. .

Okay here we go.

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What it is "requires noise." Think on that.

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From Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols:

Carlyle: a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetor from need, constantly lured by the craving for a strong faith and the feeling of his incapacity for it (in this respect, a typical romantic!). The craving for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, but quite the contrary. If one has such a faith, then one can afford the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is sure enough, firm enough, has ties enough for that... [Carlyle] requires noise. A constant passionate dishonesty against himself--that is his proprium; in this respect he is and remains interesting. Of course, in England he is admired precisely for his honesty. Well, that is English... At bottom, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honour not to be one.

***

summer: week nine

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Want to be my Netflix friend? I want to be yours.

***

. .

They’re surprisingly self-aware. They laugh when tickled, especially when they’re young, and they have ticklish spots; tickle the nape of a rat pup’s neck and it will squeal ultrasonically in a soundgram pattern like that of a human giggle.

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summer: week eight

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The day of Sage's baptism.

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Rocking horse. Lullaby.

***

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summer: week seven ( . . )

Three days ago I noticed the bracelet had slipped into the unknown from my left wrist where I've worn it beside the stainless blue-face quartz for the last several years. It was gone. The keeper of years was gone, leaving my drugstore watch, the keeper of hours, distinctly unencumbered, streamlined from ornament, purposeful. And though I had loved that piece (had never seen anything like it, had worn it as a thing I'd chosen for myself, a thing I'd wanted to myself, and as myself), when it was gone I was only relieved and astonished to be relieved, and when I found it in the carpet beside the bed yesterday I felt, after not watching for it at all, that it had of course found me while lying in wait, as is the habit I'd put on it. For I hadn't bought it myself, but had waited to receive it.

***

. . . . . .

Seven, eight years ago J walked me into an antique shop to view a white velvet camel-back Victorian he'd spotted and begun dreaming into his living room. The sofa--lovely, impractical--was covered in plastic, a vulnerable expensive thing beneath an ugly dusty tarp that made you wonder what kind of existence it could have without its veil. By May or June of the following year, the sofa had moved into J's apartment just as I no longer slept there after evenings spent on the stiff red velvet settee or the gold crushed velvet chairs that lately reformed how we sat together watching The Simpsons or Seinfeld, if we did. Someone with more love for the work might've repaired the springs in the settee's middle cushions and the carved back that threatened to detach itself from the couch if, sitting, we leaned in its direction, we two with the middle broken springs between us, his back straightened--the posture of a man sitting on the edge of his seat--my back curved towards my knees. But it was nearing Christmas, the weeks before we would break for home, he for California, I for Arizona, so J was looking to replace his furniture. "What do you think?" He asked. I walked around it and swallowed the jealousy I already felt for the place this piece had in his imagination. "Well. It's beautiful. It is. But how will people ever sit on it?" He walked towards it, touched the dark wood through the tarp. "People? There will be no 'people.' No one's going to sit on it except me." I let that sting a little before prodding: "and me?" He grinned. "Of course I'd let you sit on it." I moved away to let him work out his longing on the shop owner. In a brown box on a nearby shelf, a small sturdy chain caught my attention, each link soldered (in my imagination) like a wire-framed eyelet, the clasp stamped "Italy 925," the tag on the end of its thread: "Antique bracelet $20."

***

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summer: week six ( . . . )

Friday afternoon moved into Suite #6 at Casa Libre en la Solana, opened the notebook to get cracking, rubbed my hands together, pressed the power button. The notebook lights flickered for a few seconds, then nothing. Five Days, the green lights flickered. Nothing. So I brought out the violins and sang the "the moment I arrived at this all too brief residency to get a handle on the strange either it's a book or a waste of time book my motherboard died" song. On the sixth day we return to you having written two letters by hand. Having scissored and glued one version of the manuscript into a blank book to look at. Having bobbled in the pool over an article or two on annunciation iconography--lilies, enclosed gardens, circular windows, rays of light, inscriptions, footstools--until sunburned. Ate organic trail mix, called Dell thrice. We rise again, Four Days left. Call it a long weekend. Call it a total wash and go thrift shopping, what people all over come to the Avenue to do (have my eye on a pair of shoes you'd hate). Call it an annunciation: go home, the book remains sealed. --But no. The cicadas are oppressive. It is too hot to shop. The documents are open, five of the six, and the power lights are on. Word is on.

***

The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry is featured at the Poetry Foundation with six awesome poems by six awesome poets from the anthology and commentaries by Francisco Aragon. Go see.

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From "C.D. Wright in Conversation with Kent Johnson":

As to my own aesthetic associations / affiliations / sympathies: I have never belonged to a notable element of writers who identified with one another partly because I come from Arkansas, specifically that part of Arkansas known for its resistance-to-joining, a non-urban environment where readily identifiable groups and sub-groups are less likely to form. The last known poetry clan in my part of the country was the Agrarians. I was not of that generation, gender or class.

