New Jersey as an Impossible Object

The Wonder Show of the Universe

2011-07-29T11:25:00.001-07:00

I sat down today to try to read some of Marcia Nardi's actually published poetry. I have tried before, but it was too off-putting. Maybe because the genteelly thin poems seemed somehow shamed by the excess of her letters to Williams, as if she was deluded in inventing more crafty modes to squirrel away unacceptable emotions. However today the poems seem strangely compelling--you can hear the resonances of her anger and poverty between the lines, the bitterness twisted up into a bittersweet rhyme, and a kind of Buddhist approach to emptiness and death (although she seems not to have the tools to sugar-coat it as such--this is before the Gary Snyders and the Allen Ginsbergs inform the scene--so there is an interesting unqualified vacillation between despair and resignation; after all, as her letters imply, she still very much wants to be a part of the world that has abandoned her; she has not, for all that, become detached from her desires).
One interesting discovery had to do with her odd repeated references to Thurston or Thurstons, used as one might say something like "the Shakespeares and Homers of our time." It was difficult to search on Google, given that our communal digital brain does not confer the same sort of esteem that Nardi seemed to have for this figure. It couldn't be Thurston Moore or Thurston Howell III for purely historical reasons. Perhaps some legendary robber baron or scientist whose obscure advance became posthumously revolutionary? When I saw this picture, I knew who she was talking about

Knowing this, these lines become clear:

"And how that magic hat, invisibly
With rabbits filled,
That charmed her in her childhood will suddenly be
Some tattered schoolroom map of six by four
From which new Thurstons wonderfully draw
Real Aetnas"

+++++++++++++++++("Femelle de L'Homme")

"Your thought running from you
Just outside your window
At your call turning by running on
Because you have no face yet
Because it does not know you
Because you are the original Thurston
Waiting
For a world of his own making
In order to be born,
The creator creating to be created
The womb within a womb--"

+++++++++++++++++("Alone with a Poem")

In honor of Marcia Nardi, spend some time with unloved poetry.

Junk Shot 2! Jennifer Scappettone and The Eye of Disaster

2011-03-17T11:41:00.000-07:00

(Junk Shot 2 continues our on-going conversation with Jennifer Scappettone on "The Poetics of Enormity")

Milutis: Given this poetry requires a lot of research, is there a sense of regret that such a signature is not enough, and that your filtration process leaves out material that could be used to educate or elucidate? Or does it? Again, maybe the issue is one of the perceived smallness of device: poetic versus, say, prose-journalistic. You’re at an interesting intersection between informational value and poetic value, which are many times seen as completely antithetical.

I notice, too, that your list of the comico-tragic solutions to the BP oil spill has the heading “a taste of regret.” Keeping the same sense of regret as above—the regret for what’s left out, for knowledge that cannot be framed because of constraints of temporality, medium, form—at least the first four terms in this list had the status of buzz-words, calculated as incantations of American can-do. Junk-shot. Corexit. Top-kill. Sea-Brat #4. How do we create our knowledge of an enormous event out of these arguably poetic terms? Or do they block knowledge? Similarly, there is the popular concept of the “talking-point,” which is another tool to wrench out meaning from an enormity. We could say that this phenomenon is something news media shares with poetry, if we think about talking points like “no ideas but in things.” You wouldn’t be able to play with that in "Poetics of Enormity," and activate an enormous dialogue with Williams in the bargain, if it hadn’t become this take-away line, and hence, ultimately, a kind of flat, unthinking piece of text passed around from agency to agency. So, are these blockages or do they have some enabling capacity? How do you conceive of what you call the “post-slogan?”

Scappettone (Sent March 15, 2011): I realize there is an alas pervading each snippet of the whole, now that you pointedly ask. The results of every stab at research into seemingly shapeless miasmata of data are bound to fall short of the sublime knowledge base necessary to address the current social, environmental, and speculative emergencies in a concrete fashion. I like your use of the term "signature," which however redolent of a predigital age, reminds us that we are after all still mere flawed human individuals, writing pieces that are in some way bound to ourselves, no matter how many operations we launch as artists to escape, kaleidoscopically, our own experience.

We suffer in fact from a superabundance of information and a deficit of knowledge. How do we trace the systemic triggers of such emergencies? We would need to perform an operation such as that of Dziga Vertov in the Kino-Eye newsreels, to trace the sources of the common hamburger in its bun back to the farms and the wheatfields and the people working there: to try clarifying the tracks of production in a context that forces us to lose our grasp on the path, umbilical, that yokes one source of nourishment or crisis to the next.

Since I began composing this answer, in bitter confirmation of the urgency of addressing such questions, an earthquake at sea has triggered a tsunami which has triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, of proportions that remain to be seen and clarified. I think about the memoirs of hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that I pored through when editing the translation of a collection aimed to halt nuclear development 15 years back, the most painful attention to language I've ever paid. All of the survivors of Hiroshima interviewed mentioned the Aioi bridge. The mothers, siblings, children that had been left on the other side. The water or food that had been isolated to the other side. The people jettisoning themselves into the water to seek relief from the pain of burning, floating. It was a shared point of trauma punctuating the whole hell of horrible memories resisting any form of organization or even elegy.

When I returned to the US after two years of living in Japan, I went to an exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum devoted to the 50th anniversary of the Enola Gay bombing. It was astonishing. I had imagined that even if apology were lacking from such an institution, a taste of regret would pervade the whole. Instead, what resulted (apparently following a huge controversy, I later learned) was celebration sterilized of any trauma inflicted on the ground. One walked in to find the T-shaped bridge, the target of the bomb, captured as a still from a bird's eye view. Then the triumphal recording of the flight crew as it struck. The aestheticization of horror.*

One aspect of poetry as vocation is, it seems to me, to seek justice in the present or a redemption of history by forcing these radically disparate points of view to cohabit, if not fuse. To testify to the material fallout of actions, ours and those from "on high," with the cultural breadth that we are trained to file down little by little in the service of professionalism. The bridge in a poetic text of the sort I'm talking about becomes a focal point of concentration in an environment that is apocalyptically hybridized, yet which does contain a logic to which we can point.

Poetry can, moreover, confront interested obstructions of knowledge by using the language of obfuscation against itself, its jingles and buzz-words and slogans and spins—returning the control of knowledge in the form of the take-away line to the page or screen as a shape palpably displaced, deformed—so that the fog of rhetoric, triumph and advertising emerges as just that, rather than as common sense. I am exceedingly interested in the performative power of lyricism, of sonorousness; and this work, Exit 43, cobbles choral texts together out of the most self-contradictory material—the voices of Victorian poetasters, the EPA/Superfund, corporations, Alices—so as to create jarring rhymes that one can "buy" sonically, yet which beg further attention as material falling short of sense. I've structurally sampled the "nonsense" logics of Lewis Carroll in the service of this effort.

I do believe, ultimately, perhaps naively, in the utility of such work with language, which is highly specific. I don't reckon that information unshaped can convey meaning as knowledge. And journalism, however critical, needs to form a narrative even when none has arisen, and also responds to a political climate with which it must nearly always compromise. Hence poetry, "unsponsored."

*It isn't necessary for every document of history to include every possible point of view in order to be responsible to the truth. Years later, I went to an exhibit called "Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960," at the Brooklyn Museum. The fascination and dread surrounding the chemistry of biomorphic form in those years, a fundamental anxiety and ambivalence emerging from the United States, was represented with remarkable clarity by these curators.

Junk Shot! with Jennifer Scappettone

2011-03-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

On June 11, in the midst of the BP oilspill, Jennifer Scappettone delivered a talk at the Penn/Columbia Poetics Conference: Rethinking Poetics, that, to my mind was one of the few satisfying re-thoughts, and which she described as a "post-Paterson" intervention. Her "Poetics of Enormity" is part of a larger multimedia installation project Exit 43 and questions such key poetic concepts--old and new--such as particularity, ambience, materiality, that, emerging from Williams' attempt to capture the city, shudder in the face of the new "impossible objects"--whole ecologies catastrophized by corporate malfeasance. I will post my first question and her answer as part of a larger dialogue with Scappettone, to be posted in installments as a kind of "junk shot" to the flow of this blog, as it moves towards a foreseeable conclusion.

Milutis: Let's start with a hypothesis. Big poems are about big things (e.g. the epic), small poems are about small things (e.g. haiku). With Paterson, Williams would transform this tendency by using the small to get at the big, (but without the slight-of-hand of, say, Virgil talking about his apiary to describe a military panorama.) Williams works through and ultimately against devices like analogy--with various degrees of success--so that the small keeps its smallness, and the bigness of Paterson is an accumulation of encounters with these particulars rather than a synthesis (5 or 6 books of "clarifying" and "compressing").

So, in what you term a "post-Paterson" intervention,"Poetics of Enormity" (a piece-in-progress for the larger book/installation, Exit 43), you take on the issue of the big, of "enormity," in our current context. You start off "It seems the trouble is enormity," and later, make a pointed reference to Williams' attempt to understand something really beyond his powers of understanding; you rewrite his opening invocation as: "To make a start, out of enormity, and make it particulate, scattering the sum,/The poem a site for the restreaming of post-pastoral, post-Paterson fact in motion/as junk in the limbs."

Given your move from particulars to enormity, how do we START with enormity? What are the devices to get at this enormity? And, if this is an ethical position, is it somewhat quixotically or ironically so, or do you sense a path through the enormous?

Scappettone (sent January 6, 2011): The move away from a modernist—or modernist-cum-late-20th-century-creative-writing-workshop—focus on building a syncretic work out of particulars toward an aesthetic undertaking to confront a massive scale from the start is of course pointed (pointed through dispersion of focus, that is). While our immediate ancestors may have felt themselves to be laying the groundwork for a life of enhanced production, health, and leisure, we found ourselves mired in an epos that perceives itself to be unfolding in the eye of catastrophe, faced by the sublimity of unprofitable alterations in arrangements of resources and power: a widening gap between rich and poor in the face of dwindling provisions, environmental devastation and the invention of new diseases, the collapse of long-performative fictions of value, to take a few salient examples, and the violent conflicts that proceed from these conditions.

Starting from enormity requires a hell of a lot of research. No longer can the poet make a promising start, it seems to me, by pausing to meditate on the minor souvenirs or phenomena of the immediate moment without some sense of their complicity in the greater web of relations. Artists committed to intervening in sublimity as opposed to representing it alone need to take a stab at comprehending the totality of trouble or promise as it is embedded in the medium at hand: language, its structures of feeling and cognition, now and here but also, ideally, over time and across space. Comprehension of systemic workings would permit us to choose our subjects or objects carefully—since part of our trouble as producers is a superabundance of possible willing object/subjects, a need more astutely to search and sift through them, or at least to identify good reasons for reproducing the circumambient tsunami of information/stimuli. Devices for getting at enormity include web researches, naturally and inevitably, but also the obsolescing library, as it turns out our problems aren’t altogether new after all, though our presentism suggests as much. It seems important to include traces of the arduous research process within the work, to function like the drips of painterly epochs past, signatures of care/curation. I don’t see this aspiration, which is also an ethics, as ironic in the least, though perhaps it is quixotic.

