically. Forwardness of movement may be achieved through physical stasis,though I mind moves within the carapace of the skull.

The word is contained nowhere but inthe mind, and the book cannot be stolen. Burn the book, and you can stillremember, still recite words from it. The firemen can come to your house andburn it down, books and all, poems and all, for a house is just a book ofmemories, a poem of childhood.

There is a wound in the book from beingstole, a wound in the book from being broken, a wound from being read. There isa would in the book, and the reader made it, and from this would is built thefinest of houses.

c.cashmere

Facinganother wall of books. The old black coat was cashmere, way too big but warm.Probably there was something to flee. Something.

Black is ink is the bones of the book.The bones of the book give it its structure, allow it to hold itself together,as a piece, like the ribbing of a chest, and breathing, also, comes easier withthis structure in place. But blackis warm from size, like breathing, great, and enwrapping. Around the body,around the thinking body of the person who imagined the coat that is black andold, like cashmere, or a boat, there is a thought in little ink words, littlewords with horns so that they might go running across the page and crashingagainst each other in battle. That is the form that thinking takes in the dark,which is inky, and the inkhorned beast beat each other back and forth in theevening, yet it never straightens out, and everything is askew, crooked, butnot dishonest, merely curved, so that what light there is, and it is a smalllight, might ride over it swiftly and jump from the end of the horn intodarkness, to become darkness, to become a part of the word horde. There is norunning from the word at night, because the world then is nothing butnightwords of ink born and bred.

With a little jam, we could stick themsomeplace from which they would not escape, until the jolt of an even biggerthought jolted them loose.

d. hair

I hadcut off most of my hair.

I cut my hair each week, there notbeing much to cut, and I am left with a smooth scalp, slightly rounded at thetop, not too unattractive, something, to me, like a domed strip of parchmentthat words might be written upon, but instead the words come up out of it, ahead half-encircled by the tonsure of this mise-en-têtê, but I see eachfollicle producing a hair as a pen or the pinprick of ink, that beginning ofword, and each week as those few heads grow on the north slope of myself, Ifeel the words forming, the curvature of the scalp that convex mirror that fitsup into the concavity of the sky itself over the deep blue earth, over which skythe universe itself in chartless space, in the three dimensions of darkness, isitself another convex mirror fit into the cavity of nothingness.

e.falsely

Shethought of the pack of Tarot cards that seemed important (as it turned out,falsely).

f.graffiti

thebrutal fleshcut graffiti marking the days

The body is not a palette; it is acanvas. We write intentionally upon it of things “both wonderful &strange.” A body is a place for making and marking. Upon it are recorded theravages of life: the whittled finger, the smashed thumb, the pierced ear, thesplinter like a stick into the fleshy bottom of the foot, the slices across thearm, the cutting and sawing through the chest, the thinnest of cicatrices justunder that girlish eyebrow, more a velleity than a wish of a mark.

These are our poems, the poetry of thebody, some made by ourselves, some made by the world, unbidden, upon us, somedecorative, some reminders, all cautionary tales. We learn by failing (theslipt knife) more than succeeded (the clean pierce).

g.breathe

barelydaring to breathe, I had to buy tissues

Coincidences are meaningless, justsimilar actions that occur at similar times, but is that connection between thetwo actions that makes them memorable, or notable, to us, so we give themmeaning, which is the purpose of art. We give meaning to the world. We find themeaning that is hidden before us all. We provide that meaning to people, butoften it is obscured. We hide the meaning under shapes of colors, we submergethe meaning into film, we encode the meaning into poems.

We don’t simply want to show themeaning, because nothing meaningful is best appreciated after an explanation.The mind must find the pattern. The poet merely allows the pattern to be found.

h.alarums

Helooked alarmed for a moment because he didn’t recognize me.

We take excursions into theunrecognitions of life. It is a battle we fight against but must also fightfor. If everything is too clear, if we understand it too well, we have no basisfrom which to make a poem about it. A poem isn’t an understanding (notclarity); it is a misunderstanding (obstruction or eclipse). A poem is notsomething shown; it is something hidden so that someone else can find it.Otherwise, how do I enjoy reading poems when they are unfathomable to me?

Maybe because they’re music, as yourpoems are. Or maybe because they are codes, and it is the process of breakingthat code, that of decryption (descryption), that is enjoyable. Puzzles ofwords designed to create puzzles of thought.

It was good that he didn’t recognizeyou anymore. That gave him the opportunity to learn who you were.

If he’d known that all the time, theexperience would not have been worth it to him. You were the poem in that event. He, the unwitting reader.

i. thwarth

athwarted Plath scholar, dashed at every turn

Art requires conflict, somethingagainst something else, maybe only resting against it, leaning, maybe. Ian Hamilton Finlay made this point,defining the pwoermd (a poem of only a single word) impossible as an artbecause there could be no tension against something else. He didn’t seem torealize that a pwoermd could have internal tension to give it meaning, ortension against the expected forms of the language itself.

Finlay was, still, a great proponent ofthe one-word poem, but they always had titles, thus the text of the poem (asingle word) could be in tensional opposition to the title (of any number ofwords). His last issue of his magazine Poor.Old. Tired. Horse. (number 25,undated) included such one-word poems by a number of poets. One of these wasAram Saroyan, a poet famed for his pwoermds. One of his entries in that issuewas

lovely

Because Finlay saw the need for titles,the title of Aram’s pwoermd was always a repetition of the pwoermd itself.Maybe Finlay perceived some opposition of identicals in that.

Thus: a thwarth of action across theface of the conflict.

j.smith

We madea class trip to Smith College to look at the drafts of the poem we had pickedin the Plath papers and see how it was constructed.

Archives, it occurred to me today, area purified form of knowledge-making, because they are chosen for saving quiteintentionally and not by those who created them. So Plath might scribble wordson paper, and Smith College might accession them into their holdings, but Plathcould not know if Smith ever would. Archives take only what they want, onlywhat they believe in, and what they believe in is records that can be used tocreate new knowledge.

We make knowledge out of otherknowledge, as poems are built out of other poems, as art comes out of otherart, as life comes out of other art.

Dig hard enough, and you will find it.

k.great

Plath puta small cloth under her head to cushion her cheek against the oven grate.

Such a delicate thought. If we believein death, we want it to have as sweetest to it, even if sucking in, through thetiny slits of her nose, that sweet natural gas as if it were the almost toostrong for us scent of a fragrant and gaudy tropical flower.

We are blood and breast and bone. Thesweet edible meat of our skulls makes all of that work, but we measure bymeasures, and we count them by beatings.

l.blizzards

almostdone with sleeping out my own personal blizzards

m.dance

dancedance dance dance dance to the radio (“Transmission” by Joy Division)

I do have this song somewhere and canlisten to it when I want. It is a good song, but it’s not the one I considerthe only good Joy Division song. “Joy Division” being a self-made irony, theartists themselves being the self, and the art, the songs, being merely thevague representations of self. (TheRepresentation of Self in Everyday Art. Read it.)

The song allows for dancing but doesnot demand it. And it demonstrates Joy Divisions’s debt to the VelvetUnderground. We are haunted by influences, infected by them, infested, investedin them. When we write a line, it is a line of someone else’s, a line stone, aline misheard into something else, a line reworked into something else, aseries of lines and a personal experience and someone we loved into somethingelse. We are repetitions of the original though, building complexity as we go.

Every work of art is a reference toevery other work of art that came before it, and the trick is to find theconnections. Only find the connections.

How could we ever live in Warsaw? Couldwe ever appreciate cheese enough to live in Wisconsin?

I will have to leave you hanging.

n.ocean

theearly promise, the early educational rigor, the way none of it mattered to theocean

Say, “ocean,” and I think so often ofthe Velvet Underground song, which is all atmosphere and no land, maybe becauseit is the sea, though foggy, so invisibly so.

As you might have wanted, at some pointto have an academic career, I had never, for a second, thought of being anacademic. I was vassal to the word alone. Going off to college for English,people asked me if I were going to teach. I always said, No, because that Nowas always the true answer. My goal was to write, and I went to college becausethat was the next step in the life I led, because we build up what we can do bywhat we know, because the ocean is big, so much bigger than us, but if we canknow it, know it completely, or at least to the extent that we can, than we canride the ocean, rather than allow it to swallow us.

o.radio

I’dlisten to the radio and wonder, “Is this all there is?” Plath was a hint atwhat might lie at the far ends of my poetic transistor dial. Plath was the hintthough.

“Rock and Roll,” The VelvetUnderground. We are looking for something (meaning, connection), and theworking out of art is the working out of these pathways, which we then follow,but which we then hope others will follow. Everyone is lost in the woods. Weate all the bread because we were lost in the woods. We don’t want to go homeanyway. We want to make a new home, to find a new place to be, a new way to be.So we are searching.

Maybe some pathways move to Plath,maybe she is an answer. But when I read your words, I see the answer. It’s not“Plath was the hint though.”

It’s “Plath was the hint through.” We have to get through something, ormany things, we must get past them. And we have to find that way. And we haveto make that way for others.

As poets, as artists, we have to makethat way.

I am listening to the Feelies now,obsessively. Their hint through was the Velvet Underground, and you can hear itin them. I’d say their specific path was the Velvet Underground’s eponymoussecond album. They have a delicate roughness to their sound. They are beholden totheir makers (Lou, John, Mo, and Sterling), but they are something else.Influence is a virus, but it is not so much a self-replicating virus as onethat changes constantly, one that mutates fast enough so that we cannot stopit. Maybe I am infected by that same virus from the VU: Velvet Underground (myfavorite band), Vanderbilt University (my alma mater), Volume Unit (the VUmeter I saw as I played Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle” Vanderbilt’s student radiostation, WRVU), déjà vu (all that I’ve already seen). Lou Reed and I shared ateacher (Philip Booth) in different decades at Syracuse University. In theVelvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” Lou sings of “rules of verse,” which I heardfor years as “Rooseverse.” Why the focus on the Roosevelts? I wondered.

Maybe that Rooseverse was just the signof the mutation.

p.voice

thesearch for a poetic voice died, allowing my work to become much bigger, sinceit’s no longer hinged on the self

I know that this is essentially apost-lyric, post-avant belief, but I don’t see the self as being particularlylimiting or freeing, even though I see it as unavoidable. I look at ChristianBök’s work, and I see Christian presented to me full bore. Mentioning not a wordof himself, he is still fully presented in the poem. The self is the genesis ofall poetry and the conduit through which it comes to us.