Moving around the country — especially to San Francisco — exposed me to the differences that were becoming loudly pronounced in the late seventies. An old friend of mine in New York had mailed me the first issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine before I moved West, but I did not grasp the arguments while in Arkansas. I suppose I was happily ignorant of the aesthetic differences which divide poets.

Everything for me was, and probably still is, personal. If I was somewhat paralyzed by the fractious nature of poetics in San Francisco, from the sidelines, I can admit I was also stimulated by the fray. I realized I could not name my own point of view much less put a fine point on it. Still, I think it might have been more depressing for poets who were from the city and not included. I could opt for the position that I had never “tried out.”

The theoretically-driven San Francisco poets who were in cahoots with poets in New York and conversant with European vanguard movements — they provided me with a need to become critically aware of my back-home ways; sharpened me to a degree. I’m grateful for the exposure, the education. I am indebted to particular poets’ work from that point in time, but I am not an intellectual in the sense that qualifies or requires me to belong to a manifestoed-group. And of course one comes to take some pride in one's own outsider status.

(read the whole here)

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. . .

& one hundred and thirty-seven wow and thanks.

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From "Three Conversations with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge"

LH: Let me now ask you a slightly different set of questions. In Rae Armantrout’s essay, “Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity,” she argues against the idea that women writers are less experimental and more traditional by nature, that they supposedly need more plot and narration in order to describe the conditions of their social oppression. Rae argues against that point, which had been suggested by other writers — all of them men, I think — saying that women are actually very attracted to an experimental kind of writing that rebukes this set of conventions. She questions the “meaning of clarity.” This has to do with the poetic discourses of the academy, the institution of “Creative Writing,” people studying Contemporary Literature, the mainstream forms of modern writing. She suggests that women are instinctive “outsiders” to these conventions.

MB: Yes, I would even say that women have an essentially more fragmented approach to writing. Just being the outsider gives you more freedom to see the fragments.

I remember years ago Kathleen Fraser saying that women with children have to do this and that — it’s more natural for them to pay attention in fragments. I’ve heard people say that to portray fragments is actually more naturalistic. If we sit here, for example, and people walk by talking, and you record what we say and they say in patches, that’s actually more representational than a single narrative line.

LH: So going back to this issue of “clarity.” Take the writing of Leslie Silko, for example. Her writing is following those traditional representational structures that are considered part of a “clear” reader-writer contract, right?

MB: I wonder if that, for her, is really part of her social commitment. She has a deep commitment to people without power. Also, I question the word “traditional” as applied to Leslie. The clarity of her narrative line may not be of a tradition we are familiar with.

LH: Well, that’s the argument that Rae Armantrout is countering. She’s actually responding to her friend Ron Silliman’s argument, that women, like other oppressed groups of people, need the conventions of narrative to speak at all. She says that we, as women, have a connection to alternative rather than conventional terms of discourse, which may be patriarchally-ideologically infused and inescapably so. That women have a different relation to the symbolic. What is your own position on this? In your writing, where do you see yourself? Because I believe that you, too, are a socially aware writer, on many different levels.

What you are doing with perspective is very political for me, because perspective is situational, and that shifting situation is the nature of politics, whether you’re in a room of people in some kind of institution, or any group, or the family — maybe I’m answering my own question —

MB: I like what you’re saying.

LH: Where do you position yourself with regard to “the group,” politically? And what kind of relation do you wish to build with your reader?

MB: I have deep feeling for the group, deep longing, and I have inner-drive for my work. Generally, I’ve let my inner-drive dictate what the next moment will be. I trust that inner drive’s assessment of the reader. At the same time, I want to be open to and express the situation of my culture. I feel that audience extends out like a web. A reader can carry the influence of my poem to another person without that person necessarily knowing the poem itself. I also feel karma works in the proliferation of one’s influence or expression.

But I don’t think understanding is that important. I think there are mysteries. Things can set other things in motion that can set yet other things in motion. Without understanding.

(read the whole here)

***

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summer: week five

"We have the right to our own aesthetic values and approaches, and we are under no obligation to take into consideration, or make concessions to, aesthetic approaches (or political ideologies mascarading as aesthetics) that are hostile to us."

Lyle Daggette

***

From "Between Tongues: an Interview with Rosmarie Waldrop"

Well, yes, Absence is the great generator. I sometimes wonder, are most poems lastly elegies?