.gif for williams

2011-02-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

1668 which pulled away---

1669 the rock’s

1670 their fall up

1668 which pulled away---

1669 the rock’s

1670 their fall up

1668 which pulled away---

1669 the rock’s

1670 their fall up

1668 which pulled away---

1669 the rock’s

1670 their fall up

1668 which pulled away---

1669 the rock’s

1670 their fall up

1668 which pulled away---

1669 the rock’s

1670 their fall up

1668 which pulled away---

1669 the rock’s

1670 their fall

The Uncontainable

2011-01-17T22:01:00.000-08:00

This past summer, I talked to Rachel Blau DuPlessis at the Kelly Writers House about her long-term engagement with Williams' Paterson particularly, and long-form poetic works in general. Her "life-poem" Drafts, described by Ron Silliman as "one of the major poetic achievements of our time," continues an engagement with and challenge to Williams' aesthetics; numbering close to 100, DuPlessis' Drafts are more open, polysemic, multiple, and provisional than perhaps Williams' could have let himself perform, but which, it seems, he dreamed in his own imperfect way. DuPlessis has also written critically about Williams in her book The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, which, like her poems, challenges generic considerations, and expands what the critical essay can be. (And by the way, listening to audio of her performances, available on PennSound is a really great way to start navigating her work).
I feel like this audio interview will be one of the last I will be collecting before attempting a reconsolidation of the various materials. As you can probably tell, the content for this blog has been steadily petering, with some renewals here and there, but nonetheless on the fade. It has always been a question for me whether any consolidation is worthwhile or advisable, which is why interviews like those below have been kept in as close to their rawest form (with some mild editing) because I have felt it is better to make them available during the process, rather than to wait and wait for an ideal form that never comes. What would be the ideal? There are so many objects that this blog can be translated into (so then, why not keep as blog?) In fact, there is an application now where I can press a few buttons, enter a few passwords, and voilà! the blog is "slurped" into a book. (This application here may be easier, all you have to do is enter the url impossibleobject.blogspot.com and see what it would look like without having to download any software.) Obviously, that option only would be some kind of conceptual parody of blog specificity, although it may be worthwhile as a textual trace--evidence, like performance photos, and ultimately useful in case Blogger decides to suddenly cease operations or their data gets wiped out in an electromagnetic singularity. Nevertheless, there will be at the very least a few more postings, including an interview (text only) with Jennifer Scappetone, before Impossible Object makes a leap into another medium or into the void.
The following interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis took place on June 10, 2010 in Philadelphia.
I heard this was a really bad poem: (4 min. 23. sec)
Nobody cared about Williams (or the long poem): (2 min. 51. sec)
Marcia Nardi and the lost women of the 50s: (7 min. 11 sec.)
This is the thing that can never be contained: (6 min. 02 sec.)
Unicorn versus plethora: (4 min. 42 sec.)
Paterson's opening passage: (3 min. 50 sec.)
Eros and plethora: (4 min. 26 sec.)
The triadic line, eros, rape: (4 min. 28 sec.)
Staggering identification with beautiful thing: (2 min. 45 sec.)
Language poetry and Paterson: (2 min. 51 sec.)
Visiting Paterson: (1 min. 30 sec.)

Falls Cameo

2010-11-26T19:24:00.000-08:00

Damn. Even though D. W. Griffith filmed his famous ice floe climax of Way Down East in Connecticut, I'm almost certain that this cutaway is the Passaic Falls . . . which makes perfect sense, since for a long time Griffith worked in the industry when it was still in Fort Lee, New Jersey, just down the road from Paterson.

The Poverty of the Image

2010-11-25T13:21:00.001-08:00

The claims of imagism have always seemed to me hyperbolic. There is something more evocative in even the most cliched 19th-century sentence than in a clipped, retentive modernist line--which is sometimes only a self-caricature, more applicable in theory than in practice. But, my suspicion of some of the claims of imagism perhaps comes only when one conceives that the stripped-down poetic image gives more, not less of the reality to which it refers. I've been working through a lot of Bergson lately, and happened upon a good precis of his work, reminding me of the essential poverty of the image:

perception adds nothing new to the image; in fact, it subtracts from it. Representation is a diminution of the image; the transition from image to pure perception is “discernment in the etymological sense of the word,” a “slicing up” or a “selection” (Matter and Memory, p. 38). According to Bergson, selection occurs because of necessities or utility based in our bodies. In other words, conscious representation results from the suppression of what has no interest for bodily functions and the conservation only of what does interest bodily functions. The conscious perception of a living being therefore exhibits a “necessary poverty” (Matter and Memory, p. 38).

Williams' "things," then, as tied to ideas, can only be what Bergson calls "less than things," in that our relation to them subtracts an image of them (thus, they are virtual in the commonly defined way as the simulacrum, but not, for all that, are they purely subjective); subsequently, they return to the reservoir of accumulated images (thus, they become virtual in the more strictly Bergsonian sense of memory inaccessible to action). It is here where the third imagist principle--"as regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome"--comes into play. When the image is reduced to data, it can more freely engage in speed, dynamism, mobility--thus, just as the modern VJ can create more lively compositions with YouTube crap than with lyrical HD footage (no pun on HD intended), the modernist reduced the world to fragmented images, which in themselves had little power, but which, when entering into the durational play of the art form, opened up powers inherent in some truer nature of time. (cf. the Bergsonism of Stein.) Yet, our ability to choose those images effectively, pulling them from the virtual to make them commensurable with present action inserts the qualitative, creative impact of the temporal interval on what would otherwise be a moment of pure, unthinking action. (cf. the Theosophical background of Pollock; and to continue and contradict my VJ comparison, more thoughtfully captured images may, then, instigate a more complex experience.) This notion of data that is useful for our bodies is a very powerful way to conceive how Paterson was composed along side of Williams' duties as a doctor, as well as the themes he explores dealing with the usefulness of certain forms of knowledge in pursuit of a "radiant gist."

The Ironic Midden

2010-11-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

Recently, I was able to get my hands on the Charles Olson documentary Polis is This, and then to listen to a fairly recent PoemTalk, where they took on Olson's Maximus poems. The documentary made much of the largeness of Olson himself, and we were implicitly asked to imagine how it may have impacted his poetry. In the documentary's archival footage, we can see how he enjoys this largeness, especially when he gestures towards the "thisness" of not only the space of Gloucester, but also his presence in it.

While in PoemTalk Rachel Blau DuPlessis brings the group's attention to this gesturing that seems to self-reference, Charles Bernstein nuances DuPlessis' (and the documentary's) interpretation with a more anti-essentialist (or anti-lyrical) reading: "[Olson] is suggesting that the I in that is the resistance to the present, the possibility of what the future could be, and also the recognition of the past. . . . He's explicitly rejecting the idea that it's about him in just some biographical sense." Later, Bob Perelman will comment upon the "ironic midden" to which the deixis of this section of Maximus ("Plus this--plus this:") contributes, undoubtedly related to Williams' "of this, make it of this, this/ this, this, this, this ."
I will be talking about this "ironic midden" and the possibility of tracing it throughout history, from Shakespeare to Ron Silliman, this week at the Motto Temporary Storefront in Brooklyn. I will be introducing my new multimedia essay on literary minutiae for Triple Canopy--"The Quiddities," in addition to other related events.

The Baroness in New Jersey

2010-10-19T09:27:00.000-07:00

Al Filreis has been posting about the Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven, Dadaist zany and friend of Williams. Here's Williams' remarkable account of his dalliances with the Baroness.

On Paterson and the Cyborg

2010-09-23T22:40:00.000-07:00

here

Everybody's Paying Tribute to the Money (aka the fine print)

2010-09-21T23:38:00.000-07:00

The iClops toy camera--a microscopic viewer with USB input--never worked as well for me as the Vidster toy camera for this project, even though I imagined it could really get down to the particular. At the very least it could magnify those fine-print prose passages, translating them into another dimension. Here is a piece of data junk from the harddrive of the iClops reading from Book II.

Paris Review Interview

2010-09-18T11:59:00.001-07:00

"Modesty is in order, God knows—facing the universe of sound."
A reposted interview with Williams and Flossie, printed in 1964 after his death.

Duh?

2010-07-02T17:10:00.000-07:00

Ok, I get it, "no ideas but in things," is not materialist, but Bergsonian.

All Her Teeth Were Ideas

2010-06-30T13:40:00.000-07:00

The other night, while reading "Berenice"--Poe's zombie thriller of dental surgery gone horribly awry--I was reminded of WCW's admiration for flowers with the power to break rock:
"Thus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel." Poe's wholly fictitious "Nubian geographer" serves as an authoritative stand-in for his own fascination with alternative geographies and other ultima thule. It may be that these territories are less exotic and closer to hand, as can be seen in a picture of grass growing up through curb concrete in an essay by Jonathan Skinner in the new eco language reader. This image, from Cecelia Vicuna's Unravelling Words & the Weaving of Water, is an example of what he calls the "third landscape" of "critical corridors and buffer zones" (24) where there is a proliferation of growth that humans can't match to their system of needs. Accordingly, for him, the job of what one might call "ecopoetry" would be a poetics that "attend[s] to the untended as the untended, essentially leaving it alone" (46-7). Whether Asphodel's powers are actual (like the saxifrage) or metaphorical, I don't know enough to say. Ginsberg calls the Asphodel both mad and cultivated, Williams seems to use it precisely to reflect upon how things "tend" (towards the untend or unintend), and "the sea/which no one tends/ is also a garden." I'm dealing with my own "third landscape issues," since a lovely wild vine on my fence was mysteriously cut overnight--suddenly something seemingly "out-of-control" became a locus of variety of exterior forces. I won't go into the whole tangled narrative that evolved out of this intervention, but given that I'm in a weird intersection where I live, on the one hand, next to an inland forest, but on the other next to an airstrip and industrial zones, and, as well, in a neighborhood which has garden walks (which to me have always reeked of a form of neighborhood surveillance and control of landscape aesthetics), these mini-struggles are bound to occur. I can't even start to articulate how that constant image of the plume of oil coming up through the water in the gulf is impacting (no, beating up) my ability to conceptualize these issues. I have tentative plans to talk with Jennifer Scappettone about her work delivered at the Rethinking Poetics conference, which circulates around such issues. And maybe, also back to the gulf. Thalassa!

--the museum became real

2010-06-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

The best way to experience the Cloisters is to get locked out. I had gone to the Cloisters on a Monday, and while I know museums are usually closed then, someone assured me it was open, and I thought maybe it had some kind of special not-closed-on-Monday status. I prefer word of mouth to digital confirmation, especially when traveling, and here is where it gets me. However, while circling the base of the hill (a drumlin? a roche-moutonée?) I noticed that the striations of rock poking up through the grass were almost identical to those at Garret Mountain. Perhaps, in Williams' imagination, these rocks formed a secret continuum between places, a continuum which disturbs or challenges the creation of human artifacts. The way they came through the surface, it seemed similar to Zizek's description of the Real in Looking Awry, as that undifferentiated substance that is sometimes encountered in science fiction tales in which the edge of the phenomenal world or simulacrum is reached or broached. The Cloisters itself is a mass of organized rock on this undifferentiated, unorganized surface, although there seems to be a continuum, a redundancy even between the museum and its hill. For Williams, the bare rocks speak as "the thing itself," rather than the museum (although what would it mean that the "museum became real," if not this continuum or infinite regress of redundancy that challenges poetic distinction?) Yet I can imagine also that, for him, he is celebrating what one heroically fashions out of the bare rock, and, consequently, what it contains, "her trophies of action and instruments of pleasure"(94). In some ways the unicorn inside the Cloisters is an enviable excrescence when compared to similar artifacts in Garret Mountain's Lambert Castle, a haven for union-busting, nouveau-riche excess rather than monastic withdrawal. Reflecting, perhaps, on these related places, connected during his lifetime by the George Washington Bridge, he says in the beginning of Book V that "Here/ Is not there,/ and will never be." Yet, toward the end of the book he switches this insight up to a less despairing "Anywhere is everywhere." In some ways, the continuity of rock may facilitate the latter interpretation. Yet, when one finally enters the museum, its unicorn tapestries have as a background feature an image of a city in the distance, very much like the way New York City looks from the top of Garret Mountain. If Williams is imagining the unicorn as "I, Paterson, the King-self," and if the city in these tapestries is linked to the forces of civilization that try to trap and kill the unicorn, then is he indicting NY with the murder of the unicorn, or cities in general (since this city in the tapestries can easily, in this dialogue between doubled spaces, be Paterson itself)? And how does this book twist and explode the "man like a city, woman like a flower" equation, if Williams sees himself as the unicorn persecuted by violent group think of cities; or does it rectify it as the overriding theme since it brings in the overlapping symbolic systems of the tapestry's thousand-flowered background and the virgin Mary, with Williams emulating a Christ-like figure?