I’m not arguing with you here. I’m justriffing off it, giving my own point of view. If I believed your statement here,I would have to conclude that your work is, logically, bigger (a vaguedesignation, I’ll grant you) than Lynn’s, but I actually think bignessis more the domain of Lynn’s work than yours. That messy presentation of theself produces her broad-brush expressionistic shipwrecks smashed against therocky shore of self, and these are larger events, in that emotional and sonicway, than yours. Not morebeautiful, just beauty of a different, more visceral type.

Your size is Erik Satie-like, builtupon the altar of repetition (the ground rock of minimalist music) and builtupon the concept of music, so built upon the concept of time. I’d say Lynn’sare more sculptural, monumental.

Voices come in different manifestations,some even mute. A visual poet cannot forget the power of muteness.

q.suttee

poetryshould be a cornering of the false self by the true self until a essential voicehappens…well, any poet would kill themselves too if they believed that, or wassurrounded by people who believed that. It’s a form of suttee, a ritual killing.

I read this as an overstatement, so Itake this as a rhetorical stance. But I think that using the word “suttee”suggests two things: that society and Plath’s husband (as it is with suttees)is the cause of Plath’s death, that she is exonerated from her own act ofself-immolation.

Everything, meaning existence in general,pushes people to kill themselves, but in the end it is the act of taking powerover one’s life, even if in the cause of ending it. It is the ultimate act ofself-control and it comes only after mere existence seems worthless. I don’tlook at suicide as most people though. I don’t see it as a tragedy. I see it asa right, one that people take when they want nothing else, when they actuallywant nothing. It is cowardly in that it removes one’s ability to deal with thepain of the world, but it is brave in that it is irrevocable, final. Yourstatement here reads to me as an exoneration of Plath. There’s nothing toexonerate. It was her personal choice. The people she hurt were her childrenmost of all. If she “could live with” that, then that is simply her choice.

We create, we destroy, we must decidewhich action to end with.

r.rabbit-hole

I still see the self suffusing yourwork. You are the eye and voice, and it is you, no-one else. The self can berejected, but not escaped. And I don't think rejection of the self is antidoteto suicide. A focus on the self might actually be a way to avoid suicide.

And I must see the self as important,just because we are created by unique circumstances, so each self has thepossibility of making unique things. Whether the self is a focus or not doesnot matter. All that matters is that the self is so that the creation is indeedpossible.

s.Quietest

probablytoo smart and vibrant to languish as a Quietist poet

I doubt the people reading this will necessarilyunderstand this term. It does define things well enough, even though I thinkRon’s use of it often requires an over-simplification of reality. For instance,I think WCW was very Quietist at times. That’s the secret of his success. But WCWcannot be Quietist because he railed against that strand of poetry in hisattacks on TSE.

Whereas, I say, what we say and what wedo are never the same thing.

t. L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E

[stealing the one-word poetics of DanWaber]

Plathmight have embraced L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E once she tired of the self as beginning.

Should, maybe, Plath’s daughter, then,have taken this, or some other, more adventurous path?

There’s no hope of knowing any of this,though, without the continued living of Plath, though. Only the existence ofself makes the possible real. Or makes real the possible.

I’m not sure there is a differencethere, but I can feel one.

u.possibilities

Thesign that makes up the boy / his possibilities in terrible detail

We make possibilities out of signs.That is how we know we are poets. And these possibilities can be of manydifferent types.

v. joy

what Ilistened to: Joy Division

Sorry about expending your time withargument. I’m not a partisan, so I don’t come to poetry from one pole of binarythought. I don’t believe in experimentalism. Or the avant-garde. Or the hopefor originality, or even unoriginality, both of which are impossible. My focusis on possibilities. My focus is plural, not singular, so it leads me todifferent conclusions, or the rejection of conclusions in somecases.

Itake joy in these divisions of ours.

w. unlearning

I had to unlearn most of what I learned there.

Unlearningis most of learning. Be happy forthe opportunity to unlearn, which was made possible only by the originallearning.

x. intestate

Plath died undivorced and intestate, so theHugheses control her estate.

Ihate this kind of control over information, which has been the same for Salinger,and to some degree from Paul Zukofsky vis-a-vis his father. As an archivist, I desperately wantrecords be used and for something else to be made out of them. I want people togain insight by the records we preserve.

Similarly,I believe in fair use, the practice of taking something and fairly makingsomething else with it. Copyright, as it is now practice (as an act ofaggression) may be the death of art, and the weakling we call poetry might bethe first to go.

y. I(art)

I… One reason you are my friend isbecause you understand that art is supposed to make more art.

Quoting:“Could you turn it [that camera] off? This is not art. This is life!” (CharleneSwansea to Ross McElwee in his film Sherman’sMarch [1966], repeated in his film TimeIndefinite [1993])

Inthese terms, I think of Robert Creeley, who, one-eyed most of his life, sawwithout any depth but guessed at it from the size of things, who could not seethe dimensions of things, their particular roundness, and how light, therefore,wrapped around them, who wrote a crabbed line, in fits and stops, and clawedfrom that language an originality that befalls the smiths of the least word, afocus borne forth from an inability to focus elsewhere. I think of the humanevidence in these poems of his, amulets, maybe, possibly his talismans againsthis leftward focus, maybe touchstones to prove his connection to threefamilies. All of this in a string, as every life is, a pulled thread tautenough through the cloth holds two pieces together. But what holds in placethat thread? What threat did he encounter from the living of life that theliving of art protected him from?

z. ☞☞☞☞☞☞

really gets me thinking about this stuff—the relationship ofour work to our selves, how the self might emerge in the work, is that animportant goal/endpoint or a moment?

Weare only here for thinking and for making people think and for allowing them todo that with the little thoughtthings we create.

In that way, we go forward.

ecr. l’inf.

When not-spring

2012-01-15T23:50:00.000-05:00

Geof Huth, "Ffth ssssssSSPRNGGggg" (2003)

Every time I come across this poem of mine, I am surprised by its beauty, not having remembered it. This is a small Letraset poem from an unfinished book of such poems, but it has a visual kinesis that I never expect. It is a poem about the bursting of spring, apparently in May, which is really when spring arrives in this area of the world. This hasn't been much of a winter around here, but we are still in the middle of winter, arguably not even one third of the way through it, and much more cold and snow may come to us. So I'll look forward to the next season now, especially since I'm ready for it, especially so since I've somehow acquired a cold in the middle of it.

ecr. l'inf.

the flesh end

2012-01-14T22:45:00.001-05:00

Geof Huth, "Myology, Plate XII" (detail of visual poem in progress, 14 January 2012)

I woke up today with a parched throat. The bedroom was dry since the heat is on. It is the middle of winter even though almost no snow has fallen so far.

After arising, a threw a few handsful of water into my mouth, swallowing them down. The swallowing made me realize that my glands were swollen quite large. I imagined them as delicately cooked sweetbreads that I could bite into gently but eat with gusto. Later in the day, a headache revealed itself, followed by a running nose. I'm using Kleenex (that actualy is the brand) generously right now. Decorating the floor with it.

Since I'm sick, I have been less productive today than I had intended to be, but a mug of hot ginger tea has calmed my throat a bit. The day has been spent more in watching than making, and deep reading was too much for me. The discomfort of a cold disturbs my concentration.

Still, I wanted to make things today, wanted to make things under the influence of a cold, so I sat at a table and began working on "Myology, Plate XIII." I am working backwards numerically through these plates, coloring them in with different materials as I go, and writing on them with different types of writing implements. These are my most colorful visual poems, and my least sequential. Text is scattered withing them and there is no one way to read the text, maybe no one way to understand each. While working on this, I regained my concentration, which allowed me to move through the work quickly. I'm not quite done with this one, but if I die tonight (a definite unlikelihood), enough of it will be left behind for it to be interpretable. (There is much more going on in it than the detail I've provided shows.)

listen to ‘Sickbed Song’ on Audioboo

I also did two audio pieces today, which I had hoped would capture some sense of my illness, so that my illness would be a partner in their creation. But except for some coughing in the second of these, which I enhanced a little as part of the performance, there was little real evidence of my illness. I was able to overcome it, able to focus on creation, incapable of being influenced too deeply by my body. A kind of failure it was.

listen to ‘Sickbed Audio Play’ on Audioboo

The first of my audio pieces was simply a glossolalic poemsong, which I realized (during its creation) was reusing a tune I'd used before. So maybe the illness has taken away my imagination. The second audio piece was an audio play, a duodrama, but also a piece that is simply too long. So maybe my illness keeps me from making anything very good.

Right now, my feet, socked and under the covers, are too hot, my head hurts, as do the insides of my nostrils from all the blowing. I am sniffling and a little achy, my eyes are stinging a little, and my legs are aching, maybe from too much time in bed. Yet I have no fever. Maybe this ailing will dissipate by the morning, and I'll be returned to my normal state of creativity, questionable enough by itself.

ecr. l'inf.

His b's are 6's, his w's are long-armed x's, and his k's are crossed V's

2012-01-12T23:51:00.001-05:00

Márton Koppány is one of our greatest poets because he knows when best to use words: almost never.

He is a perfectionist because he is minimalist, or it may be the other way around. Regardless, his focus is intense, and his intentions are focused. He makes a poem out of the smallest possible pieces. Sometimes even smaller.

And his success rate is so high, especially given his productivity, that he is the human equivalent of manna, human manna who drifts down from the heavens to nourish our impoverished minds.

Given Márton's focus on the minimalist, I find it strange to hold in my hand a poem that is a small chapbook of many pages and which stretches across a range of at least 200 words. How did he become so prolix?

By trimming the words back, by holding them in check and breaking them into lines, by making every page of this extended sentence a poem unto itself, by created enjambment across the break in a page, across (especially) the break of the turned page.

The book is designed as a performance, but not one by Márton, but one by us, the readers. We are the ones who dutifully turn the page when the page says to us "(he turns the page)," the parentheses suggesting a whisper, a slight prodding.