Jabès holds that we speak, comment, write because we cannot bear silence, which is lastly the absence of an “original word” lost in the breakage of the first Tablets of the Law. But that it is also this silence that allows us to speak, read, write. “Writing is an act of silence, allowing itself to be read in its entirety.” And we must “rather than to sense, hold on to the silence that has formed the word.”

I’ve worked with absences, esp. in Lawn of Excluded Middle: absence of center, empty center, the womb, the resonating space of a musical instrument, the space between words that makes them words, words carrying absence as a sea shell carries the roar of the sea: “words shelling the echo of absence onto the dry land,” or “the empty space I place at the center of each poems to allow penetration.” But as for the "metaphysical presence" I have no experience of it.

Silence and elision figure in many poets’ work. Almost by definition: every line of verse at its end turns toward silence, toward the white of the page, toward what is not. (It is one of the challenges of the prose poem to preserve this silence once there is no white space at the end of a line because there is no line. It has to be displaced into syntactical/grammatical “turns.” Or semantic shifts. Recently I have created silence inside the sentence by using periods rhythmically where they don’t belong grammatically).

One could also say that white space, while it interrupts the text nevertheless is the larger continuity, and that the poem rests on this continuity, on this silence that is present in the white of the page.

Silence in conversation is a different matter. I am happy that Edmond and I were comfortable enough with one another not to get fidgety with silence. It sometimes proved the silence of a thought forming that later could be communicated. But other times not.

Ortega y Gasset has a very interesting passage on this phenomenon:

When we converse, we live within a society; when we think, we remain alone. But in this kind [of true interchange], we do both at once...: we pay attention to what is being said with almost melodramatic emotion and at the same time we become more and more immersed in the solitary well of our meditation. This increasing dissociation cannot be sustained in a permanent balance. For this reason, such conversations characteristically reach a point when they suffer a paralysis and lapse into a heavy silence. Each speaker is self-absorbed. Simply as a result of thinking, he isn't able to talk. Dialogue has given birth to silence, and the initial social contact has fallen into states of solitude.

(read the whole here)

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But as for the "metaphysical presence" I have no experience of it. I wonder then how it is possible to experience or work with absence . . .

***

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From Annie Finch's proposed thealogy: "The Body of Poetry"

During the same two centuries lyric poetry, like the other arts, has come partially to fulfill the role of religion in the spiritual lives of many educated secular humanists. As the individualized self has increasingly taken on a quasi-religious significance through the Romantic and Modernist movements (compare how ancient or even medieval poetry centered itself in social convention and allusions rather than the individualized perspective of the self), the structural bases of poetry have been reorganized to reflect a new emphasis on the experience of the individual soul, and on an aesthetics of transcendence as opposed to immanence. So, ironically, lyric poetry has itself taken on key spiritual and metaphysical characteristics of the dominant religious tradition. These unspoken assumptions have come to dominate both mainstream and "avant-garde" contemporary poetics, a situation with implications not only for the content of spiritually-oriented poetry, but also for poetics on a level deeper than that of religious content.

In contemporary free-verse anecdotal poetry, that mode which Ron Silliman, following Edgar Allan Poe, has called the "school of quietude," the apparent sincerity of the individual self, or soul, becomes the central transcendent poetic criterion, a site of spiritual fetishization. All other factors—form, diction, image, subject, tone—are subsumed in the service of this effect. On the other hand, in the case of much avant-garde poetry, including such experimental-spiritual poets as Fanny Howe and Ann Lauterbach, the spontaneous shapes of an increasingly disjointed poetry are conjured as a means to invoke the transcendent-inexpressible, a grace that defies and overwhelms language.

Both kinds of poetry gain authenticity in the reader's eyes to the extent that they appear to leave behind, or transcend, the "poem" as artifice, a crafted piece of language with its conventions of diction and rhythm and distinct, recognizable structural characteristics. Whether the spiritual self or its transcendent object is the center of a contemporary poem, in either case the sensual "body" of the poem, and the language that builds it, is beside the point, for both mainstream and avant-garde critics. Whether purged with Puritanical zeal of anything that disturbs the mundane linguistic flow with the reek of the "poetic" on the one hand, or "fractured," "fragmented," "ruptured" with tireless violence on the other, the poem's body has come to be despised by literary culture.

In what I have come to name as a Goddess-oriented spirituality, the attitude towards the body is the opposite to that in the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition. Dirt, blood, sex, soul, earth, death, animal are not destined to be transcended; as direct embodiments of the immanent sacred, they by extension are sacred. The traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions may tell us mystically that God is present in everything ("I draw water, I carry wood; that is my prayer," said the monk in one of my earliest favorite stories), but the notion of the Goddess actually constitutes a physical presence. Not only is the Goddess of the world; the world is her manifestation. Though the transcendent god and the immanent goddess are complementary sides of the same human spiritual coin, their resonances are fundamentally different.