Poet Beats Fire at Its Own Game!

2010-05-27T13:10:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts on listening to the recent PoemTalk on Williams' "Red Wheelbarrow:" I was sitting over the piano last night trying to compose something to Williams' "Descent Beckons" passage of Paterson, with Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories playing in the background as possible inspiration. Everything I tried sounded no better than something you might hear on an overwrought PBS documentary on Williams (even though the one that does exist is good!) And as I started to ventriloquize Williams' patter-song in lieu of some, again overwrought, "new music"-type vocalization, I started to think, "where have I heard this before?" Sure enough, that part of Paterson is among his recordings on PennSound, where there is not one but NINE different versions of "The Descent," compared to four for "Red Wheelbarrow," and five for "This is Just to Say." So we may have to reassess what we consider to be Williams' chestnuts.
As well, I noticed that Williams uses the word "glaze" with a particular valence in Book III of Paterson that in some ways makes it a pointed response to the "glazed with rain/ water" of the RW: "An old bottle, mauled by the fire/ gets a new glaze, the glass warped/ to a new distinction, reclaiming the/ undefined" (118) This aspect of the bottle, transforming from sand to glass then into some "new distinction" by a less controlled, destructive fire puts it in contrast to the wheelbarrow that is glazed with rain water almost decoratively, highlighting the quiddity of the wheelbarrow with a special, almost coy, atmospheric effect. However, by this point in Paterson, Williams is less delicate with the "beautiful thing." In Books III and IV, it is not the material object that the poet must "amen" ("selah!" "so be it!") but rather the transformative energies that destroy and metamorphize matter. Release the Gamma Rays! So, taking Grenier as his invitation to replace the word "chickens" with something more piquant, how about:

so much depends
upon
XXXX
the red
prematerial
xxxxx
glazed with
electron
xx
beside the white
vortices

My last Red Wheelbarrow reflection is brought to us by the gods of spam, through my Yahoo Pipes Williams/Paterson device. Here, a reflection on the RW, undoubtedly ripped from another, better formatted page, buttressed with posts on Adidas second quarter earnings and BEKO washing machine quality problems.
The name of the blog is "Letter," and somewhat bathetically, we are told that "Letter has'nt any friends yet." The tags for Williams' classic imagistic haiku . . . well we might as well just replace his original words with them, because they are . . . well, close enough . . .

and balls buy
child

clothes coat
eco

friendly hamper
hanger

hangers horse
laundry

mannequin metal
on

rack racks
ride

riding shelf
shoe

toy warehouse
washwooden

--the being taut, balanced between eternities

2010-05-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

The newspaper accounts of tightrope walkers DeLave, Harry Leslie and Geo. Dobbs, mentioned in Book III that I can find are not as interesting as this description of a promised future event, and the aftermath of one of the DeLave walks across the falls:
"The performance was now concluded. DE LAVE gave notice of a repetition of the feat on Monday next, when he would walk with peach baskets tied to his feet, stand on his head, and perform other 'terrific feats.' A large number of pickpockets were on the ground, and one man, ISRAEL MONSON, a butcher doing business in Main-street, lost his pocket-book containing the avails of his week's business -- about $115."
In the following description of a walk by Harry Leslie (Williams found a much better one, which maybe shows how his archivalism trumps that of instant digital access), we see how his walk, the fall of Sarah Cumming, and Sam Patch's leap, all are memorialized by a "blasted pine"--an evocative image that I don't think Williams uses, perhaps because it might have resonances with the landscapes of Romanticism.

No search brings up Geo. Dobbs, except a software developer's site with a weird article titled "Dr. Dobbs: Funambulism and the Perpetual Tension of Software Development," which uses the tightrope as an extended metaphor for maintaining tension between old and new "platforms": "The innovation that will help us regain our balance as developers is not just in this deeper dive, but in treating the entire software system holistically. It won't be sufficient to just analyze the source, or the assembly process, or the tests that exercise the software. We'll control the tension with technologies that are not just process oriented (like the current ALM suite), but with tools that fundamentally understand and communicate what's happening in a software system at various stages of development. This will enable us to optimize our coding and testing to improve software quality, as well as the productivity of every developer. After that, the crowds will cheer as we reach our platform, ready for the next development challenge to present itself." Yes, but can you do it cooking an omelet, in female attire, while doing the "Washerwoman's Frolic"?

Aztec Astral Glitch

2010-05-02T12:15:00.001-07:00

This time reading Book II, I picked up on this mental wormhole that takes us from Garret Mountain to a similar place in Mexico, Chapultepec or "grasshopper hill." It seems like he refers to this statue, or ones like it, when he talks about the "grasshopper of red basalt, boot long . . . a matt stone solicitously instructed/ to bear away some rumor/ of the living presence that has preceded it, out-precedented its breath . " The rumor, we can imagine, may refer to grasshopper's signature sound, and Williams may be reflecting on the appropriateness of a representation without this sound. However, that its "wings do not unfold for flight--," for Williams "no need!" Remember, this passage occurs after the first appearance of the references to that which he approaches "concretely." I had been thinking this time around that, contrary to perhaps more wishful interpretations of Williams' relation to the concrete, that in Book II he conceptually places the concrete in subordinate relation to the vitality of the workers in the park, and thus seems to denigrate the concrete, even though the workers are boisterously rude. Yet he goes on to describe how the "mind's wings," connected to the artist's hand, and faced with the unyielding rock, seem, in this odd game of rock-paper-scissors to beat out any cheap vitality. This reference may serve to clarify the cryptic lines "Love is a stone endlessly in flight;" "the stone lives, the flesh dies;" as well, perhaps his reference to "window-eyes that front the whole head" (see pic above) implying the immortal insomnia of artistic vision, of the "Love [that] combat[s] sleep."
A big question for me is how this passage was meant to be read without the possibility of a quick Internet search? As an astral residue in memory? How legible is it meant to be?

Paterson Datum no. 47

2010-04-28T13:30:00.001-07:00

Paterson via San Francisco

2010-04-19T17:17:00.000-07:00

Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren cutting up on Paterson

via spsullivanmedia

A Time Before Slaughter and Other Updates

2010-04-12T17:49:00.000-07:00

I've started to teach Paterson for the first time, and I am structuring a whole course around it, so I was expecting to be posting more, but the little insights proliferate and flow away. I did finally get a new copy, and it's nice to have some clean pages (to dirty again . . . ruing how the mind continues), and then another copy of the older version made it my way, just as I was starting to reflect on transcription inconsistencies (the true mark of "overreading"?) I had Paul Nelson come in to class today to talk about his Patersonesque project about Auburn, WA nee Slaughter in his A Time Before Slaughter; in his long poem, the absence of water flowing seems to be an interesting inverse of the presence of the falls in Paterson. That is, instead of the falls and its water being a source of energy and industry in Paterson, here, because of the way the snow melts off the mountains in these parts, the settlements would have been impossible without getting rid of the water--in the form of damming and rerouting or eradicating the natural waterways. . . . with the attendant displacement of native Americans and natural resources. This connection to Paterson in the Pacific Northwest will be important for this class since I'm asking students to imagine their own Patersons, using a combination of creative research and writing using Google maps as an interface. We'll be doing Frank O' Hara, Alice Notley, Robert Smithson, and other related writers since this class is a reformulation of the "everyday life" class that I've taught before, here and at Brown, but in the past with less of an emphasis on poetry.
In semi-related Williams news, some mention of Williams made it into this new piece of mine just out in Triple Canopy on the rolled r, called "R, Adieu."

Golden Coach into the Future

2010-03-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

Golden Coach Diner, where Smithson had lunch on his famous New Jersey drift (in "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, NJ") is now a Dunkin Donuts. Not too bad a fall into the future. I'm at a donut shop now, and this morning I heard someone asking "do you have, you know, those mini-donuts, the holes." At least Dunkin Donuts has a name for these. Although I think Smithson would like the idea of going to a donut shop and asking for a box of holes. "Can I have a thing that is a hole in a thing it is not?" They should be called do-nots, or do-knots.

To What xxTUNE Dance in this IM MENSE?. .

2010-03-07T21:12:00.000-08:00

David Lyle's letter to Dr.Williams Dec 1 1939 . . . elapsed writing time for letter Lyle notes as 5.5 hours, but then also the letter has been expanded on April 9 1939 before sent out . . . questions of the Tao, swastika . . . symbol as "real substance" . . . the "continuous realism of the Hebrews" is based in their monism . . . "the central problem is of the particular. . HOW do we KNOW anything at all . ." . . . "the TAO symbol is the wiring diagram of the source of human energy" . . . Lyle's profession as a radio operator and engineer comes through in his technical metaphors, as in "BREAKING thru humanity. IE.. to break thru every anthropomorphism...every inadequate concept and its ensu-ing inadequate operating custody...." . . . more a child of cybernetics than of the modern machine world, he rightly but completely oddly puts the Hammond Organ as the new paradigm of consciousness, NOT the cinema . . . "topologically fotographing the idea behind this country called America. . . in terms of the running Hammond Organ basic underlying second by second simultaneously as moving image all and/or any ever happened. . . happening . . . and ever will happen event structuring of man. . or men" . . . Hammond Organ tones being generated by oscillation, on/off, discrete signals whose parameters are controlled in real time and also based on a system shared with missile control devices, also invented by Hammond . . . "to make a map of the sea (of human energy)" a constant refrain, as is the attempt to situate imagism as a break-thru to a system that structures events closer to the re-al substance "And since Arnold ask the real substance question as . . . To what TUNE dancein this immense? . . . ." Or is it TONE? I wish I could go back and time and buy Lyle a new typewriter ribbon . . . the plectrum does not weave by itself . . . "Utmost permanence can be transferred directly to the uses of calculus and asymptotic curves in MATH . . . . transferred dirrectly to the swastika being asymptotic to the symbol area formerly known as ONE nation . . . W hat is oneness.and where is re-al substance....." . . . I think I had a sense this morning in bed of what this math looked like, and then I woke up a little more (proving its reality) . . . "Math signs closest to imagist operating of central nervous system." . . . "Behind any and/or all of the above areas. . there must be an imagism law. . which is continuous. . testable and checkable by anyone, once they know HO W TO SEE it. . ie, once they know HOW TO EXPERIENCE the ART of knowing. . . . either directly or thru others. . . as on a busman's holiday. . ." "The right question being Shakesspere's 53rd sonnet. . . What mmmmmm is YOUR RE-al SUBSTANCE, whereof are you made, T hat millions of strange shadows on you tend?" . . . and you must imagine the substance fading out with the lapsing ink of the ribbon the cross-outs (mmmmm) the penned-in corrections and misspacings . . . a loveable but maddening text, so hard not to want to include, but so hard to completely transcribe . . . Lyle himself, in a sense, his symbol or re-al substance . . . "As continuous imagism . . . all disguises have been stripped away, it is ALWAYS and EVER-y-WHERE (Where is your re-al substance?)" . . .