And it is a book about imagination, about the reader's process of imagining a book into existence, even though it is presented in the voice of the writer, a writer Hungarian, but a writer in English, a foreigner in a taken native tongue.

The turned page breaks the flow of the words. (The parenthetical does.)

But the breaking of flow is the flow. Or floe. It floats, it continues, it is, as a breathing is, continuous, otherwise it would compel us unto death.

This book (called, I should tell you, The Reader) is written in Márton's hand, a hand I know but a hand that, in this artistic pose, is more printed than cursive, a hand that isn't the shape of waves that Márton's hand usually is, and one that has a gentle quirkiness I like, some letters looking like other characters, and sometimes the word breaks into a burst of cursive before dying away: li is always a cursive ligature, a liquid form.

So we have a book about us and our thinking by a man writing in his own hand, in the most personal way, on beautiful blue quadrille pages, and all those little boxes, all those little blue lines, cannot hold us in place.

This is a book about thinking, which are what the most beautiful books are made of.

I am breathless again around Márton, because he teaches me I should give up writing. He will be enough for me. I don't need my own words.

I bend down into muteness and tip my hat.

Which is my name held in my hand.

__________

Koppány, Márton. The Reader. Second edition. Port Charlotte, Fla.: The Runaway Spoon Press, 2011 [1988].

(The book isn't listed on The Runaway Spoon Press Catalogue page, but maybe Bob Grumman, the publisher, will comment on this posting and tell us how to acquire a copy for ourselves, or -self.)

ecr. l'inf.

The Start of Don Huth

2012-01-11T23:06:00.000-05:00

Don Huth (circa 1938)

Myfather will turn 75 in a couple of months, so I've begun typing out a littlebiography of him, maybe 100 pages or so. This is not really appropriate contentfor this weblog, but I've been working on it for a couple of hours, and Ithought this rough draft of the opening might entertain at least me. I don'tknow where I'm going with this story, even though I know everything thathappens, so I'll just keep typing until I find the right voice for it. Rightnow, my tone is informal and a little jovial, but it still seems wrong for theupcoming event, if not for the story itself.

From my father, Ilearned the meaning of the “obtain” when it didn’t mean to acquire. When welived in Bolivia, you see, I asked him who his favorite philosopher was, and hechose Marcus Aurelius, desiring possibly to be associated with that rare breedof philosopher who was also a general.

My father, Donald Edward Huth, was at 2:22 pm on the23^rd of March 1937, weighing seven pounds and seven ounces and 21inches long, at Saint Anthony Hospital, 10010 Kennerley Road, St Louis,Missouri. My father is a genealogist, so he has handy detailed data on hislife, though, as is common with genealogies, these bits of information abouthis life do not add up to a man. They allow us to know everything about him andyet know nothing at all. So the only way to find out something about him is tounderstand what someone who knows him knows. And that is my role, as the writerin the family, as the only person likely to be able to write a book in a fewmonths, as his eldest son. And in anticipation of his seventy-fifth birthday.

As would eventually become common for people in ourfamily, my father was born in a place his family wasn’t really from. The Huthsimmigrated to New Orleans and stayed there for a couple of generations, but theLehrs on his mother’s side were from a place near St Louis, from the stateright across the Mississippi from his city of birth, from western Illinois. Butnot quite St Louis. He was born among family but not truly in a place offamily. He exhibited the homelessness that became the defining characteristicof his children’s lives. Even today, when all of his children are in theforties and fifties, I at least am uncomfortable when I say I am fromsomewhere. I have never felt as if I were of any place at all.

My father’s parents were George John Huth andCatherine Ann Lehr, whose ethnic backgrounds were primarily German. The Lehrswere primarily German, with French and German varieties of Swiss mixed in. TheHuths were more mixed. My grandfather (Grandpa to us) was one half Alsatian,one quarter Irish, and one quarter Corsican. I could say that he was threequarters French, but that would give no indication of his real ethnicity.

Donald was George and Catherine’s first child andonly surviving child. They had one stillborn daughter (whom they named MaryAnn) a few years later, and then no others, so my father was a special child,firstborn, male, and only, all of which characteristics made him something tobe treasured. These facts may explain why three baby books survive describinghim and his early life, and these also made him an important part to the continuationof the family, actually the essential part. This need to continue the familywas something I felt growing up, as my brothers probably also did, for my fatherwas the last of his line.

His father George and Uncle Edward were orphaned aschildren, their parents having succumbed to the prevalent and virulent diseasesof New Orleans and then dying in the twenties. Edward himself did marry butnever had children, maybe because he and his wife could not. This last myfather as the only pioneer left to multiply the family after the firstimmigrant (another George) arrived in New Orleans in 1855. Just a little morethan a century after his great-grandfather had arrived in the United States, myfather began, with the help of my mother, to build a family of six children,three of them boys.

I like to imagine that my father was named after afamous Duck, and I’m sure his name led to some teasing while growing up, but hewas named if he were named for anyone after his uncle Edward, receiving hisuncle’s name as his middle name. Later, my brother Rick also received this as amiddle name: Erick Edward. This avuncular transmission of middle names is evenmore exaggerated, and regular, in my case. My great-uncle Joseph Anthony Reilly’smiddle name was transferred to his nephew, Paul Anthony Tanner. And Uncle Paul’smiddle name was transferred to me, Geoffrey Anthony Huth. Finally, at least fornow, my middle name has been given to my nephew, Nicholas Anthony Huth.

(to be continued)

ecr. l'inf.

A Poetics (# 88 - 92)

2012-01-10T23:54:00.001-05:00

Geof Huth, "Phyllotaxis 001"

88. Discipline

"And most artists," says an anonymous architect in a film entitled My Architect: A Son's Journey, "don't have any discipline." And later tonight, I realized that, since I will be giving a reading of "mathematical poetry," that means the organizer is a mathematician, that her desire for order exceeds even mine, and mine always requires some significance to the number of poems in any book I create. Entire poems of mine are guided by various means of counting, of putting in place possibly invisible order.

Yet I cannot understand the need to have every biography of every poet be 129 or 130 words in length (and those with 129, I assume, are giving some dispensation). I cannot understand why my name cannot appear in space, six months before the reading, with a number of poems that doesn't coincide with numbers of poems of those other poets.

There are many kinds of discipline, and the poet's is, foremost, the discipline of the word, a discipline that sometimes requires the happy acceptance of chance, the messiness of error, mere dirtiness. Sometimes, control is the ability to allow something to fly out of your hands, to exist even if you do not guide it.

Discipline is more a trying than a making. The disciplined poet is the one who makes a poem with some regularity or the one who waits until the time for making it good. Discipline is the act of knowing when you can do what you must do.

Discipline is a seeing, the perception of pattern, and then the capture of the pattern. Poem as a pattern of words. Voice as a pattern of sounds. Sight as a pattern of letters or lines or blocks of text.

We live within patterns mathematical, and not. Chaos works only in that it surprises our expectation for pattern, but that unexpected pattern that brings light to the small world of the mind is the one that brings us joy. For pattern is almost a sign of the existence of meaning in the universe.

89. ear

Here, it is.

90. (ear)2

Gotta have one.

91. Punk

chore.

92. Hand

It is the hand who's the maker. Let the mind take the credit.

Tendons that prove we are fleshy marionettes. Move the fingers, through dancing, as the makers of meant.

Hand, and then to it. Hand that can mold.

Hand that perceives through a sense that must touch. I tap and I write and I scrawl and I be.

I crib and I crave and I crawl, and I be. I cradle with fingers the pen who is me.

I cradle with fingers the pen who is me. I write every word as if it were true.

ecr. l'inf.

In Aprill I Will Have Done What I Had Done Last April

2012-01-08T23:45:00.000-05:00

Every April, for the past few, I've promoted the crazy idea of International Pwoermd Writing Month, a month in which members of a self-selected group of poets each writes at least one one-word poem a month. One of the contemporary masters of the form, someone who so often surprises me with his new ideas, is Jonathan Jones, lately of Brussels, but a citizen himself of the United Kingdom.

Last April, he not only participated in InterNaPwoWriMo, he also produced a little booklet in green (the color of spring) of the pwoermds he had created. and a few months later he sent me a copy, along with an unnecessary note excusing the delay. So I have now waited about half a year to actually write a few words about this book. Delay is what keeps the world moving.

He called this booklet "apri'll," because April will, and he opens the book with this epigraph from Octavio Paz

No one is a poet unless he has felt the temptation to destroy language or create another one, unless he has experienced the fascination of nonmeaning and the no less terrifying fascination of meaning that is inexpressible.

which is a good enough opening to a book of pwoermds, a book of new and reformulated words.

Since "apri'll" is such a small book, my commenting on even a few pwoermds constitutes uncovering a larger than usual percentage of the book, so I will chew only briefly on only a few pwoermds:

'lossom

The blossom is broken because it is not quite full, not quite blooming. That is how I take it, though I assume we could read it that the blossom has begun to drop its petals. But that doesn't fit with the theme of spring, and that would better be a blosso' (which doesn't work at all as well as a poem).

chimpanzed

Simply an American chimpanzee translated into a British chimpanzed. So it is merely a joke, but a joke about language, and one that requires some understanding of language use across dialects. And you have to avoid pronouncing it as a two-syllable word.

thumbrella

A beautiful little pwoermd about a tiny umbrella, maybe one used by a

dwarful

which might be a small handful or might be an awful small thing.

kn&t

My favorite of these is the unpronounceable one, the one that is purely itself, the one that has tied its round circle of an o into a knot.

And for a few more I give you a green page from the book, which has only a green cover and white pages. I made it green so you could appreciate its vernal fecundity. And don't forget to appreciate his found pwoermds (and the wonderful bibliographic detail that accompany them).

ecr. l'inf.

The Great Unread

2012-01-07T22:45:00.000-05:00

I am sitting in a small room with a tiny percentage of my books. Even after donating away about 2,200 books last month, I'm sure I still have at least one and a half times that number left, and maybe double.

As I was looking throw the three small bookshelves here for a tiny book by Jonathan Jones (apri'll) and not finding it, I realized that I would probably not ever finish reading these books of mine. They would surround me, but they would not be inside me. Or not completely. I will have skimmed them, or flipped through them. I will have read a chapter or two, or looked a fact up in them. Yet I still will have become them.