In a poetics of thealogy as opposed to theology, connections of shape and identity within and between poems are not accidental embarrassments, but crucial kinships. For one thing, the skeleton of pattern that creates coherence gives the ability for the self to let go of a single, ego-oriented identity within the larger identity of a patterned shape. Transcendence is not the only way out of the self; there are several ways to skin a soul. And the connection and difference between various poems' forms and shapes, like varieties of species, make evident the polyvalent nature of the sacred. In this context, to write a poem as a separately formed individual poem, united to others only in relation to a single abstract formlessness, would be to sacrifice the texture of specificity and the multiplicity of patterned and formal structures for what amounts to a sort of free-verse monotheism.

(read the whole here)

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Assuming that whatever corresponds to form corresponds to body, though all this dualism is, as ever, duplicitous. I don't believe it. You don't either. And the connection and difference between various poems' forms and shapes, like varieties of species, make evident the polyvalent nature of the sacred.

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Trystan proposed that he and I write a collaborative book-length poem called Wax. "A goofy thing with six lines in each section," he said of it. While we're on the note of "authenticity": would the real writer of poems in the house please take over? I'm retiring. --Don't read mine. Read the odd numbers. Those are his.

1-
His wax is a pain relief kind of wax. The kind of wax that she has is ear wax, igyou!

She wishes that she had the kind of wax that he has. And then her wish came true,

now she had a pain relief kind of wax, just that she wished for. The next day, he came

to her house for a sleepover. He watched TV, she took a nap, then it was night, then

she heard something, she woke him up, it was a bear! They thinked suddenly,

they had an idea! He threw his pain relief wax at the bear, it killed the bear! It was the best sleepover ever!

2-
He worried about the wax in his dream, the wax of dolls' eyes and chattering wax teeth

and yellow statues melting in the heat of his hands because he held all of it in his hot hands,

the hot hands in his mind where the dreams made everything creamy. His feet melted

against the sidewalk in the sun, and his ankles, and his knees and femurs, and his hamstrings.

They were big soft lumps in a soft yellow puddle of his own body wax. Dear me, said his head

as it looked down at his torso floating in the soft bone puddle the hot hands in his mind made up.

3-
The wax that he used last night was a very amazing night. Then he said shesh, what a night! Then he gave her

a ring that said, Wax Forever. And she said, What a Beautiful Ring. Then they went to the airport to go buy rich wax.

There is rich wax at London, Paris and Tokyo after 1 full day! They went to the Tokyo store to buy rich wax.

They saw only one bin of Tokyo's rich wax left. They were very rich, after they paid $1,000 for a $100.00 bin of rich wax.

They had $2,000 total when they got $900.00 back. When they flew home on flight 1,257, they

watched a movie when they got to their house, now that they have rich wax.


4-

The movie was really a rhinocerous commercial. It waxed on and on about rhinocerous horns and rhinocerous

plates and rhinocerous nonstick waxless bakeware until one of them decided they wanted

the waxless rhinocerous bread machine and picked up the phone and dialed 1-800-WAXLESSRHINOWARE

and said, "yes, one waxless wonderman bread machine please, rhino-plated, yes?" The woman on the t.v. screen

said "oh you must be calling from California. We don't sell anything waxless in California." And she smoothed the hair

on the rhinocerous's head. Why not? they asked. "Because," she said knowingly, "in California they grow wax by the sea."

5-

The wax is going to charitiy, at Washington state. He has a bandana over his head, he, the one who called the charitiy to pick up his wax.

He went to WWW.WAX CHARITIY.COM. He wrote a song 2 weeks after he ordered the wax at WWW.WAX CHARITIY.COM. 1 week later,

the charitiy came with the wax. And he said, Why did it take so long for my wax to get here! Because somebody else ordered at

WWW.WAX CHARITIY.COM. Then he took a trip with his wax. then he said, I am W.M.W that means, WITH MY WAX.

Later, he was in Paris and then, somebody said, Bonjour, somebody named, Pierre, and he said, I was the one that

created WWW.WAX CHARITIY.COM. Then Will said, OK. And Pierre said, What do you have there? I have wax.

6-

Years of booking wax and shelving it as soon as it arrived and the man could no longer find room

in the tables for the multiples representing the pounds of wax on paper. Any number he chose led back to negative

stores of wax, the wax slipping into grams, milligrams, then zeros, though the shelves were full

and the warehouses across the city, his cities, reeked with the smell of lanolin, paraffin, vanilla bean,

wintergreeen mint, grease-stained cardboard wrapped around blocks of sallow wax. A single box arrived

that day that smelled of rubber, of whitewall tires, of elastic bands. That's when the wax began to melt.

***