1014 E 24th St.

2010-03-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

This is where David Lyle lived. His method of information-sculpting was one of Williams' main inspirations for Paterson, and I've been told by acquaintances of Lyle that there were boxes and boxes of his "great work" back in the garage. Can someone please just go knock on the door for me, and ask to see if there is anything still in the garage???

The Mad Cartographer Falls to the Ground

2010-02-20T17:27:00.001-08:00

Al Filreis gives a good parting shot about Paterson, at the end of this mappily-themed PoemTalk about Spicer's “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.” With Julia Bloch, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and CA Conrad.

Paterson Data 43, 44, 45, 46 (and other varieties)

2010-02-15T09:56:00.000-08:00

The Egg Platter
21 Egg Plate Varieties
Hamburgers French Fries Open 10:00pm to 3:00pm

the ®eal thing

2010-01-30T22:24:00.000-08:00

I was teaching Silliman's ® this past week, which has a couple of jokey references to Book II of Paterson: "The ascent beckons, using an alarm clock"; "The dissent bickers as the assent hunkered (memory is a kind of astonishment)." I didn't think that these were the most interesting aspects of the poem. But, as usually happens with the flow of class conversation, and as an attempt to bring students into the poem gradually, I started off with the first four lines . . . again, so flat, distanciating, and jokey that I wasn't sure how interesting they would be for discussion at first:

"Touch me first.
There was a young man from Nantucket.
Poem is the practice (corner of forehead in rear view mirror).
Gonna sit right down and right myself a ladder."

Since I was asking students to "taxonomize" Silliman's sentences, lines 2 and 4 are fairly recognizable as Sillimanic punning sentences; 3 is a Sillimanic "meta" sentence commenting on process (here both a critique of "reflection"--the forehead in the mirror as the problem of mirroring, and the pleasure of confounding it--but also a hint of the theme of memory to come, with the rear-view mirror being a kind of useful instrument of the short-term capture of what's immediately past). 1 is a little bit more harder to pin, because it seems more typical of a kind of injunction to a lover (and thus a little atypical for Silliman), but when that's the reader, there's a kind of alienation effect involved (there's no way I can touch you BEFORE I read you, unless we are ascribing a touchable subjectivity to words themselves, which is probably the case.) Ah, Brechtians in love. In fact, these whole first lines seem like a love poem that is encrypted even as he pushes the reader away with the flatness of his evocations. We know what the "man in Nantucket" rhymes with. The old song about "writing oneself a letter" rather than a "ladder" is about unrequited love powering writing, courtly sentiment translated into a tin-pan-alley corn. And then it dawned on me that this connection between "ladder" and "letter" is what really turns the whole piece into a kind of commentary on Williams' discovery of the triadic line, and the optical effect that he institutes with the "descent beckons" passage. Because, just as the "descent beckons" down the page (like the flow of the falls) while "the ascent beckoned" (forcing our eye back up to make sense of what we just read, memory activating even as time pulls us forward through the poem, as a kind of conceivable levitation), one "sits right down" (again the pull of gravity downward) to write a ladder (which we usually consider a tool of upward movement, to reach high places). The whole structure of ® is ladder-like, with single sentences running down the page rather than coalescing in paragraphs, and, as with Williams' passage with the "descent beckons" the theme is renewal, in the very simple sense that each sentence seems to be written after waking, and may contain within it a recent memory of a dream. Whether one can get to that dream with the ladder/letter of language, whether that is a dream of love or some other salvation, the writing continues downward, away. But could Silliman's circle-r, instead of "registered trademark" be the kind of momentary "reversal of despair" which Williams grasps fleetingly in the lines:

"The descent
xxxxxxxxxxxxmade up of despairs
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxand without accomplishment
realizes a new awakening :
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxwhich is a reversal
of despair.

xxxxxxxxxFor what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
xxxxxxxxxwhat we have lost in the anticipation--
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxa descent follows,
endless and indestructiblexxxxxxx.

Listen!--"

Radiant Gist of Science

2010-01-22T15:54:00.001-08:00

A CFP of interest from the William Carlos Williams Newsletter:
"The confirmed panel on Williams for next January’s MLA convention in Los Angeles is entitled: 'Williams and the ‘Radiant Gist’ of Science.' Proposals are now invited that examine any aspect of the poet’s relationship to science--e.g., medicine, physiology, chemistry, and physics (Einstein, Heisenberg, Curie, etc). Please send an abstract of 250 words to Erin Templeton (e.e.templeton@gmail.com) no later than 15 March 2010."
Also in the same announcement, Teddy Rapp is organizing another Williams MLA panel: "Sessions title session is ‘An Early Martyr and Other Poems’: 75 Years Later.' Proposals are invited on the volume within the 1930s context, or on individual poems, clusters and biography. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. Please send a 250 abstract to Theodora Rapp Graham at this address: theorg1995@aol.com no later than 15 March 2010."

Interanimation of Words

2010-01-18T21:01:00.001-08:00

"It is not that Williams's language is without history, but that its history is not European; rather, it is local, polyglot, and as likely as not merely personal. It is not that those who learn a language through books rather than through speech rarely come to feel the kinship of words, so much as that the grounds of what I. A. Richards calls the 'interanimation of words' have radically shifted. Much of the language Americans used, certainly, had no visible antecedents as they walked down the street, and the imperative, especially but not only in school, was to adopt an English overlay. Malcolm Cowley complained bitterly that 'our studies were useless or misdirected, especially our studies in English literature: the authors we were forced to read, and Shakespeare most of all, were unpleasant to our palate; they had the taste of chlorinated water.' What landscapes did Charles Olson's father carry in his head as he walked his Post Office rounds in Worcester? What mythologies did he attach to them or find in them? When Williams calls Paterson 'a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands' he is identifying his poem as an attempt to end the split between American writing, speech, and landscape . . ." Disjunctive Poetics, Peter Quartermain 14.
I like the idea of "interanimation of words," as a way to deal with the sound/text split by pointing to the power of sound without essentializing it (the Derridean critique), yet it seems that whatever was gained by this move is lost by essentializing some pristine notion of the American language. How can there be no visible language on the street when this era was one of the proliferation of mass-produced signs in the cities (not to mention the language of the papers, the comic pages, the radios blaring from radio shops). That language read in books seems to be the definition of "visible language" here seems a problem. An earlier reader of my copy put an exclamation point next to the quote about Shakespeare. It is unclear whether this ! meant "what a howler!" or "I agree!" but it seems to me that Shakespeare here is the wrong example to proffer. Iambics aside--indeed a bete noire for Williams--the wildness of Shakespeare's unofficial English is precisely American in its inventiveness, and thus, therein, a lot to learn about the ways in which the sonic-linguistic landscape can energize a poetry. Wouldn't this formulation be better than to try to imagine Charles Olson's father as some sort of noble savage? (and if he was carrying the post, did he not have those visible letters--as well as the bric-a-brac of memory shot through with other legenda--to carry him through?)

Catch Up with the Impossible Object

2010-01-14T13:35:00.001-08:00

Unfortunately, even though there's been a lot of traffic to the blog lately, there haven't been many updates. I'm still doing some slower moving trudge work with this project, perhaps moving towards a synthesis or disintegration; as well, faster moving projects elsewhere have called for my attention. I'm not sure yet whether an "end" is in sight, and every time I think this project is running on empty, a new strategy or opportunity extends it.
For those new to the site, I'm arraying some links to its past media highlights, as well as annotations about things yet to be done, and some long-standing wishes for the project that will hopefully be fulfilled in the new year.

Patersongs: This is one of my favorite aspects of the project: songs composed from the text of Paterson. There has been an open invitation to artists and musicians to compose these songs for the site, although many who promised a long time ago still haven't followed through! Just to let you know, I'm still waiting. And still on my wishlist is a punk/thrash/girl band version of the Marcia Nardi letters.

The Locust Tree (Joanne Hsieh and Jesse Roy)
In Spite of the Grey Mystery of Time (immaginarium light outreach inner-youth center with Joe Milutis)
Sam Patch! (Joanne Hsieh and Jesse Roy)
To Make a Start Out of Particulars (Joe Milutis)
The Skeleton of Peter the Dwarf (Graham Stowe)
Look for the Nul (Joe Milutis)

As one can tell from the last link above, sometimes the video content has a tenuous relation to the poem or even the city Paterson itself, and I used my toy camera to document more absurd, drifty, or plainly disconnected territories, in the search for a more non-local idea of this localized epic. The blog and its momentum brought me to Patterson, Georgia; Hudson, NY; Paris, France; Brussels, Belgium; and other terra incognita. These pieces are the more "junky" spontaneous and properly blog-like materials.

Exploring Paterson in Patterson, GA (with Clark Lunberry)
Reading the Geological Cross Section Passage 20 meters Under Paris (with Jonathan Wonham et al)
Thinking about Paterson at MoMA
Paterson in the "ruins in reverse" of Hudson, NY (with Max Goldfarb)
Paterson for Bird Watching (with Jackie Goss and Michael Gitlin)

Sonic experiments with Paterson material form the core of the project, and may come together at one point into a documentary, or remain disaffiliated blog data--both of which would suit me fine. In the spirit of Williams' work, it is always a dilemma when faced with the choice between unification and fragment. Yet to be incorporated are interview materials recorded (and previously posted) with Herb Blau, Jeanne Heuving, and the folks at the Kelly Writers House, as well as some materials that I hope to record in 2010.

Make a Song Out of That Completely (with Joe Ruffalo et al)
Listen to It! (with Bob Perelman et al)
It's the Locality (with Lytle Shaw, Bob Perelman, Amelia Arenas)
Have You Ever Been To Paterson? (Amelia Arenas, Bob Perelman, Carole Maso, Lytle Shaw, Joe Ruffalo)
Blocked (Bob Perelman, Lytle Shaw, Amelia Arenas)

Seattle has taken me far afield of New Jersey, so one of my favorite new things has been a subtitling of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers with, among other things, snippets of Paterson. I plan to do the whole movie, although, truth be told, the project slowed once I hit the "action" scenes (the ambiguity and mystery of the more "everyday" scenes seemed to lend themselves more to this experiment.)

Los Ladrones de Cuerpos, episode 1
Los Ladrones de Cuerpos, episode 2
Los Ladrones de Cuerpos, episode 3 (the virtual reality episode)
Los Ladrones de Cuerpos, episode 4
Los Ladrones de Cuerpos, episode 5 (the Jack Spicer episode)

Life, Love and Paterson: Jeanne Heuving on Paterson

2009-12-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

Jeanne Heuving, who is finishing a book on the transmutation of love in 20th Century Poetry, talked to me about how she would apply her concept of "libidinal field poetics" to Paterson, when I interviewed her a couple months ago. Jeanne, with whom I teach as well as help curate her Writing for Their Lives literary series, is the author of Incapacity and Transducer, as well as a number of scholarly works on poetry.
Imagism as love poetry; Williams and love: (8 min. 25 sec.)
The Marcia Nardi letters: (7 min. 40 sec.)
Ecstasy in objects; Requited vs. unrequited love poems: (6 min. 45 sec.)

Paterson Pageant!

2009-12-04T12:27:00.001-08:00

I've been meaning to do something about this historical curiosity from Paterson for a long while, but then was tempted to just post it as an unsung piece of data (a la Williams), because what else can you do but reflect on the oddness of the event, and the abyss of history that separates us from the idea of a radical political "pageant" that the proletariat would take seriously as a means of action. Indeed, while we usually think of 1968 as one of those rare moments where art was taken seriously as part of political change, here we had a much earlier moment when the New York avant-garde and the strikers of Paterson came together to mount an entirely new form of political "representation." In fact, this experiment in the summer of 1913 would turn the distinction between representation/propaganda and presentation on its head by having the very strikers as actors. As the New York Tribune wrote at the time:

"There was a startling touch of ultra modernity—or rather of futurism—in the Paterson strike pageant in Madison Square Garden. Certainly nothing like it had been known before in the history of labor agitation. The I.W.W. has not been highly regarded hereabouts as an organization endowed with brains or imagination. Yet the very effective appeal to public interest made by the spectacle at the Garden stamps the I.W.W. leaders as agitators of large resources and original talent. Lesser geniuses might have hired a hall and exhibited moving pictures of the Paterson strike. Saturday night’s pageant transported the strike itself bodily to New York. . . ."