These books, even unread, define me. Take one shelf, and you'll see that I am interested in the typographic, the visual, the poetic, the conceptual. You will already see, from this small sidetable's holdings, that I am a visual poet (or, less likely, one of those very rare few who enjoy visual poetry yet never create any).

While looking through the shelves, I noticed that two books were shelved upside down, something I simply never recall having done before. But there they were: Jackson Mac Low's Representative Works: 1938-1985 and Michael Harney's The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea were resting on their heads. They would they saw was in some ways backwards, but in other ways just right given the place where they live, a place overwhelmed by poetry, but accepting others in as well, along with art supplies, clean clear bottles that used to hold scotch, the beginnings of sculptural visual poems, or just the pieces for them.

Oh, there are books I've read sitting around me as well, but this is primarily a selection of books I intend to read relatively soon, probably about 250 of them, but maybe more. I have brought them around me, brought them close, so that they might keep me warm with their thoughts, even if I haven't allowed those thoughts to penetrate me yet. And I have not penetrated them myself.

Because reading is an interpenetration. A physical penetration (but also intellectual) of the book by the reader. An intellectual penetration of the reader by the book.

Yet we will all die, soon enough, without having read so many score of the books we had intended to read. Still, we feel somehow increased by them. It is strange, sometimes, to think of the books I've never read. For instance, Moby-Dick, yet I feel something of the book, I've picked up pieces of it. (Read all the encyclopedic matter in it once in Ghana, read the Classics Illustrated comic book version as a child in Barbados, and I've seen so many famous and unknown illustrations of it—but I've never seen a movie version.) We are increased even by what we only tangentially experience.

Tangenitally.

It is all about penetration, and degrees of penetration. What we learn about it, and how deeply we learn. But having that unread book is important.

A friend of mine believes that the most potent review is the review of silence, a total lack of response. She says that that silence speaks of a deep inability to like and, therefore, to respond to the author of a work. She claims that silence means the book, the poem, the story has not been loved. But I don't believe that.

First, I realize that some books go years without being read, even books on my shelves. Then one day seems, for unknown reasons, the day to read that book, and when I read it I am exalted. It is at least possible that I know the unread books well enough to know when it feels right to read that book, and then I find myself in the perfect frame of mind to enjoy the book.

A frame of mind is a frame of reference. It controls the book as much as the book's contents do.

So some people don't respond because they have not had time to read the book.

Second, sometimes people find it difficult to respond to a book. I have found myself loving a book, found myself constructing a review in my head, and then never writing the review because the time doesn't feel right, because I'm tired, because I feel empty of useful sequences of words. And I write more than most people, and probably with more ease. Yet response is hard.

Even if the books gives in to you, gives itself over to you, gives everything of itself to you, you still have the requirement of a personal response, one that fits the time, the place, and one that fits the response the book is giving you.

Interpenetration. You have to give to get.

Or we never read a book. We merely read versions of ourselves.

I'm thinking of this, having tried to find a little book I thought I was ready to respond to, one I loved, one I'd never forgotten, one that I'd planned to respond to tonight, one that I've lost, however temporarily. Yet, no matter how temporary that loss is, I feel it like a void inside me.

Because I want to respond, because I want people to know when their work moves me, because I feel a responsibility to respond. Because even the least of us writers, those who work in the small time that I do, they have voices, and when they yell them into a canyon they want to hear the voice, somehow changed, and somehow reassuring and different from the original, echoing back.

For the book is the voice yelled out, and the echo is the reader responding.

ecr. l'inf.

The Beauty of the Buttocks

2012-01-06T23:52:00.000-05:00

Geof Huth, Detail from "Myology, Plate XV" (6 January 2011)

The attempt I'm working on now is a set of seven plates removed from a damaged book. (I've never seen the book, only these plates.)

Being black and white images, with frequent voids, most of these will be easy for me to color, so I am bending down close to a pages, eyeglasses and contacts away from my eyes, and working like a diamond cutter on the page.

Because I'm still working on the first page, after almost a week.

I consider the poeticity of this as I work. What is the poetic value of a coloring-book poem, even if ex post facto, rather than ab ovo (all white and open)? What about the words scattered in it? How do they cohere into a poem?

And do I care about coherence in the narrower, linguistic, sense?

One could make an argument that the colors in a poem need to function linguistically for the poem to function as a poem, that they must have some, at least quasi-, semantic function. I wouldn't make that argument. In a visual poem text can work as text and/or image, and image can work as image and/or text. It is all possible. It is the possibility that matters, that makes the visual poem worth a stare.

The colors in this poem carry out many important functions (functions that go through my head as I work on this--so much more slowly than I usually do, but always adding color and words every day): Colors demonstrate anatomic patterns across the mise-en-page of the poem, and they protest against such pattern. Colors demonstrate the diversity and complexity of the human body. Colors capture and settle the eye.

And maybe the last is the most important, since for a work of visual art to work it must still the eye enough to gain the attention of the mind.

The text in this poem is entirely semantic and generally syntactic. But the text works nonlinearly. This poem is not stanzaic, but there are often short stanzas in it, and they are always broken into bits and strewn across the text. Reading is meant to occur as view does: by seeing the whole thing but immediately focusing on small bits of it. Reading should be a darting, a looking for bits of color and extracting information from it.

Everything here is of color. It is meant for the sighted and uncolorblind. It is meant for the eyes first, but for the brain in the end.

Mindless, we are nothing. Mindful, we are too cautious. Minded, we are right.

ecr. l'inf.

tracings . . . leavings . . . inklings . . .

2012-01-05T23:57:00.000-05:00


Bibliographic Epigraphy in John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language (1823)

Tracings we leave behind. What we leave are tracings.

Tracks of a finger, ink as spoor. Black footprints muddied out.

We leave behind because we are left behind. A fair child, they might say of one of us, but a far sight shy of a good one.

Snow is a kind of darkness. Paper, the remains of the forest once all upon us, yet now we drag our feet, our nibs, across its fair surface.

No foxes (too shy), but foxing. Paper darkens like snow. Anything to eradicate, anything to wipe the scent of spraints. Brown fur slips into brown water.

We are what is not often of water or sky and given over to the earth best at the end.

Burial of the spirit in the word. Burial of the word on the page. Burial of the page in the fire.

Wrinkles of the hand cradle the pen, wrinkle of the ink soaks the page, wrinkles of the page crawl into a fist.

To trace a word as signature, to trace a word as drawing, as paraph, as flourish and flourishing. To trace a thought from the start. To trace a word from the heart.

From the heartform organ flows blood of ink, inkling of black as a tracing rivulet. Not railing but waiving.

Waving what flag that there's be a surface for the ink sopped up, black ink, red ink, soaked into the cloth, soaked into the page, soaked into the cotton fibers of his shirt. Last in thought of bellum, not belle, but bell, a tolling, still he wrote a word of ink.

Upon the page in warp and wharf, an only mooring from the sea, in black and boiling. What splashes up and splashes him. He's covered top to foot with ink, covered all the body all in words, words in wonder, wander, wade, words with weapons and with blade.

Words' profusion, it is so great, that body (paper, page, and flag), waving, teeters, flagging, falls, and flails as words, in ink of blood and blood of ink, as last retreats and forward's march, leaves the entry that's exit's wound.

Body worded, body inked, the grave tattoo of drumming dimming, the breath is leaving, breast that's heaving, yet every word it ever took, and every word it ever said, and every word it ever wrote, stays behind like mark of shadow.

What's solid's fleeting, yet we leave it behind.

Leave behind a word to mark it. Leave behind a word to be.

All these tracings in the snow. Words' erasings, less that no. Less than none and less than nothing, less than empty and left than bare.

We leave behind, after all our racing, we leave behind to slow our pacing.

We leave behind the word to mark the place we were and that we were. We leave behind for, in the end, we are the words we were and marks, we are the scrapings on the mat, we are the leavings where we sat.

A word in ink is blood of life. We leave behind the word for wordlings. We leave behind the word to prove—that we were left behind and left.

❦

ecr. l'inf.

My Myological Method

2012-01-03T23:49:00.001-05:00

Geof Huth, "Myology, Plate XV" (draft made on 3 Jan 2012)

My muscle is me, even if we thought the muscle were the mouse. What rises through the body, in rising and dipping waves, rocking never cresting, are the physical impulses of our minds, but we are that body.

I thought of muscles as I sat at the table, in light not quite bright enough, to color as a child might with pencils, and to write the occasional word or phrase, on a slightly foxed plate removed from a damaged book, the holes where the needle and thread went through it still visible along its left edge.

It is a process I do not like: to create something atop a unique piece of anything that I like, anything that I think is already beautiful. And I think I've already destroyed this sheet beyond salvage, but I'll keep adding to it until I think it is saved or I believe to a degree that I don't yet that there is no chance to save this thing.

The process of creating a poem on a beautiful piece of damaged paper is frustrating for me because I don't trust my hand enough. And on this page I already see many infelicities of the hand, many times when my muscles (or, sometimes, my pencils didn't work for me. Usually, it is where the text I've written is too large, so I've learned something to guide the next six experiments.

For I have seven of these sheets, each different, to work on. The process should take me more than a month. I may give up in between, but I'll keep trying, because there's always the chance of success. And there is something calming about carefully filling in voids with color. Soon this sheet will be shimmering with competing colors. At that point, maybe it will be something.

For now, it is a hope, an inclination. I hope the incline goes up instead of down. But, of course, that depends entirely on which direction I choose to walk.

On the third day of the year 2012, Geof Huth discusses a visual poem he is creating upon a plate removed from a damaged book on anatomy.

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Pick a Card

2012-01-02T23:54:00.000-05:00

I am drawn to books of poetry on cards, and I didn't realize it until today. Robert Grenier's Sentences. Susan Howe's Poems Found in a Pioneer Museum. bpNichol's still water. The many many works of poetry that Márton Koppánny has produced on cards. To that list, I will now add Lev Rubinstein's Thirty-Five New Pages, recently published by Ugly Duckling Presse.

This is a book to manipulate, a tactile book, haptic. It gains value by forcing us to deal with the pieces of it. But it comes at us, as you can see above disguised as a codex, bearing even its title on its spine, which you could slip between two other tiny books and not recognize, without close inspection, that the book is a box.

These thirty-five cards work through a process of repetition, the slow working out of a thought with few words. Each card is a page numbered, the number appearing at the top of the page as a title. And every title has a small superscript number bearing the same number as the page. And each of these superscript numbers directs you to a footnote, and each of those footnotes tells you what should be on the page, not what is there, but what should be.

As we might guess, the first card should be blank, a blank flyleaf before the title page, and then the numbers pull you into the book that is nothing but a deck of stiff cards in our hands. Rubinstein plays games with you as thoughts slowly and indefinitely arise from the sturdy pages in your hands. "Here," you read in the fourteenth footnote, which appears on Page 14, "something should be written," and you realize it has been. These are conceptual games, but serious, and satisfying. I smiled broadly near the end of the book, filled with a kind of joy at the beautiful rendition of the book's own genius in my head.

I am reminded most, in these cards, of the work of Márton Koppánny, which is also conceptual in this playful way (though also much more visual in intention), and that is a good thing. This text is clean, emotionless, without subject, because it is all subject, because it is about us, about the act of reading, and about the expectations we bring to any process of reading. The book may be a bit pricey given its size, but the joy of reading it doesn't diminish with time.

I'll end, though, with two quibbles: the box itself is far too thin. It needed to have been much sturdier. Books in boxes usually have much stronger boxes, and this one even shows some creasing from merely being assembled by hand. Second, the translation is really not perfect. Maybe this was intentional, but a number of times near the end of the book the text simply isn't idiomatic English. Read Page 30, "is currently read" should be "is currently being read" and "constantly reminding of the Author" should be "constantly reminding one [or you or us] of the Author." I can't imagine a need for this clumsy English.

Still I love the book. It was the first I read this year and the first I reviewed, and it's from Ugly Duckling Presse, and it has a number in its title, and I'm sure it will be one of my favorites of the year even by the end. Just as last year the first book I read and reviewed was a book from Ugly Duckling Presse that had a number in its title: Sarah Riggs' 60 Textos.

I see a pattern, and that is what this book is about: the patterns of reading, the patterns of being, the patterns of expectation.

_________

Rubinstein, Lev. Thirty-Five New Pages. Translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011. US$15.

ecr. l'inf.

Huth Collection of Wordbooks (A Description)

2012-01-01T23:58:00.000-05:00

Entick's New Spelling Dictionary (1802)

General Description

The Huth Collection of Wordbooksis a collection of a couple of thousand publications focused on the examinationof language. The core of the collection is about 1800 dictionaries of varioustypes, from the 1700s onward, but the collection includes all other types of“wordbooks” as well: encyclopedias focused on language, thesauri, grammars, “spellers,”usage guides, style books, books on wordplay, and monographs and books of essayson language. The collection includes expensive and rare hardback books, cheappaperbacks, printed ephemera, and even some humorous dictionaries collected offthe Internet in the 1990s, at the real beginning of the Internet Age. Theprimary language of the collection is English, but it includes books that focuson the entire universe of languages, and it includes a number of bilingualdictionaries, as well as a good selection of monolingual works in French. Thecollection covers the history of language, writing systems, phonetics andphonology, grammar, etymology, wordplay, shorthand, and handwriting, making itmuch more than a collection of dictionaries. Its temporal coverage begins inthe mid-1700s, with a few books, is strong in the 1800s and 1900s, and alreadyincludes many from the 2000s.

The core of the core of thecollection is a set of antidictionaries, or recreational dictionaries. The mostfamous of these is Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’sDictionary, but the process of collecting these dictionaries has uncoveredan almost secret history of antidictionaries, reaching back far before Bierce.The antidictionary collection is divided, conceptually, into threesub-categories of work:

contradictionary: a humorous or cynical glossary that re-defines aset of standard words (such as Bierce’sDevil’s Dictionary)

neolexicon: a glossary of creative neologisms, rather thanneologisms that have entered the general corpus of the language (such as RichHall’s Sniglets or the glossary thataccompanies Anthony Burgess’ novella, AClockwork Orange)

paraglossary: a glossary of words that are either obsolete or rareenough to be entertaining or, in some cases, are presented to reveal theirinteresting characteristics, such as strange etymologies or rare features ofconstruction, as in words only one letter in length (such as Josefa Heifetz’ Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary)

These antidictionaries themselvesserve as exemplars for the idea that the meaning of words is slippery, thatlanguage is our essential skill yet it gives up on us constantly, that languageis not simply work, but that it also play. The collection as a whole serves todemonstrate how humans are people of words, dependent on them, driven by them,and always using them, even when those words contradict each other, cause themtrouble, or lead them astray.

Because this is a collection ofpublications, the book as object is of interest in the collection. For thatreason, the collection includes multiple editions for many titles, and in somecases it includes multiple printings as well. This tendency towardscomprehensiveness has the advantage of demonstrating small changes betweenprintings and, thereby, helping users make distinctions between variousprintingsin the collection.

A Few Highlights of the Collection

The strengths of the collection, beyond antidictionaries, are American andAustralian lexicography, British and American books on language, Frenchantidictionaries, and slang. Given that the collector of these books has livedin the United States during the active construction of this collection (startingfrom about 1992), the focus on American dictionaries is expected, but theAustralian part is not. Still, the collection includes a number of importantbooks in the history of Australian lexicography, including a first edition ofEdward Morris’ Dictionary of AustralEnglish (1898), which marks the beginning of Australian lexicography.

Because of the expansiveness ofthe collection, it includes scholarly texts in linguistics as well as popularbooks written more as entertainment for (or admonition to) the general public.British writers on language heavily represented herein include the academicwriters Eric Partridge, David Crystal, and Tom McArthur, and the more popularIvor Brown and Jonathon Green. American academics include Jesse Sheidlower andMario Pei (the latter best known for his popular books on language), and thepopular writers Paul Dickson, Willard R. Espy, and Margaret Ernst.

The collection of Frenchantidictionaries is notable for including two editions of Maurice Rheims’ Dictionnaire des mots sauvages (1969 and1989), an important work of French scholarship that collected examples ofinvented words from the breadth of French literature. Beyond this, thecollection contains a number of humorous, and sometimes quite popular, Frenchcontradictionaries, including ones focused on medicine and Oriental ceramics.

The slang and dialect segment ofthe collection includes many contemporary works, including those of the great Americanslang lexicographer Tom Dalzell, and works of historical importance includingearly dictionaries of Americanisms and the second and third edition of Briton JohnCamden Hotten’s The Slang Dictionary fromthe 1860s. The dictionaries of slang include serious slang dictionaries, suchas the many editions of Eric Partridge’s Dictionaryof Slang and Unconventional English, and many small and humorous glossariesof slang thrown together as entertainment.

Because of the collector’sinterest in family words, words that are unique to individual families, thecollection has almost as good a collection as in possible in this realm. Itincludes both rare editions of George William Lyttelton’s Contributions towards a Glossary of the Glynne Language(documenting the words peculiar to his wife’s family), all editions of PaulDickson’s Family Words, Adams,Charles C. Adams’ Boontling: An AmericanLingo (documenting Boontling, that jargon once spoken in the tightly knitAnderson Valley of California), the collector’s own Familiar Words: How We Speak Alone Together (documenting threeinterconnected strands of familyspeak), and a couple of his friend J. JamesMancuso’s manuscript dictionaries of words from his own family.

Beyond these general categories,the collection includes a number of items of special interest, ranging from agood collection of “blueback spellers” by Noah Webster and others to JohnCleland’s questionably accurate AdditionalArticles to the Specimen of an etimological vocabulary (1769). Also ofinterest are an early edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the EnglishLanguage, various editions of dictionaries by Joseph Emerson Worcester(Webster’s major competition in the United States), and Noah Webster’s firstdictionary, A Compendious Dictionary ofthe English Language. (1806). The collection even includes an interestingselection of dictionaries meant for children, including recent ones doubling ascoloring books and A Dictionary, or Indexto a Set of Cuts for Children (1804), the latter unfortunately stripped ofthe cuts, or engravings, that bore mentioning in the title itself.

The Archival Connection

In the end, this is a collectionof books, of objects one holds in one’s hands, of things one must manipulate tomake them work. To some degree, these are archival works. Many of them bear themarks of those owners and users who have come before, and the spellers,grammars and dictionaries from the 1800s often include jokes, riddles, andpersonal notes, sometimes showing the expressiveness and liveliness of theyoung women using them, such liveliness maybe sometimes being more acceptablewithin the private pages of a book than in real life. Some of the books in thecollection are merely pieces of ephemera, such as little samizdatantidictionaries pasted to bulletin boards. These pieces are interesting inthat their content (like those of the chain letters that came before them)changed over time, being added to and subtracted from but still remainingessentially the same.

The books also connect to thepapers of the collector Geof Huth, which also reside at the M.E. GrenanderDepartment of Special Collections and Archives. First, these are the books oflanguage that Huth collected, each of them demonstrating his interest inlanguage. Second, a number of the books in this collection are ones he used asa child or student. They bear his signatures. They preserve his markings withintheir pages. They even show the awards he received. Finally, these books did not exist as an undigestedmultitude for Huth. They were of a piece. He maintained a database thatcollected up to 45 different pieces of data for every book, includinginformation on when and where they were bought and for how much. The notes inthe database often put the books into greater context, and the fact that he trackedthe names of previous owners of these books helps to show that he sometimescollected more than one wordbook from someone collecting such books decadesbefore he himself did.

Potential Use

The collection is broad in scope,despite its focus, and can support many kinds of use. There is enough depth inthe collection to support some linguistic, lexicographic, and lexicologicaluse. The collection as a whole provides evidence of linguistic change, in termsof the meaning of words and phonology, and the collection provides an overviewof the history of the dictionary in English from the mid-1700s on. Certainly,the collection provides plenty of useful material for the study of the book,including changing styles of bookmaking over the years, and it provides asource of practice for those interested in working with rare books. There is aliterary component as well, since many of the writers of these books onlanguage were also writers of fiction or other literary forms.