Indeed, the spectacle of 1200 workers walking from Paterson to Madison Square Garden to perform challenges the very notion of "spectacle;" we perhaps instead enter the realm of the simulacrum (without the cold video eye, or the potentiality for the anesthetizing rewind).
The one reference to this event happens in Book III of Paterson, an excerpt from a letter to Williams from a friend who had participated in the event: "Rose and I didn't know each other when we both went to the Paterson strike around the first war and worked in the Pagent. She went regularly to feed Jack Reed in jail and I listened to Big Bill Haywood, Gurley Flynn and the rest of the big hearts and helping hands in Union Hall. And look at the damned thing now."
While the last sentence seems to comment upon the loss of energy and "pagentry" [sic] of the I.W.W. or American labor politics in general, there is a comment in the MacGowan footnotes that makes me think that this statement is Williams ventriloquizing. And yes, he is perhaps reflecting ruefully on the failure of labor politics, but maybe also making a meta-comment about his own labor of "page-entry." "And look at the damned thing now" seems to have been a comment this friend made--not ruefully but enthusiastically--when he finally saw how Williams had progressed with Book III.
Some of the many documents on the web about the Paterson Pageant include archival documents collected in an issue of TDR (summer 1971, pp.61-71), a book on the impact of this show on emergent modernism, and a lot more to explore.

Old Home Day, and the Old, Old Home

2009-11-11T13:25:00.000-08:00

Just out, Zack Pieper, Erica Kaufman, and I celebrate old home day in the Kelly Writers House over Notley's I, The People. Whether the home was Milwaukee (where we all have lived), Pennsylvania (I can go toe-to-toe with Al Filreis on Action News trivia), 10 & A, or another virtual or metaphorical "home" is uncertain.
I've been thinking about one of my comments that, left on the cutting room floor, perhaps deserves some mention here and then elaboration. In our discussion of the actuality of 10 & A (the recurring theme of the reality or absurdity of using poems as maps has been a theme throughout this blog), I had mentioned the importance of 10 & A--allegorically and actually--as at the edge of Alphabet City. There is a sense of the primal quality of being on the edge of speakability/calculability, with the number 10 and the letter A signifying, respectively, the base 10 number system and the alphabet itself. We can also think of the history of gentrification, and this particular locus as a borderline, which indeed is impacted by the presence and presencing of poets. But this poem also engages with the mystical consciousness that goes beyond the place where number intersects with letter, the democratic systems that writers such as Poe railed against in their preference for visionary consciousness over systemic politicized rationality.
I'm rereading today a translation by Charles Doria of the "Secret Book of Moses on the Great Name, A Book About Everything, In Which Is Contained The Name of the One Who Ordains Everything That Is," a book that twists the name of God into all possible combinations until it is exhausted and the performer hence becomes God (in a lovely Arthur C. Clarke short story about a computer in a Himalayan monastery that sets out to do this, the results are less, let's say "hubristic.") In his intro to the "Secret Book," (printed in Kostelanetz's Text-Sound Texts anthology) one is "reminded"--perhaps from some great archaic echo--that this Tetragrammatic remix, written in Greek, is not based off of the Hebrew YHWH, but rather the Greek iota, alpha, omega, which transliterates as I-A-O. Is it a stretch to posit 10 & A, as I-A-O, with Notley riffing on the names of God? These lines from the old poem seem apt: "I want You alive/all the time of this My life here/make for Me all My soul desires/for You are Me and I am You/something if I say it has to be/for I possess Your Name/in the phylactery of My heart/and all flesh moved against Me/shall not hold Me back . . ./for I am Named You Your Name is in My Soul."
As if to seal the deal, the Horus eye, which I noted appears on the facade of the cafe at the northeast corner of 10 & A, appears as an image (mere doodle or mystic oogle?) in the original papyrus of this Egyptian text (home continues to evade us). Some intersection!

Sponge Bob vs. Mike Wallace

2009-10-31T10:15:00.000-07:00

This morning in the pipes: a meditation on the "fashionable grocery lists" of the literary and illiterary elite. For some reason, Baby Jane is coming to mind ("but you are a fashionable grocery list, you are!")

The Only Real . . .

2009-10-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

Paterson Datum no. 42

2009-09-10T12:23:00.001-07:00

Rolling Up the Sum

2009-09-05T17:02:00.000-07:00

As Peggy Lee would say, "Is that all there is?" Poet Zack Pieper, who hopefully is still planning to record a Patersong for me, sent me this Williams poem of his, which seems to sum up the critical reception of the man in two concise tercets:

GRAFFITI:

No idea
BUT
in things i.e.

Dr. Williams
was a
"hornball"

Los Ladrones, part 6: The Jack Spicer Episode

2009-08-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

nb: The Torrent is unleashed October 1.

Summer Reading

2009-08-29T19:40:00.001-07:00

Looking back, I feel like I didn't get a lot of summer reading done, termiting along with a bunch of my own scattered projects, but I decided to categorize what was done under the general heading of Williams-related, and non-Williams related, with nuances in-between. Also included are sincere revelations as to how much was eventually read:

Williams related:
--Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (here and there; a couple of the first chapters then skipping to the last.)
--Alice Notley, "Dr. Williams' Heiresses" (I've tried to read this thru a couple times, but this was the first time finishing it. . . . it's short but dense.)
--Charles Olson on Paterson V (in The Collected Prose of Charles Olson, in which, honestly, he has more interesting things to say about Moby Dick than about Paterson.)

Somewhat Williams related:
--Alice Notley, The Descent of Alette (all)
--Bill Luoma, Works and Days (all)
--Hesiod, Theogony & Works and Days (all)
--Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (ed. Bernstein) (still working on it; most)

Can be related to Williams with a stretch:
--Victor Hugo, Dieu (started. savoring; also saw Pierre Henry's version at his house a couple weeks ago. Awesome!)
--rereading Peter Lamborn Wilson on TAZ (and what pray tell ever happened to the concept of "affinity group" . . . not even coopted and travestied by mass culture. Just disappeared.)
--William Gibson, Spook Country (started, not sure if will finish; really just mining for the locative media references)
--Ignacio de Loyola Brandao, Teeth Under the Sun (almost done)

Not related to Williams
--Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way (a handful of ministories left before I had to return it to ILL)
--Roxanne Carter, Drown: A Novella (all)
--reread some Donald Barthelme, some Angela Carter stories
--Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (ed. Motte)(working through; skipped the "mathy" essays)
--Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel (started, enjoyed a couple chapters, put down; will probably pick up again but not soon.)
--Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus (also enjoyed a couple chapters, but not sure how much of this I could read at once without big committment to Roussel-world; I think I like the idea of Roussel more than the actual reading of him for long stretches. Come to think of it, this is the second time I've tried to pick up Locus Solus.)
--Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style (misplaced before completely finishing; wondering whether to use it for students; still need to look up some of those rhetorical terms.)
--Christian Bok, Eunoia (all)
--Eugene Ostachevsky, Iterature (all)
--Elizabeth Young, Aim Straight at the Fountain and Press Vaporize (halfway)
--Kenneth Koch, 1000 Avant-Garde Plays (most)
--Kenneth Koch, Selected Poems (recalled by the library when I was 1/4 thru)
--Kenneth Koch, Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching Great Poetry to Children (an unexpected used-bookstore find that provided good after-bath reading as well as after-semester reflecting on teaching, during June.)
--Robert Duncan podcast lectures
--Gertrude Stein's Making of the Americans read by Gregory Laynor. (worked well on shuffle, interspersed with some of the 45s out of James Brown's lable "People Records" that I finally digitized in June.)
--rereading (after 25 some years) Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (and this time got annoyed and put it down after a couple chapters.)
--James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (occasional dips)
--lots of printed out pdfs and magazine articles that I took to the gym, got wet, threw out, and now have forgotten. (note to Jeff Bezos.)

Paterson Datum no. 41

2009-08-21T13:17:00.001-07:00

Measure and Beyond

2009-07-24T23:27:00.000-07:00

I've been dipping into Michael Golston's Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science. I've had a long standing interest in ideas of "musical soul" as they intersect with questions of technology and race. Golston is one of the few writers I've found who discuss early ethnomusicologists like Milton Metfessel and Carl Seashore, who created elaborate recording machines to analyze the emotional qualities of African American song. (Metfessel even made a graphic analysis of the "negro laugh.") After reading the first very interesting couple of chapters in Golston's book, I skipped ahead to his thin, albeit important final chapter on Williams' "measure." For Golston, Williams' concept of "measure" is his definitive, yet little explored challenge to the rhythmic ideologies of other modernists such as Pound and Yeats (and detailing these "rhythmic ideologies" forms the rest of the book's meat.)
Williams' move "beyond lyric" requires a dispassionate stance towards these rhythmic myths promulgated by other modernists, tied biomechanically to blood and pulse and fantasmatically to the inaudible consanguinities of race and nation. Williams' more constructivist notion of "measure" always struck me as non-musical, and Golston solidifies my hunch that its association with musical notions is misleading. The word conjures up both science and haberdashery, a numerical span or swatch held out at arm's length. If anything, Williams' "measure" is something you do with materials after the fact. The concept of rhythm, of the other hand, has an originary feel, making claims to a core authentic outpouring, which is why it encourages both the irrational plenitudes of "soulful" performance and the cultic violence of the fascist homebody.
In tandem with this book, I was reading Susan Stewart's essay "Letter on Sound." If the above sounds Derridean in its suspicion of the vitalist category of rhythm, it still maintains a clear dichotomy which Stewart's (more Derridean) approach seems to challenge. While Williams' "measure" is not really synonymous with meter, Stewart's distinction between rhythm and meter seems to evoke a creative tension between the planned, measured structure of a poem, and the various existential or performative iterations of it. "The sound of the poem emerges from this dynamic tension between the unfolding temporality of the utterance and the recursive temporality of the fixed aspects of the form. . . . Song, by virtue of its measure, is fixed and repeatable, although it is, like all utterances, subject to transformation. It is the tension between the unfolding semantic pressure of speech and the asemantic pulse of measure that defines the possibilities of lyric art." (34-7)

Paterson Datum no. 40

2009-07-22T21:59:00.001-07:00

GIFin' Paterson

2009-07-15T21:05:00.000-07:00

Albert Min sends along his gifonym from his Paternom home.

Los Ladrones part 5

2009-06-25T22:09:00.001-07:00

This episode's special guest star Marcel Duchamp.