The books also support the studyof social history. This partly comes out of the fact that some books bear scantbut still illuminating information about the users of the book. But what ismore important is that these books demonstrate something about the developmentof the middle class. In most families in the 1800s, it was common to have onlytwo books: a Bible and a dictionary. And the dictionary served to tell you howto be a proper citizen: how to spell your words, how to use your words, and howto pronounce your words correctly. Over and over again, for more than acentury, these wordbooks give evidence that people saw a great need to learn topronounce even the words they used daily. The dictionary, now an engine ofdescription, was once an engine of prescription that guided people along thatone right path of proper speech. And as the more various waves of immigrantswashed upon our shores, that desire to use the language properly, at leastproperly according to some supposed authority, was an overwhelming desire ofthose anxious to succeed in society.

The Future of the Collection

This collection of books is notfinished, and only the death of its progenitor can ensure it will no longergrow. Currently, a small but essential part of the collection remains in thecustody of Geof Huth for his continued use. Beyond this, his collecting willcontinue. Even after years of collecting, there remain gaps in this body ofbooks. The coming years will allow time and opportunity to fill these gaps andto add newly published works to the collection. Even in the tiny realm of theanti-dictionary, hundreds of books could be added to this collection. Also, thecollection could benefit from an influx of heavily used dictionaries andgrammars from the 1800s to provide more insight into people’s connection todictionaries and language.

Cataloging the Collection

The database that accompanies thecollection provides full bibliographic information, including descriptions of thephysical state of each book and up to three dollar values assigned to eachbook: the book's original price, the price original paid by the collect, andthe current (or once-current) price of the book in the antiquarian book market.Entries in the database provide enough information to distinguish any book inthe collection from any other, even if one of the same edition, and the wealthof information in the database supports various types of searching. Evenunexpected pieces of data can sometimes prove useful, as the collector himselfoften used the name of a previous owner of a book to find a particular book hewas searching for.

[Later, I will include a datadictionary explaining every field in the database.]

ecr. l’inf.

2,000 Books and Subtracting

2011-12-31T22:17:00.001-05:00


75 Boxes of Books, 7 of Personal papers, 2 Tubes of Oversized Materials, and 1 Large Envelope of Oversized Materials Ready for a Trip to the University at Albany (29 December 2011)

While preparing this year's donation to the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives at the University at Albany, my largest ever, I stayed up the entire night to finish my preparations. Even after starting months ahead of time and spending all my free time working on completing the cataloging of these books and the foldering of my papers, I found myself pressed for time. By the time my day was done, I had been away for 32 hours. Starting at about 3:30 that afternoon, I slept for the next fourteen. Among what I gave away were many books I never thought I could ever part with: Noah Webster's Compendious Dictionary from 1803, the first dictionary he ever published; Contributions towards a Glossary of the Glynne Language, both editions of this first-ever book of family words, the first released in 1855 in an edition of 50; Ambrose Bierce's Cynic's Word Book, the precursor to the publication of the Devil's Dictionary, this book goes only through the letter L; a full-leather copy of a high school printing project from the 1940s that included bits of papyrus tipped in; and so many more rare and wonderful and sometimes expensive books.

We are often surprised by the things we give up, which end up being those we must give away. My house was so full of books that I couldn't find the ones I owned. At least 60 boxes of books were piled away in closets and under the eaves. They hardly existed. Many of these were always out in plain view, and I would examine them occasionally and marvel at their existence. I spent years collecting these books, often to the great detriment of the family finances, and I did it to define a world for myself, one constructed of words. The books I collected stretched back to the mid-1700s, and the latest book in the collection is dated 2012 (which won't be here until tomorrow, but such are the habits of American publishers, of all publishers, for all I know).

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/34420829?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="440" height="248" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>

In my video documentation, I say there were 1825 books in the boxes, but the number was really 1925. However, I reviewed the thousands of entries in my database of books (AKA the Bookbase), and I discovered a number of books not properly marked as heading out of the house, so the real number of books ("titles" is a better term here) is over 2,000. A large number.

The core of this collection is dictionaries, primarily in English, but also in other languages, particularly French. But the collection has any kind of publication concerned with language: thesauri, grammars, style guides, monographs, books of essays. And there is a second, deeper core to the collection, something even stranger. In the collection, there are over 500 antidictionaries, which are dictionaries designed primarily to entertain than to instruct. Some are focused on redefining words in the language (such as the three dozen or so versions of Bierce's Devil's Dictionary within that collection), some invent and define neologisms, and some of them merely display strange or obsolete words for our entertainment (most famous among these probably being Mrs. Byrne's Dictionary). The variety of these (particularly in terms of quality) is huge, and I have these in a couple of other languages, including a good selection of antidictionaries in French.

Or had. I had.

Some of the Books in the Collection and My Jigsaw-Puzzle Method of Packing them in Boxes (29 Dec 2011)

Finding these books took both skill and luck, and there are still many more I want. Even now, I've been thinking of the books I need to acquire, of ways to expand the collection. There are big holes in the collection. I have Hotten's second and third edition of his Slang Dictionary, but not the first. I've never found a first edition of The Devil's Dictionary I would buy because it is usually found only in Bierce's multi-volume set of Collected Works, which was sold only as a set. I sometimes have the first volume in a two-volume set without the second, and I somehow allowed myself not to notice that the fifth volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English has recently been released. I'll be particularly interested in that volume, since it will probably include citations from a dictionary of mine, just as the fourth volume did.

The Contents of Box 38 (29 Dec 2011)

In this collection, there are many volumes that cost quite a bit of money (and many more that cost almost nothing, but which accrue value by having been brought together), and Box 38 has the greatest concentration of such books. Not many books, but worth about US$5,000 in total. I didn't pay that much for them, though I did pay quite a bit for them. I have tended to live dangerously, at least financially. Still, even this box's books represent only a small percentage of the total value of these books, and I mean "value" in a couple of ways. What is important to me is not the dollar value of the books; what I care about is how these books demonstrate and examine the human engagement with language, how they define us as beasts of the word.

Wordbooks on the Left, Taking up Most of a Row of Shelving (29 Dec 2011)

Once I arrived at the University at Albany, I backed the truck up to the loading dock, and the five or so of us there unloaded this huge collection of books. The process was fairly quick, but tiring, since I'd spent the morning, with Nancy helping, moving 82 heavy boxes down three flights of stairs and into a truck. Once the boxes were moved into special collections, I helped load them on boxes, and then I was ready to go. I said goodbye, drove the truck back to the rental place, drove the car back to the house, made two other donations (one of about 200 books to the public library), and I kept working until I decided to lie down for a few minutes and didn't arise for fourteen hours.

In my dreams, I know there were words.

ecr. l'inf.

(each asterisk is a snowflake)

2011-12-25T02:25:00.001-05:00

(Every link here is the same link and takes you to Jack, even that for the image above of that same poem.)

Today, it is Christmas, even at 2:00 am, which is when I'm starting this. mIEKAL aND is awake in his bed in the middle of Wisconsin thinking of the coincidence of his own birthday with Christmas, with the Mass for Christ's birth. And Jack Kimball is off in nondistant Massachusetts putting together words that are wry, arch, and wary all at once. Little children are dreaming, and some of those dreams are nightmares.

Given the specialness of this day (it is my friend mIEKAL's birthday, after all), I am breaking my blog silence, a silence brought on not by lack of interest—but by the demands of the back-breaking job of cataloging or confirming the cataloging of two thousand or so books (on words, words, words) that I'll be donating to the University of Albany next week. Sometimes, life intervenes. And when it does, even urge and verge cannot take control of our lives. We must live these lives instead.

And, so, a Christmas tradition continues—and one of my favorites: I present to the world (or that little portion of the world that ventures to this small place) Jack Kimball's annual Christmas poem, which is always a digital poem of some kind. This year, it is a marquee poem, a poem created using the marquee tag for HTML. This allows Jack the opportunity to scroll words past our eyesight, and he does this for us in different colors, and with different typesizes. The world is, after all, multifarious, and it comes at us in many flavors, and from many directions.

And all at once.

Words move from left to right, they move up, they move down. And we are left alone to figure them out. Language is a Babel (babble, bubble, bibble, bib, bip, ip). When the letters and words descend from the top of the screen, there is a difficulty putting them back together, because the bottom of the sentence comes first, so we try to stitch the sense back together, but we keep forgetting the recent past, we are not puzzle-solvers, and we are left with fragments.

Because the world comes at us in fragments, some of them gentle, some of them fast, some of them hard-edged, some of them soft. The world is atomized, the particles nothing but the sneeze of God (the sneeze, moreso, of the universe).

In this poem, Christmas comes at us, as snow, as the view we have of light, of a night scene, of the votive candle and the dead, as the Christians modification of the pagan world, of the pagan world we cannot leave, of a sense of blood and breath, body and bone, as a realization of the mind working through the contradictions of culture.

Culture is a mold, spreading.

Some realize it is a kind of night.

(To think that Jack wrote me, about this poem of his, that "this seems more seasonal and escapist.")

Merry Christmas.

ecr. l'inf.

A Poetics (# 87 via # 57)

2011-12-13T23:59:00.001-05:00

Geof Huth, The First Form of Entry # 80 of "A Poetics" (17 March 2011; photo: 13 December 2011)

What is, I am asked—sometimes with an intensity vergingon malice, sometimes with contorted confusion, sometimes out of an innocentcuriosity and desire to know—is the boundary between a poem and everythingelse? I am asked this question because a poem to me can be words arranged inlines on a page, words spoken into air, words scrawled on a page or moving on ascreen, shapes resembling letters but never taking the full form of text, songswithout the courtesy of words, or grunts and groans and nothing more—just theinarticulate articulations of the voice.

And I ask, What is the boundary between your body and theworld?

Does sound not enter your body and becomeindistinguishable from your thoughts? Are you not, even now, sucking air intoyour body, bringing the world into your body, just for the simple pleasure ofliving? When you eat the foods of the earth, when are they simply meat and eggsand apples, and when are they merely the substance of your body? the muscle ofyour arm, the hair of your neck, the nail grown just the nail, grown just a bittoo long, of your thumb?

And when you die, when are you no longer yourself? At themoment of death when your consciousness gives way to cosmos? At the point whenyour body becomes the temperature of world around it? When all the flesh hasfallen from your bones? Or when even your bones have crumbled away intonothing? After having defined yourself as a body for so long, when does yourbody not define you at all?

The more precise the line between poetry and somethingelse, the less I care about it. Not because I don’t find the exerciseinteresting. I do. But because poetry has to be about possibility, andboundaries are more about pietics, about purity of thought instead of theelasticity of possibility.

But poetry means something to me—as a word withinquotation marks and as a concept.

Poetry is that art that we practice that has an intensefocus on language in any of its three incarnations (or any combination ofsame). In visual poetry, the focus is on the shape of the text, which mayinclude images, which may be wordless, which may consist of nothing butinvented textshapes. Visual poetry examines poetry primarily from the point ofview of the eye. In sound poetry, the focus is on the sound in the ear, so a soundpoem heightens the aural and may be about intense verbal gymnastics in terms ofmeter or music, or it may be about the examination of the sonic edge oflanguage: the sounds we can make that have no verbal meaning but which we canpronounce in ways that allow it to carry emotional meaning.

In textual poetry, sometimes called lexical poetry, whichis what most people think of when they think of poetry (that is, poetry inlines that sometimes is read alone, in loping cadence, from a page), the earplays a part because the poem is about the sound of words even when notsounded, the eye has its place because the poem’s arrangement on a pagegoverned its expression from the body and gives silent hints to its meaning,but the poem is primarily for the mind, for the making of sense or thedestruction of sense through sense: it is about the meaning we make when wehear through the syntax of words held in place together.

Certainly, all of these are of the body and affect thebody, and all of these are of the mind, and force us to think, but these arealways emotional products of the self. We are meant to understand them with ourbody, with our mind, and with our heart, which are all the same thing, each oneindistinguishable from another, each more a concept than a fact, each the mostimportant pieces of our unique selves, themselves indistinguishable from theswirling mass of the universe twisting around us.

ecr. l'inf.

At the Sight of the Bruise

2011-12-10T22:26:00.001-05:00

Bruise on My Left Thigh (29 November 2011)

It all started when I fell up the stairs.

It is so more likely for someone to fall down the stairs that I always have to emphasize the word "up" when I tell this story.

I am now weeks into a project to pack up 2000 of my wordbooks (dictionaries, antidictionaries, thesauri, grammars, usage guides, and even monographs on all aspects of language). These I will be donating to the University at Albany in the next couple of weeks, and I never imagined the dangers to my health that such a project entailed.

One day a few weeks ago (the 20th of November), I was carrying two heavy boxes upstairs. (These were actually boxes of my papers, which is the other part of this project.) Just before I made it to the landing, I slipped on the stairs, the weight of the boxes helped pull me down faster, and I landed hard on the corner of the second from the top step with the outside of my left thigh. One of the boxes spilled its contents onto the landing, so I cleaned that up and then I lay down for a while, keeping ice over the point of impact. I went to bed early that night.

The next morning, my leg was still sore, but not much. I had no bruise on my leg at all, and as the days passed my pain slowly subsided. Then on the morning of the eighth day after my accident, I sat down on the toilet and noticed a brand new bruise on my leg, but on the inside of my thigh. It was large, deep purple in the center, flaring out into red, and dissipating finally into that sick shade of green associated almost entirely with bruises.

I thought it amazing that it took over a week for the bruise to show, especially since I had imagined I wouldn't be bruising. After all, I don't bruise easily.

What I didn't realize was that, along with the bruise, I would begin to experience greater pain. Suddenly I had pain that centered on my thigh and calf but that went all the way down to my ankle. The pain was frequent but not constant. It would change places suddenly and without notice. I began to limp.

Eventually, my leg began to seize up, especially if I didn't use it. When I stood after sitting for long periods of time cataloging books to donate away, my leg would cramp up, making the first step with my left leg painful. Worst of all, my leg would cramp up when I slept, and I would away to painful burning cramps six or so times a night.

This past Monday, I decided to visit the doctor, electing to take an appointment late in the day. Yet it wasn't late enough. After waiting thirty minutes past the time of my appointment, I went up to the woman at the counter and asked if I'd been lost in the shuffle. The response was that I was next, and that they hoped they would be able to get to me soon.

And soon enough they did. The nurse weighing me told me she liked my tie, a subtle pattern of ladybugs that people rarely recognize as such.

I didn't see my doctor but a physician's assistant named Kathleen, and she couldn't figure out the problem. She was very thoughtful, asked questions, and allowed me to ask questions, but she didn't know why the bruise took so long to show and why it showed on the opposite of the leg, and further down as well. She told me to take three ibuprofen twice a day, and to call if the situation worsened. She was adamant about this directive, because she'd quickly learned that I'm only vaguely interested in my health. I think she realized this during this conversation:

Kathleen: What medicine's do you take?

Geof: I've no idea. There are too many of them?

Kathleen: You don't know the names of your medicines?

Geof: No. You know how some people are really interested in their health? I'm not one of those people.

Kathleen: Well, you really should know what medicines you're taking. You should keep a list with you.

Geof: I'm never going to do that.

Kathleen (looking in my thick patient folder): I see you take [and she names a bunch of medicines I don't remember the names of now].

Geof: I remembered that two of them had almost the same name. And see? I don't need to remember them. You can look them up.

Kathleen: You need to know your medicines. What if you go to an emergency room, and don't know your medicines?

Geof: I'll never go to an emergency room again.

Kathleen: Why not?

Geof: Because it's always a waste of time.

Somehow, I did not annoy her with my natural obstinacy. I did ask questions, though they were focused on figuring out why the bruise took so long to show. She said I was the most analytical patient she'd ever had. I said I was paid to think.

She also sent me deeper into the hospital for an ultrasound of my leg. I asked, "Is this so we can make sure the baby's okay?" She didn't answer, but maybe she laughed. She was sending me for an ultrasound so that we could discover if I had deep-vein thrombosis (which is a serious condition that can lead to death) or phlebitis (swelling of the veins).

After waiting in two more waiting rooms, a sonographer named Amy conducted the test of my leg. It was a bit boring sitting there without a screen to show me the veins she was following. And she told me that, if I had deep-vein thrombosis, they wouldn't let me leave the hospital. They let me go, but without telling me what the results were.

The next day, I discovered I had superficial vein thrombosis, which is associated with no dangers.

Later that day, however, I called the doctor again and set up an appointment, because the bruise started spreading, popping up in a non-contiguous part of my leg. This seemed like worsening, so the call seemed necessary, though I wasn't at all sure.

This time, my own doctor ("Joey," I called him) showed up, entering the room while saying, "Let's take off the leg!"

"That's what I thought!" I said.

(The man knows me a little, so he can tell jokes.)

He decided that what happened was that the fall damaged the entire muscle group in my thigh, and that this caused bleeding internally that was slowly spreading through the leg (downward apparently because of the force of gravity). He assumed that the bruised had been spreading because the ibuprofen was a blood thinner, so he took me off that regimen and told me not to take my daily aspirin for a week either.

And Kathleen gave me a prescription for a heavy painkiller. I still awoke to cramps the first night I took them, but the dosage in the morning kept me groggy all through the work day, though my pain didn't decrease. I reduced the diurnal dosage the next day.

My pain has slowly subsided over the next few days, though I'm not sure if it was the painkiller alone that made that happen, or if my leg is improving. The bruise is dissipating, so maybe the leg is getting back to normal. Still, I limped for a little bit today.

I received the painkiller in a container with warnings stuck all over it, and until a few minutes ago I thought there were only three warnings. But I have just discovered that one of the warnings was pasted over a fourth:

DO NOT DRINK ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES WHEN TAKING THIS MEDICATION.

Hmm, would've been good to've known about that a few days ago.

ecr. l'inf.

On Metadata and Metalife

2011-12-05T00:26:00.001-05:00

The Fifteen Boxes of Wordbooks Ready for Donation (5 December 2011)

After weeks of working at it, weeks of searching the house for dictionaries and other books of language hiding in nooks, weeks of putting them into boxes, I have not prepared exactly 15 boxes of an estimated 80 or so for donation to the University at Albany.

The process is complicated by two major factors:

First, years ago, I abandoned entering information on each of my books into my database of books, because I'd switched back to Macintosh computers and had not purchased a database program for that environment. I still haven't, but I've found one ancient functioning Windows laptop, and I'm updating the database there. The data I collect on each book is quite extensive, so I have spent many hours collecting metadata on books I'll soon no longer own.

Second, I have never finished covered the dust jackets of each dustjacketed book I own. Certainly, this is a ridiculous process, and one more ridiculous when I'm focused on books I am about to give away, but it has the value of protecting the books from damage (or further damage), no matter where they exist.

Unfortunately, I've been working on this project, various parts of it, for months, so I should be further along. But it's more complicated that simply books. I'm also preparing my papers for donation. And even though a good percentage of those are in perfect order, quite a bit remains unorganized. When I'm not working on organizing books, I'm focused on organizing my personal papers, and I have three boxes of an estimated ten of those in perfect order. But about half of what remains is in order, they just don't fill entire boxes yet.

As part of my papers, I'm organizing the digital files relating to these papers, primarily digital audio and video, though I may also prepare collections of digital photographs for donation as well. All of which takes time, even though most of these collections are in nearly perfect order.

Just as I have pulled too much data into my life, I have created too much data during it. And all of this information is somehow information about my life, metadata about me.

So that I do not so much live a life of flesh and blood and sex and hunger as I lead a life of data, in multiple formats both digital and analog. If the data all disappeared, I myself would disappear, even if my breathing body remained.

ecr. l'inf.

Coming back up for Air, I Realize I Haven't Drowned at All

2011-11-30T22:17:00.001-05:00

Three Boxes of Publications, Most Acquired This Year (30 November 2011)

I took notes for this, so I have to get it right.

At best, I am Frank O'Hara. Can I be Frank? At worst, I am Frank O'Hara. I came up with the title for this constellation of words while foldering poetry pamphlets and magazines and arranging them in boxes in alphabetical order. I have filled three boxes so far. I will fill at least one other, and maybe more. Estimating is the art of being wrong but vaguely sure of it. We depend on what we don't quite know.

When I came up with this title, I first thought I should make a poem out of it, a poem to go under it, with it. But I thought better, deciding that this title needed to be the title of a little essay to end the night I'm struggling through with pencil and folders.