Return to Paterson

2009-06-22T11:37:00.000-07:00

I spent a little time in Paterson last week, while participating in the William Carlos Williams Society's Annual Conference. The talks happened some remove from the chaos of the city in the more bucolic satellite campus of William Paterson College, mostly dead for the summer, although the focus was particularly on the relation of the poem to the city. As hoped, I unearthed some bits of knowledge not easily dislodged from academic books or internet searches. For example, my hunch that the Kevin McCarthy involved with a dramatic reading of Paterson at the Lexington Ave. Y was the Kevin McCarthy of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (thus, through pure hunch setting off the continuing series of Body Snatcher hacks) was given credence since someone pointed out that he was Mary McCarthy's brother, and thus would share her literary circles. I met the almost-allegorically named Dr. Peterson, distinguished for having written the first book-length study of Paterson, and whose collection of Williamsiana includes a manuscript with a mole Williams removed from Floss taped to it. He also had some David Lyle manuscripts and gave me some insight into Lyle's personality. While I couldn't get her to say anything on tape, one scholar mysteriously said something during a question and answer session something to the effect of "Marcia Nardi ruined my career!" So, some juicy bits from long-time travelers in the Patersphere. I took a few of the "greener" critics--including someone writing on ecocrit and Paterson--out to the more off-limits places, where the dead factories seem to have sagged and mulched a little bit more since my last visit. I wonder what will happen to these mysterious and historical abandoned spaces now that the falls area will become a National Park. I almost fear the worst, but hopefully they can get people who are smart about maintaining "preserved ruins" in the spirit of a place like the Eastern State Pen, rather than turn it into a tacky tourist phantasmagoria. Already they have painted the Looms-Warpers-Winders-Quillers-Coppers- Jacquards-&Supplies on the side of the old Paterson Silk Machinery Exchange. Ugh!

10th & A

2009-06-17T12:32:00.000-07:00

"Let's get bitchy about a few things, he in effect said. What about this "local," isn't that a little overrated? what about all those things he's supposed to be that he isn't? Oh, I said, local was a word he used to explain why Poe wrote horror stories that took place in horror-story land. Long stupid exchange about the local. Like, The most local thing about a person is their body I said, for some it's their brain he said, etc." --Alice Notley, "Dr. Williams' Heiresses"

Yesterday, I recorded a PoemTalk about Notley's "I The People," along with Al Filreis, Erica Kaufman and Zack Pieper, in which we had a long, hopefully not stupid exchange about things such as the locality (or ideality) of her 10th & A. You can decide whether it turned out "fast, perky, sassy, talky" when it comes out in the fall. But in the meantime, Google Earth gives us the most likely vision Notley had of this corner:

In the spirit of the local, tomorrow begins the William Carlos Williams Society's Conference Paterson: The Province of the Poem.

Triumph of the Bill

2009-06-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

A while back, Albert Min mentioned to me that Williams’ “so much depends” resonates with the common Spanish phrase “todo depende.” These translational resonances are afoot in my retooling of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers into Los Ladrones de Cuerpos with Williams’ Paterson in the subtitles. I had originally intended to get the dubbed Spanish version, and hack the English subtitles. When a mislabeled BitTorrent served up the original English versions with a Spanish subtitle file, I was initially disappointed. However, by using poorly understood Spanish as the source text, I was able to inject a little more indeterminacy into the process, especially when I kept myself from looking at the actual film (I have yet to watch more than half of the whole movie, even though I’ve been watching it for the last couple months). While I’ve had to shape the subtitles, to a certain extent, to the speed and logic of the image, I’ve not been slavish to these requirements, sometimes gleefully inserting flashes of text that could not possibly be read within the temporal constraints of the film, as if the subtitles were a foreign language, an ambience of exotic chatter. And this is poetry, after all . . . not as foreign to Santa Mira as are the pods. Doctor Miles Bennell not once but twice gives way to reciting some bit of doggerel to charm his constituency; in some of the next episodes, we’ll meet his literary buddies. But Miles—or in the translation, Dr. Bill—does not recognize language’s body-snatching powers for what they really are. He toys with them a little too casually. It thus seems appropriate for the repressed to return in the form of cameos by William S. Burroughs (the police and the psychiatrists, natch) and Jack Spicer (we’ll meet him in future episodes). So far, if you caught them, there was a bit part played by Marcia Nardi, some quick homages to the early subtitle art of Frank O’Hara and Guy Debord*, and nods to The Matrix. Keep your eyes out for other special guests. I’m working on Duchamp and Genet right now. Some early plans not put aside just yet included a William B. Williams character (he’s probably the first DJ, the guy who came up with “Make Believe Ballroom”). While we’re at it, why not William D. Williams (you know, Lando Calrissian?) and maybe William E. Williams, William F. Williams, and a William X. Y. Z Williams? The Bill is in the mail!
By turning William Carlos Williams back to “Carlos,” we can maybe get at some body snatching at the heart of not merely Paterson but Williams’ language practice in general. However, I don’t imagine any return to some authentic resonance with a Spanish origin, but rather hope to multiply the possibilities for movement of the poem. When Danny Snelson was in Seattle this spring, we worked through some of these possibilities with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os for a performance we put together. I have been thinking about these issues a lot since our confabulations, inspired by his particular take on the act of translation. I’m sure if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have tried to translate a poem in Cyrillic this morning. Now that’s hard, although we all know that that the most common English translation of that funny little Russian “x” is “spider-vehicle.”
*actually I didn't realize until now that "Can Dialectics Break Bricks" is Vienet's not Debord's, although I did know that it is more of a redubbing than a resubtitling, even though the subtitles will of course seem at first the locus of detournment to English viewers.

Los Ladrones, Part 4 (The Virtual Reality Episode!)

2009-05-31T22:37:00.000-07:00

Los Ladrones de Cuerpos, pt. 2

2009-05-19T14:03:00.000-07:00

The Desire for Literature

2009-05-14T17:12:00.000-07:00

I stopped into Jeanne Heuving's Approaches to Textual Studies seminar the other night to discuss Books I and II of Paterson. Starting at about 44 minutes in, Jeanne had some valuable insights into the Marcia Nardi letters of which I have a short clip (I'll have to have more of a one-on-one interview with her to pull these insights out a little more). As well, the class provided some lively points along the way. If you would like to hear the rest of the conversation, click here.

Paterson Datum no. 39

2009-05-09T12:22:00.001-07:00

Still Not Convinced!

2009-05-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

Poetry or intellectual blackmail? I spoke earlier of my dislike of Pound's Cantico del Sole, and I'm still not convinced after this recent PoemTalk. My ears are tinned to its alleged sarcasm!

Headline News

2009-04-29T22:54:00.000-07:00

In an astonishing turn of events after Sen. Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic party this Tuesday, Republican officials have decided to change the name of their party to "Democrat," as part of their on-going "War on Language."

"Je suis un citoyen démocratique!" radio host Rush Limbaugh said on his nationally syndicated talk show.

Lamenting the potential loss of the art of the filibuster, which will undoubtedly be the outcome of a democratic majority in the Senate, conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith said in an emergency press conference today, "We are all Republican." Today's press conference, to be published as Press Conference (by Conference Press), was a twenty-four hour recitation of Tuesday's CNN News coverage. In a follow up press conference about Press Conference, Goldsmith praised conceptual art and talk poem giants such as Strom Thurmond, and wondered what would happen to politics when reading verbatim from phonebooks is left solely to the liberal elite.

In related news, all flarfists are now conceptual poets; and all conceptual poets have taken the name flarfist as their own.

Dr. Williams was unavailable for comment.

Polis Is This! (PBS is . . .)

2009-04-23T08:21:00.000-07:00

PBS is airing the Charles Olson documentary Polis is This tomorrow night (check your local listings below.) Now if I actually had a working television, this might be exciting.

3/30 9:00pm New Jersey Network –2
4/1 8:00pm New Jersey Network –2
4/1 8:00PM Iowa PTV World 3
4/2 8:00pm Prairie Public, Fargo ND
4/3 2:00am KET-1, Kentucky
4/3` 9:00pm S. Oregon Public TV
4/4 2:00am Prairie Public, Fargo ND
4/5 3:30pm KACV Amarillo,TX
4/5 4:00pm Detroit PTV
4/5 7:00pm WGBH-Boston, MA
4/5 8:00pm WKAR-E. Lansing MI
4/7 7:00pm Ozarks PTV-KOZK, Springfield, MO
4/8 11:000pm WCVE, Richmond, VA
4/10 10:00pm WGCU- Ft. Myers, FLA
4/11 6:00pm WGCU-Ft. Myers, FLA
4/11 8:00pm WVIA-Pittston,PA
4/12 9:00pm WVIA-Pittston,PA
4/11 9:00pm S. Oregon Public TV
4/12 11:00pm WSIU-Carbondale
4/13 9:00pm Rhode Island PTV
4/13 10:30 WCNY-Syracuse, NY
4/15 8:00pm KMOS- Warrensburg MO
4/15 10:00pm KVCR-San Bernardino, CA
4/19 1:00pm WGBY- Springfield, MA
4/22 11:00pm KCSM - San Mateo
4/24 2:30am WNET, NYC
4/24 12:00pm KCTS-Seattle
4/24 1:00pm WHYY-Phila
4/24 8:00pm WDSC-Daytona, Fla
4/26 7:00pm CET-Cincinnati
4/26 8:00pm Utah Edu. Network, Salt Lake
4/28 midnight KTEH, San Jose/San Francisco
4/29 10:00pm VermontPTV
4/29 11:00pm KUAT Tucson
4/30 8:00pm WGCU-Ft. Myers

Vast Ventriloquism

2009-04-14T09:36:00.000-07:00

Wallace Stevens' rejoinder to Williams' "no ideas . . ." on PoemTalk #14.

To Make a .srt Out of Particulars

2009-04-10T23:33:00.001-07:00

Los Ladrones de Cuerpos, vol. 1
click it!

Altogether Unfit for Ordinary Use

2009-04-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

for godot's send up of Williams' geological cross section passage?

"So Much Depends on What You Mean by Failure"

2009-03-30T08:56:00.000-07:00

"But assuming that the aim of rhetoric is to establish a connection between language and reality, this is rhetoric of the highest order--the rhetoric in the word itself. This is risky business, and it may explain to a large extent why when Dr. Williams fails he falls flat on his face. Depending on no artifice, he has no artifice behind which to conceal his failures to complete realization."
--Mary Ellen Solt, "WCW: Poems in the American Idiom" (13)

"147: The failure of Williams to go beyond his work of Spring and All and the Great American Novel seems to verify Bergmann's assertion that nominalism inevitably tends towards (deteriorates into?) representationalism."
--Ron Silliman, "The Chinese Notebook"

"[Marianne Moore] thought Williams' intention to find a redeeming language had been woefully sidetracked--Williams answered brilliantly that if the close of Paterson contained its own failure, that was because the very grounds of the search had implied a failure (indeed the whole American experience as he had lived though it had demonstrated over and over a tendency, a proclivity, toward failure). 'If the vaunted purpose of my poem seems to fall apart at the end,' he was willing to concede to Moore, 'it's rather frequent that one has to admit an essential failure.' In fact, what better strategy to assert the need for a redeeming language--a language that would reveal ourselves to ourselves--but 'by stating our failure to achieve it'?"
--Paul Mariani, A New World Naked (614)

Barack and the River!

2009-03-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

Obama's first national park designation is

Maybe this spring it's time for Silliman to reread Paterson instead!

Hell Must Be Peopled (1859)

2009-03-27T20:58:00.000-07:00

Brimstony! . . .

Campbell, Alfred Gibbs
"INVITATION TO THE CLERGY TO PARTICIPATE IN THE INAUGURATION OF THE TAVERN AT PASSAIC FALLS, N. J."

Ho ! preachers of His Gospel who
Salvation came to bring,
Rest from your labors for awhile,
And join our gathering!

Ye servants of the Living God!
Your fealty cast aside,
And with us for a single day
Stand on the Devil's side!

What boots it that we open wide
Another door to woe,
Through which a still increasing tide
Of human souls shall flow?

Hell must be peopled; and our plan
Is quite the surest one;
Our railway's a descending grade,
Our cars the swiftest run.

Not faster do the waters plunge
Adown Passaic's steep,
Not swifter do the lightnings fly
Athwart the vaulted deep,

Than our good train, when once she starts,
With freight of priceless souls,
Speeds to the pit where, deep and dark,
Perdition's Ocean rolls.

Then come with us and view the train;
The depot consecrate;
Where God's voice in the cataract speaks,
Rum's reign inaugurate!

Ho! servants of the Living God!
Your fealty cast aside,
And with us, for a single day,
Stand on the Devil's side!

1859.

Testing My Pipes

2009-03-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

Data floodgates opened onto the real thing!

Paterson Data nos. 37 & 38

2009-03-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

Body Snatchers!

2009-03-20T17:41:00.001-07:00

While the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers has multiple remakes and half-mutant cousins, we forget, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1884 “The Body Snatcher” as well as a more significant and overlooked precursor . . . Paterson. Now hear me out.
Some of the data I’ve strewn along the blog-lines of time go unnarrated either because they sing for themselves, or there’s nothing yet to say. The last piece of data, a 1960 announcement for a reading of Paterson at the world’s most literary gym—the Y at 92 and Lexington in NYC—became striking precisely for what was not immediately striking. The names “Robert Lowell” and “Kenneth Koch” were perhaps the most immediately recognizable, the more boring aspects of this notice. A Google search for “Arthur Luce Klein” shows that he was the director of spoken word LPs, and that “Talley Beatty” danced in Maya Deren films, among other things. Beatty’s name was one which, as an experimental film buff, I should have had in my brainpan, but luckily it is a name that Google searches shine their grace upon. The name “Kevin McCarthy” is another matter. There must have been a deep sigh that accompanied my typing his name into the search engine, knowing I’d get all matter of Facebook pages from 17-year-olds in Illinois, and track and field stats from La Jolla. You cannot be famous with a name like Kevin McCarthy—you are doomed to be usurped by your doubles at all turns. Which is probably why the most famous Kevin McCarthy, and perhaps our man, played Dr. Miles Bennell in the 1956 Body Snatchers. Who better to play out the drama of more perfect alien bodies replacing yours than someone with a name which is as empty a repository as is “John Smith”?
What, then, was going on in this performance of Paterson? It may be that McCarthy was brought on board merely for the imprimatur that celebrities tend to give avant-garde works. Or was there a more pointed connection to his most famous role? Because one can imagine the poets reading and the dancer dancing (creating, it must be said—if I imagine correctly—a racialist division between the white poets’ work of words and the “natural” inaccessible beauty of the Falls as a black man). But the B movie actor? What was he doing? What else? B-movie-ing: with paranoiac intensity, he must have performed the body-snatching confusion of “who speaks?” in Paterson. Does the man inhabit the place or the place the man, his thoughts sitting and standing on the bus, animated automatons abounding, “They walk incommunicado . . . . They begin!” It’s like a blob and robot movie rolled up in one. Now that I think of it, you could subtitle all of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with random lines from Paterson, and it would make sense, especially given Paterson’s talk of fertility, gamma rays, and sleep (if you remember, you become one of them if you go to sleep . . .).
Compare, then, if you will, the following representative passages:

Listen to me,
Please listen.
If you don’t, if you won’t
If you fail to understand
Then the same incredible terror
That’s menacing me
Will strike at you!
--Invasion of the Body Snatchers

A false language. A true. A false language pouring—a language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without dignity, without minister, crashing upon a stone ear.
--Paterson

. . . and decide for yourself!

Paterson Datum no. 36

2009-03-17T10:42:00.000-07:00

Paterson Data no. 35

2009-03-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

Nardi, M. Meeting you on the street today [poem]. Ladies' Home Journal v. 73 (October 1956) p. 162

2	Nardi, M.Was it the honey-hearted vowel? [poem]. Poetry (Modern Poetry Association) v. 84 (July 1954) p. 212-13

3	Nardi, M. How the rich move softly [poem]. Commentary v. 15 (March 1953) p. 243

4	Nardi, M. They said it is all clear now [poem]. Poetry (Modern Poetry Association) v. 75 (March 1950) p. 331-2

Paterson Datum no. 34

2009-03-12T08:50:00.001-07:00

Paterson Datum no. 33

2009-03-09T16:14:00.001-07:00

Paterson Datum no. 32

2009-03-02T08:18:00.000-08:00

"As mental acts torqued by the 'perception' of rhythm become automatic, the 'economy of attention' is freed and the mind expands. Miner conflates the vocabularies of psychology and economics here: if production and production-level workers can be automatized through the agency of rhythm, then time, capital, and mental resources may be freed up for expansion--both in economic and in psychological registers. What is generated in both cases is 'interest.' The economic principle at work here--that is, capital converted into automatic production frees up other capital for investment--also mobilizes the intelligence: automatized by rhythmic perceptions, the mind is free to increase its 'economy of attention.' According to Miner, economy is the end of biology, and the ability to perceive rhythmically constitutes the foundation of all human speculation." (Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science, Golston p. 21)

Paterson Data nos. 31a and b

2009-02-26T19:30:00.000-08:00

It's the Economy, Stupid

2009-02-25T09:19:00.001-08:00

In Williams’ Embodiment of Knowledge, he talks about the general notion of waste and excess as antithetical to “economy,” widely defined to include notions of the poetic. This assertion might strike those for whom writing poetry today is the closest thing to potlatch as patently silly. Even more silly, as always with Williams, is how he dovetails these insights with a general theory of womanhood:

And it is certain that purity which we require in woman is nothing more nor less either than the beautiful flower of the common plant, economy. And all that is manly—all doing, perseverence, daring, courage, all are nothing else than economy in their reduction, however we glamour them about. It is all: the set value, the single path, concentration of energy, each is economy of purpose which alone makes action beautiful. (187)

He even goes as far as to say that the reason that he stays with Floss, and does not cat around, “is that I am too lazy to go about for others. This is the sole reason.” (187) If laziness prevents him from being “divided by over multiplication,” Paterson eventually gives Floss the horns, since here he does engage multiplicity and challenge the economy of “one.” It makes sense that Paterson becomes a locus for these transgressions, since, as we have discussed earlier, it is the product of Alexander Hamilton’s “new” economy—a planned system that, in its disregard of the contours of natural energies, proved disastrous. And that, in his “elucidation by multiplicity,” he includes the excess of materials from archival sources, representing economies he can’t understand, an intractable “messiness” confounding the poet—finicky at heart, yet challenged by the cosmic imposition of an ontological lassitude. If, as he says earlier in Embodiment of Knowledge “[p]oems must be . . . considered as documents of men” (74), Paterson attempts to break this existential rationale for formal coherence in pursuit of a knowledge not necessarily in his own body. Or is this just his science-fictional sex-poem-fantasy? For, further down in “Waste and Use,” he muses on the possibility that if he were a river he could embrace multiplicity and, thus, manage to get around with more women. Maybe “in the year 1, 011, 000 A. D. we will be river large . . . I think in that case I could be content with a thousand women of proper assortment” (187). . . . a clear case of Passaic envy?

Paterson Datum no. 30

2009-02-20T09:11:00.000-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 29

2009-02-17T11:25:00.001-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 28

2009-02-14T09:51:00.000-08:00

Why I Chose New Jersey to Look at I Don’t Know

2009-02-13T11:45:00.000-08:00

In the recently released documentary of Arthur Russell, Allen Ginsberg describes him as “like William Carlos Williams, only he sings.” Here is a audio clip from the documentary, a collaboration between Russell and Ginsberg.

Paterson Data, various (nos. 12-27)

2009-02-07T20:46:00.000-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 11

2009-02-03T17:04:00.001-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 10

2009-02-01T22:43:00.000-08:00

Note from the Midwest

2009-01-30T13:17:00.000-08:00

Zack Pieper, of this band, may finally be getting a Patersong out. He writes:

"Riles and I are kicking around some Paterson ideas.
He is reading Book 1 now. He's not really familiar with
modernist poetry, but he certainly is versed in modernist
composers! We talked about what Williams might be doing in a
musical sense. His syllables fall on off-beats sometimes sometimes
not. They are sometimes "haunted" by pentameter. But so is a
lot of the best prose. I think. But they are PHRASE based, & are susceptible to
changes in texture, changes in tempo. The music's got
to serve the words in a project like this. Fit tightly.
PRECISELY BECAUSE what all those guys like Kreymborg and
Jolas and Wallace Stevens too, saw in Williams WAS
his subtelty of measure, the WAY the words really WERE
the music, they did not alude to music, nor make a
kind of formalistic PARABLE about the ideas about
music or 18th century ideas bout music and theology,

No he did not do this did he? He was (I bet) a pretty
insufferable inscruttable old prick. A safe man, a cautious
man, with a sentimentality more urbane than Whitman's.
A statesman in disguise. A Yankee Norman Rockwell doctor.
But he saw the WILDNESS underneath the bland pastoral.

Have you heard Reich's version of The Desert Music?
Not bad. But: I HATE HOW IN "Poetry/Song"explorations
the human voice is so often detached, floating above
and separate from the unpopulated dreamy or romantic
soundscape below rendering it into "atmosphere"
DEAR GOD I HATE ATMOSPHERES! I want to hear a fat magic
marker scribbling on paper, you know? kind of Alban Berg
meets Cecil Taylor, BUT with a logic that follows
the WORDS. When he gets measured, when he gets prosaic
the music does. The music dissapears inside the words.
Not vice versa."

A House Call Brings Two Worlds Together

2009-01-27T00:07:00.000-08:00

A colleague, Bill Seaburg, handed me a copy of House Calls with William Carlos Williams, MD without much explanation. The black and white photo on the cover (and those within) gave it the aura of an old book, as did the map of New Jersey and environs in the inside covers (no routes 78, 80, 95; airports signified by a propeller plane icon.) As one pages through, however, various anachronisms emerge: a car’s aluminum sunshade (on a blob-shaped hatchback); satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms from siding; signs for free cellphones, pawning playstations. The back of a Tastykake van may give us the sense of old times and regional snacks, but the Butterscotch Krimpet on it can only be a product of computer design (in the foreground, a sign for “Official New Jersey Inspection Center,” hanging by two chains, is evidence of the more hand-painted artistry in past signs.) The authors have decided to hide the copyright info on the final pages (2008!), leading me to believe that this confusion was intended. Also hidden in the back is a note on the method, which is psychogeographical in spirit. The writers acquired records of addresses to which Williams made housecalls, and then took pictures of what they found there. So the gap between these two worlds, between what Williams must have seen when approaching each house and the site as it stands now, is as much the subject of this thin book, as are the poems and reflections that make up what at first seems just a simple tribute to Williams as doctor, poet, and Patersonian. Yes, Patersonian, because one of the things the book also makes clear is how much footwork this Rutherford doctor DID do in Paterson, at all hours. So hopefully, this quiet psychogeographic research project can heap a little of the deserved shame on the current citizens of Paterson who refuse to accept Williams as one of their own, even as he worked its inner chambers and touched "the secret of that form/interknit with the unfathomable ground/where we walk daily and from which/among the rest you have sprung/and opened flower-like to my hand."

Sharp Sparkle (No Snark)

2009-01-26T12:50:00.000-08:00

In which I talk about Elizabeth Alexander channeling Williams . . .

Paterson Datum no. 9

2009-01-22T13:33:00.000-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 8

2009-01-19T09:24:00.001-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 7

2009-01-18T09:33:00.000-08:00

Thanks Luke for letting me borrow your projector when mine died.