I made all these notes about what I was going to write, and my handwriting is somehow appealing to me. I like how it is long and thin, a bit messy, and occasionally stylish. Not good handwriting, but serviceable. (Like this is not good writing, but serviceable.)

Moving through all of these publications reminds me that I have failed at doing in this space what I had wanted to do: to talk about poetry on the margins, poetry that makes its value in the margins, poetry not much cared for but all the more special for exactly that reason. I have a little pile of books to write about, some that I had read at the beginning of the year, and yet I've set down no words about them. And I wondered why. I didn't wonder what my excuses would be. I know those well enough. I wonder how I let this happen.

And the reason was simple and clear: I am a failure poet, a poet of failure.

I've written about this before. I've suggested that failure is not only an option, that it might be a preferred one. Why? Because success is fleeting, at best, and usually not found—because it is the work that matters to me. I don't put much effort into publishing what I write. My energies, such as they are, I focus into writing, into making. Call me Fabbro, or even ffabbro. My focus is making, not distributing. If I write a book, I might send an electronic copy of it to a few friends, but only if it's reasonably short. No-one's read the book of 156 longish poems I wrote a few years ago. Plenty of my poems have entertained only me.

Since we could reasonably argue that poetry is meant to be consumed by others, that success is other people (other people knowing one's poetry), I can claim, without fear of contradiction, that I've failed at being a career poet. I am not unknown, and I don't bemoan the fate I've created for myself, but I have to accept that most of my poetry is a big secret to the world. The other day I prodded Douglas Rothschild into saying this about the reading he was planning to set up for me in New York City: that he wanted to have my friend Chris Funkhouser be there to be the "name poet." I have to say that I really love that.

I have amassed a full cubic-foot box of poetry I've written this year alone, yet I don't think I've published any poems this year, except a few found photopoems in Otoliths, one poem in the book The Bury Poems, and a small book of photopoems put out by Redfoxpress of Ireland. (I'm not counting the little publications that I create for each reading I give.)

These papers of mine, and all these publications I've made my way through this year remind of more than my failure as a blogger about marginal poetry and a career poet (though I'm not saying I'm a failure as a poet, just that I care about something else; I want more to leave something behind than to have people see it now). This detritus of my life reminds me that I am a person hungry for experience, hungry for media. I want to watch every movie and read every book. And this consumption is a kind of craziness.

I'm estimating that I'll donate about 80 boxes of dictionaries and other wordbooks to the University at Albany this year, along with another 10 boxes of my papers. Why do I have so much stuff? Because it is matter that matters to me, because each book represents knowledge.

The one with the most words at the end of the game wins.

But the game is ending for me. I'm in love with the book, as a physical object, as a carrier of meaning, as a dear friend that opens herself up to me whenever I need her to. I thought, maybe, that I couldn't shake this, but I can. I'm holding onto thousands of books, and still more boxes of my papers, but this year will be my greatest divestment of stuff ever, of the stuff of meaning, and meaning is all that I'm about. (Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" is playing while I write this, because my life needs a soundtrack, and because this is the right soundtrack at this moment.)

I am giving up my books and my papers because I age faster than most people. I feel in my body as a child. Everything is a pleasant surprise to me. I am still energetic enough (and I'm not that old at all). I am still enthralled with the pleasures of the earth. The book and the word entrance me because they are about meaning, but also because they are bodily forces. With them, through them, I return to the body, which is the source of poetry, because poetry is life, because the body is life.

But we, eventually, have to give everything up, we can hold onto nothing forever, and I want to give things up at my pleasure, I want to give them away before they become a burden to me. I need a lighter life. Not a weightless one, but one that is nimbler than mine is now, one of a couple thousand books instead of five thousand. I want to read my way through all my cheap paperbacks (Faulkner, Borges, Smollett even), and I want to discard them, give them away to someone else, start a new life for them.

I want to be filled with them without having to have them. I want the memory of a life instead of the life that these books were. But those most important markers of my life (these personal papers of mine and this huge collection of wordbooks) I want held together as a piece, as a memory of me, just as I will carry within myself a memory of them. So I'm keeping them together. Sometime soon there will be nearly 200 cubic feet of materials that carry the DNA of my thought, words and images and sounds that maintain a better memory of me than I do myself.

I have created this world of meaning, thus I can give it a new way to mean, and a new place in which to do it.

More than a week ago, I fell while walking up the stairs with two heavy boxes of papers and books. The weight of the paper in my two arms (which hugged the boxes to my body) pulled me forward and into the stairs I was walking up, and my left thigh smashed against the corner of a stair. My leg was in pain for hours, so I had to sleep with the pain, but it resided quite a bit. I did not bruise, not for a week, and then the other day a huge bruise, deep and purple but also greenish, appeared on my inner thigh, obliterating this diffuse pink birthmark that otherwise rests there. My entire leg is now sore, sometimes remarkably so. A sharp heat impedes my walking, and I remember that we cannot ever escape the past or what we have done there.

So we might as well preserve what we can of the past somewhere, so we can visit it, and see what we are like. And that's what I'm doing by putting together all these boxes of meaning, which are not less (and nothing more) than my message to the future.

And not all futures are distant.

Geof Huth, "Bilgious" (a poem written in a book of neo-Dada poetry tonight, 30 November 2011)

ecr. l'inf.

The Poetry Survives, the Books at Least

2011-11-27T23:59:00.000-05:00

Geof Huth's Poetry Collection (22 November 2011)

I cannot buy any more books of poetry.

That is what I tell myself, but I ordered a few titles from Jeffrey Maser of Berkeley just the other day. The problem is that the bookshelf that I've set aside for poetry (one that my father-in-law built into a wall for me) is absolutely full. I might be able to squeeze another book into it, but it will be difficult. This bookshelf includes only books of poetry by individual poets or sets of collaborators. There are no anthologies here, no books about poetry, no books by poets that I don't categorize as poetry (all of these are on a different, much smaller bookshelf).

This set of shelves holds my entire alphabet of poets: Aasprong to Zukofsky. But the truth is that not all my books of poetry by individual poets are here. A number of books that are too large for these shelves, or too small, or which are out for reading, or which are set out in anticipation of reading, all of those, lie on other bookshelves, and they number certainly at least 250 books. These shelves here hold about 650 books, almost 100 per shelf, some very thin, some quite wide.

So I assume I have about 900, but maybe even 1,000 books of poetry, almost enough to have to divest myself of this collection as I am my dictionary collection (another 2,000 books there).

I'm not sure if books in such numbers are a burden or a blessing, but I assume they are both. I'm withholding at least 20 dictionaries from my donation to the University at Albany, because I can't bear to without them yet. I'm holding onto all my poetry, except for chapbooks and poetry magazines I've already read.

Yet every book will have to go at some time. As I wrote, elsewhere, today, "Everything must die, and one's connection to a dictionary [or any book] may be the least of such deaths. "

Maybe the least, but still something a bibliophile feels acutely.

ecr. l'inf.

The Re-invention of Hugo Cabret

2011-11-25T23:06:00.001-05:00

Geof Huth, "The Blue Bird of the 72nd Street Subway Station" (25 November 2011)

One day shy of four years and four months ago, when I was still an innocent child, I wrote a review of "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" in this very space. My review was positive, though I certainly characterized the writing in this illustrated book as just a little better than dull. But it is not only words that make a book work, sometimes it is also images, or how the images work with the words.

This afternoon, I saw the movie Hugo, based on the same book but retitled by Hollywood, which believes the more uninteresting a title is the better one will be able to promote the film. Directed by Martin Scorsese, this film hews closely to the story in the book (though Hugo peers from the 4 in a clock instead of the 5), and (more importantly) it maintains the books "second act" focus on Méliès and silent film in general.

Since I the time when I'd read the novels, which is now a lifetime ago, I have seen scores of early silent films, at least doubling the number I had seen up until that time, so every snippet of a film that flashed before my eyes was a bit of a film I actually recognized. I had that connection to the predecessors of this film. And so does Scorsese. At his core, Scorsese is not a filmmaker; he is a film fanatic, an historian. And this film of his is both an authentic and moving replication of the original verbo-visual novel it's based on and an homage to a style and era of filmmaking that we have generally abandoned. The act of making this film is an act of restoring our memory of the mute films of the past, and this resonates with the story of the film itself. The film as a project, thus, recreates the book as a project and the book as a story.

Which is perfectly right, since no film is actually about itself (unlike, say, poems, which are usually about themselves); they are always about something else; they are always replicants standing in for something else.

So I watched the film in 3D, at a theater near the 72nd Street subway station in Manhattan, and I was amazed at its artistry, its sense of magic, and it all reminded me of how the now clumsy special effects of Méliès were actually acts of supreme genius. He thought beyond the film stock, and so he figured out how to make appear on it what was never quite there.

This film reverberates with the past: the past of Paris, the past of cinema, the past of the characters occupying that pseudo-3D space before my eyes, and the past represented by the book fewer people will read than will see the movie (even though that thick book is a quick and beneficial night's read). But it is also a good story well told, with characters that are much more real than those of the book. Here, rather than in the original book, the people become real flesh and blood, beings we can believe in and care about, even the station master. So I teared up, because I am a sap and my heart runs slow though steady, near the end of the story when Hugo Cabret begs the stationmaster to let him go, because the stationmaster should understand, and the stationmaster knows Hugo is right, and knows that his only chance is also Hugo's: that he has to let him go.

And so the trick of caring for a celluloid person works on me, because I want to replace the clockwork of our lives, no matter how efficient and effective, with the beating heart of a body, because it is better to care at all than to wait until it is the perfect time to care. So I would tell you, if I could tell you directly, to see this film, because it is beautiful visually, because the actor's make themselves fragile and real, because Scorsese makes a Hitchcockian camio, because the special effects are perfect because they are unobtrusive and propel the story, because the clockwork automaton who draws us and the characters themselves into the story has a real beating heart that we can never see.

And I say this even though I can never understand why Hollywood usually thinks that all foreign languages when represented in English on the screen need to be presented with British accents, instead of American or Canadian ones or the accent of the languages people are actually supposed to be speaking.

There is, I suppose, nothing real about the movies, and nothing real about the hearts we discover we have while sitting in the dark to watch them.

ecr. l'inf.