Paterson Datum no. 6

2009-01-17T15:33:00.001-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 5

2009-01-16T14:05:00.000-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 4

2009-01-15T08:58:00.000-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 3

2009-01-14T12:56:00.001-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 2

2009-01-13T11:10:00.000-08:00

Paterson Datum no. 1

2009-01-09T23:58:00.000-08:00

The big question: first of all, need I belabor the following, or can I have the license to let the data speak for itself? Because, the second question, more to the point (and you've heard it before here) is whether I need to pull this whole thing together. It was Williams' problem, and I knew from the start it would end up mine as well. Would the ultimate solution be to merely let this blog trail off into data fragments without explanation, causing many new visitors to think they had happened upon some elaborate splog? Is the line between blog and splog all that clear when we are questioning the nature of the data itself, wondering, as Williams did, how to leave it the hell alone, and not constantly try to sing it into being? I keep happening upon various thises and thats on the harddrive, touches and encounters that are interesting, but unassimilable; and even the patently "uninteresting" junk snaps or aborted recordings have some interest if only because they point to the limitations of my own personal filter. So maybe I'll end up floating them more frequently. And maybe that will buy me more time to work on a larger synthesis. Which will in the end just be postponing another disintegration. Ah, the games we play.
This is a cloud in Paterson.

unworldly love that has no hope of the world that cannot change the world to its delight

2009-01-04T12:47:00.000-08:00

At about 22 minutes in this July 1987 class on Williams by Ginsberg, he talks about what he calls "Paterson: The Wanderer (A Rococo Study)," although in other places on the web I only see it referred to as "The Wanderer: A Rococo Study." Nevertheless, Ginsberg describes it as the early poem (1914? 1917?) that explains "how [Williams] got to be the great poet of Northern Jersey." Also in this file: Wordsworth and spots of time, Williams and Zen ordinary mind ("If you want to get high, don't; if you want to get high, get down"), Williams as super8 artist super haiku artist sound haiku artist.

we takes ovr 4 2009, kthnx carlos!

2008-12-31T17:26:00.000-08:00

NO IDEAz BUH . . . CHEEZBURger?

2008-12-28T18:47:00.000-08:00

In the shower today, I thought "Maybe I should turn WCW into a LOL cat?" Of course, as one usually finds in the recombinatory world of the Internet, where one meme attaches on every possible apt object unto infinity, it was already done. Twice! And both times with the same poem ("This is Just To Say," of course, full of lol-cat sheepishness . . . although they would have been more funny if plums were replaced by CHEEZBURGER!) Stock photos of William Carlos Williams shift between the angry "tunite i peez on efrytin u oen" face and the "u gots new bird? ai hadn't noticed" face. But I decided to stick to cats cause iz bing lazee 4 ez funee. Paterson is not as ez to transform into lol-Caterson (although the Bible seems to be; maybe because no "ceiling cat" in Caterson. Say it, jus CHEEZBURGER.)

Of course, Ezra Pound was already speaking LOLcat-speak way back:

Benevolent Indifferent Attention

2008-12-21T20:23:00.000-08:00

A small fragment and continuation of an earlier Ginsberg talk on Williams, this file touches upon Williams and Buddha mind, the "naive" poetics of Marsden Hartley, the capture of raw perception, green armpit writing, and dodging the social brain. Ginsberg starts in a particularly winning way, then seems to get rattled by a question that sends him into a train of truisms about particulars and universals, but then towards the end, he gets back into his groove, but the question is, is his "groove" a manifestation of social brain or buddha mind? Is this distraction the moment when poetics has a chance to "converge upon mindfulness?" Or is it less to be found in his routine, and more in the clacking of folding chairs in the last seconds of the file? By the way, I'm wondering how the buddha mindfulness flashing in the moment of first capture really relates to a "poem is a machine made of words"?

enter these starved and broken pieces

2008-12-15T16:06:00.000-08:00

I don't know I don't know I don't know. Managing to forge a "whole" work out of this mess, the operation keeps getting interrupted for long stretches of time. As always, the underlying intuition is that this is the whole, that there is nothing to wait for, here we are, etc. I withheld certain parts of the mix that I put together in May while at the Visual Studies Workshop, since I thought posting them would preempt any release of this "whole;" but now listening to what I had managed to put together, while taking account of what has been collected in the meantime, I know it will all change again. Or maybe I'm closer to the end than I'm letting myself admit. In any case, I've decided to post the significantly new parts of the bigger work here, given they will probably entirely change or be folded into a different continuum. Current misgivings annotated.
Possible Intro (1 min. 35 sec.)
well, even though it's intentionally clunky, for something that I've spent so much time on it's probably not an appropriate opening, especially since the pandering, sterile beat gives it the feel of a public radio PSA on monitoring your cholesterol.
It's the locality! (1 min. 33 sec.)
I love Williams' quote that art is not "putting sugar on cake." A crucial bit from the PennSound bytes. Exposition, exposition so . . . yawn? (one person has told me it's boring for those who already know Williams-- the core audience; evidence of constant my schizophrenia concerning who it's for and who will listen. But wait, it's not all sugar on cake, buddy!)
Have you ever been to Paterson? (2 min. 5 sec.)
Cloying? Also, when editing, I had a lot of trouble making the Carole Maso samples really sound like they fit; I still think they might be a little off, even though they provide some crucial connective material and diversity of voice (I found myself overusing Bob Perelman and Lytle Shaw throughout, so any chance I had to get other material in, I took it.)
Blocked (4 min. 31 sec.)
I think this section is the most successful at doing what I wanted the piece to be doing, a mix between informational and musique concrete elements. I do think that, as it goes on it succumbs to the banality of overused effects, which, while may have some place in a more live setting, I think falls a little flat here after a while. For some reason, I think the loops and delays and filter sweeps went on for so long because I wanted to get some particular sound bites in, but but by the time that they fade up into the mix, it already feels like they've been "said" on a subconscious level.

saxifrage

2008-12-12T16:13:00.000-08:00

I swear, the last (and first) time I was at Mt. Rainer, the park signs had hieroglyphics for "saxifrage." I called the park ranger to confirm this memory, but all I got were dead answering machines (of course they are not at their phones, they are in the wild!) I usually take pictures of these things, so I feel addled having no evidence to back me up, but I'm not going to drive all the way back to the great mountain on the near horizon just for this one post. Believe me when I say that saxifrage is plentiful enough that even if a hieroglyphic for this flower were not to be found, it should be there in some imagined guide. Because the word has a hieroglyphic nature that Williams would have appreciated. From the Latin, "saxi" and "frage" combines two favorite Williams concepts: fragmentation and rock. That no flower appears in the etymology is perhaps also what drew Williams to it as he inspiration for "no ideas but in things." For the flower emerges, invisible as it were to the object pieces of language, but indebted to them nevertheless, in the same way that meaning breaks between elements of montage rather than in separate film cells. Both breaking (of the rock) and building (of the flower) are combined here in a single, slow geologic complex. Here is Williams' poem about saxifrage, the original locus for Paterson's "no ideas but in things." It is a deceptively simple poem, somewhat pastoral, but so much about writing itself that one is unsure where the metaphors stop and where things begin.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
-- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

When Williams says "let the snake wait under/his weed" it seems like he's saying: give that to the snake, it don't interest me none. Does that carry over to writing with words? Is Williams NOT writing with words (my interpretation above that the poetry happens BETWEEN the words might carry this out)? In this case, a metaphor that reconciles people to the stones would be the problem with metaphor. However, the "let" could also be a kind of laissez-faire attitude, a benediction even. This is what snake does. Amen. This is what words do. Amen. Yet, is this the natural order of things? "Let" could also announce the trope of hysteron proteron (since the snake is waiting and the words are striking: a distinct reversal). If all these are true, he's caught in a kind of disabling polysemy. So he returns to simple commands (to himself or to the reader). Compose. (but then he takes it a step further, and hits upon the mot juste.) Invent! He is not reconciled to writing and metaphor, but is split from it (even as it does the splitting, but in splitting it himself he (sort of) makes a song of it, or at least emerges as a kind of unified being, one, not two (although there is a two within the one.)

Metadata Now

2008-12-11T21:13:00.000-08:00

Now New Jersey as an Impossible Object has some metadata, although, since this blog is probably a kind of metadata itself, then . . . so . . . there is no data. (How do you say that in French?) That would imply an informational core that even the Falls of Williams does not really provide. Probably the only reason I didn't add these tags so far is that, since Blogger calls them "labels," they were invisible to me (compare the annoying way that Apple insists on using the confusing and vaguely patronizing command "Share" rather than the less value-laden "Export.") I probably have to comb through these one more time, as I did them today in a fairly casual manner while procrastinating from other more official demands on my time. As with any index, it's the concepts that tend to be hard to organize; while "no ideas but in things" was pretty easy to trainspot, there are other concepts and themes I'd like to map out. The proper name is, of course, the easiest way through, and I try to avoid indexing what is in truth only a dropped name, but the index is name-dropping elevated to a science, afterall, so I am not too hesitant to have Bob Fosse, Bunk Johnson and Lao Tzu vying for Marcia Nardi's attentions at this cocktail party of the mind. And the proper name is its own intoxicant. Since my geovistor's map is lighting up, I guess this deluge of proper names is triggering all manner of Google alerts, although I didn't think merely tagging would affect those. As our friends at for godot have so aptly illustrated with their Issue 1 publication, the name is a strange attractor in the chaotic system we call "poetry." Or, if there are any Sokals out there ready to pounce on my physics metaphor, let's just say simply that the name is driftwood, clung to in a data tsunami. Or if there is anyone who sniffs at such a pedestrian metaphor, we can say that the name names the name naming name, namely "name" named "Name."

Mindfulness of Detail

2008-11-23T18:40:00.000-08:00

More trundling thru Naropa archives. I'm reminded how great a teacher Ginsberg was, how highly conscious he was of the language he was using even as he was talking about it, his tools no dull calipers, but perhaps language on language, lipping further. extracting excaliber? even with the mechanics of meter, a blast from the grammar school past, which takes up the bulk of this file, he brings the foot back to the dance. Anapest, trochee, and dactyl. Mouthing and the breath stop where idiot winds go. By the time he gets through all these meters that Williams doesn't do, you get a better sense of what he actually does.

Tomorrow!: Williams @ 125 LIVE

2008-11-10T19:49:00.000-08:00

Tune in tomorrow to the Kelly Writers House live webcast celebrating William Carlos Williams' 125th birthday (when it's 125 yrs., what're a couple months give or take?).
With its live poetics-oriented broadcasts, KWH-TV will provide mighty competition to Philadelphia's Delightfully changeless Action News Team. Watch out Jim Gardner and Lisa Thomas-Laury! There is a news that stays news longer than your staying news!
Live feed tomorrow Nov 11 @ 6:00pm EST (3:00pm Pacific)

What's There?!: Herb Blau on Paterson

2008-11-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

I asked theater legend, writer, and Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington, Herbert Blau if there was a quality of consciousness in Paterson that has analogies to what goes on in experimental drama. He took this question for a ride, uninterrupted, resulting in this hypnotic read of Book One, without me having to say much else. The interview took place on 8-8-08 in his Seattle home. I’ve known Herb for close to 15 years, but that is just a sliver of his career, which has included directing some of the first productions of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter and Genet in the US. He was also co-founder of San Francisco’s Actor’s Studio; co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York; one of the conceptual architects of CalArts; artistic director of the experimental theater group KRAKEN; and author of numerous books that, with a blooded prose that he considers theater in itself, take on theater’s impossible limits and the indelible impact of the image on thought. He is also an indefagitable teacher; while some fancy professors are phoning it in at 50, Blau continues to be a tireless and available resource for his students at 82.
Theater, Consciousness, Paterson, & Various Readings of Book I: (34:58)
Bonus Fragment: (2:35)

Democracy

2008-11-04T23:50:00.000-08:00

"Without invention nothing is well spaced,
unless the mind change, unless
the stars are new measured, according
to their relative positions, the
line will not change, the necessity
will not matriculate: unless there is
a new mind there cannot be a new
line, the old will go on
repeating itself with recurring
deadliness"