All Her Teeth Were Ideas

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!

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

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.

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

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.

Benevolent Indifferent Attention

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"?

Mindfulness of Detail

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.

Naropa on Williams

Following up on our last post, Ginsberg starts this lecture on Williams with a discussion of smell.
Since starting this project, I haven't gone back to the online Naropa archives to discover or revisit any references to Williams. It seems there is quite a bit here to work through. I definitely need a new iPod, the collision of which with archive.org instigated my first access to the intellectual life of this western haven (which, while exerting a fascination, was always either too expensive or too distant to get a taste of). I'll report on any particularly juicy findings as I work through this deterritorialized detritus. Of other talks here, some of my favorites are Peter Warshall on red squirrels and the cosmos, anything by Burroughs or Peter Lamborn Wilson. I would steer clear of the Harry Smith recordings, which I kept giving a chance, but they never came through; they are poorly recorded, and, in addition, because near the end of his life, were mumbly and incoherent. Sadly. (If anybody can find anything in the Smith materials to disabuse me, please pass on.)
(Of interest: Naropa Remix.)

Ginsberg Drift

As described by Al in the last entry, here is the clip of Allen Ginsberg taking documentarists through the defunct industrial groves of Paterson, and talking about "no ideas but in things." He starts with his reading of one of his letters to Williams (which we musicated earlier this spring for the blog) and somewhat reinforces my hunch that Williams did not expect Ginsberg to become famous, since Ginsberg describes Williams as wanting his letters for their "street" quality (the way Ginsberg mentions this, you get a sense that he might have felt honored by this inclusion but also condescended to.) This footage was shot 20 years ago, and from what little you can see, the landscape remains little changed. As one is apt, Al marvelously scrambled the elements of this footage in his memory. I'm still looking for the boot and the shopping cart!

You Need This Kind of Unhappy: Filreis, Lowenthal, and Couch on Paterson

New Jersey as an Impossible Object brings me to University of Pennsylvania again, which makes sense since we can probably map Williams’ cosmos as a quadrilateral connecting Paterson/Rutherford, New York, Paris, and Penn (he went to medical school and met Ezra Pound at the university, and his impact is still felt there today). In fact, this interview took place at Penn’s Kelly Writers House, where they consider Williams their patron saint. His poem “Quality of Heaven” is etched in its pavestones, and as Kelly Writers House director and Kelly Professor of English, Al Filreis says, “Williams is what underwrites so much of what we do. He is absolutely central. He’s accessible, in small pieces (not Paterson). He is liked for his crazy geniality and he is very much hip to the language-centered people who inhabit the space. He does it for everyone.” I talked with Al—a native of New Jersey, who did his undergraduate thesis on Paterson (to the dismay of his advisors); as well, joining the conversation are Kelly Writers House director and poet Jessica Lowenthal, and poet, teacher and translator Randall Couch. They are all regularly involved with Poem Talk, a new podcast series which is probably what will force me to break down and get a new iPod. For the life of me, I can’t sit in front of the computer and listen to anything longer than a few minutes, so, if you are like me, I would suggest too these long clips more for loading and listening on your mobile media playback device of choice. As always, pieces of these relatively raw conversations will be worked back into the mix at a later date.
Teaching Paterson: (11 min. 20 sec.)
Paterson, Keep Your Pecker Up!: (3 min. 8 sec.)
Ginsberg and Nardi: (13 min. 51 sec.)
Sam Patch and General Privation: (6 min. 25 sec.)
The Discovery of the Triadic Line: (10 min. 5 sec.)
Approaches to Knowledge: (2 min. 11 sec.)
Paterson and the World: (3 min. 24 sec.)

Williams: A Very Sexually Suc-sexual Young Man

I’ve been trudging through the Williams material on PennSound, trying to log the material that may be useful to my purposes, and it has not been fun. Like celebrities are apt—especially celebrity old-timers—we hear the same pat formulations, the same stories. It may be that the famous just lack imagination in general (at least outside of the spheres of their imaginative control) or that we live with a notion of fame that points to our own lack of imagination (we make people famous because we need these human signposts, and require them to turn out these same stories about themselves). Nevertheless, here are some of the more juicier moments dealing with Williams’ relation to sex, which of course is really what we want of our celebrities:

“I don’t like jazz. It’s tiresome. I hear the people, the artists, in Paris would rave about jazz, but it’s too tiresome! It’s too much of the same thing! . . . Not subtle. If you’re going to be sexually excited about it, it shows you to be a boob. But if you want sex, go and get a colored gal, and she’ll teach you sex, but don’t be kidded. Erections mean more to me than rhythm.”

“I was very sexually successual as a young man [sic], but I did not believe in going so far that I lost my head. I wanted always to be conscious, quite. I didn’t want to indulge in sex so much that I lost my head!”

On Ginsberg: “I’m disgusted with him and his long lines . . . . [The Beats] tend towards homosexuality. For God’s sake what is homosexuality but a variant of sexuality? It’s the same thing. There’s nothing new about that. It’s been done before. No enlightenment!”

On Toulouse-Lautrec: “I was attracted to Toulouse-Lautrec by his social position, which I sympathized with. But the whore’s just as much a human being as a saint. And I wanted to emphasize that, that he was the man who respected the truth of the design. For God’s sake, what the hell difference is it to him that she’s a whore? He was indifferent to it! And the poet is also indifferent to it.”

These all come from an interview with Walter Sutton that he did late in life; something about that interview situation must have brought out the cranky old man in him, and it’s more revealing than the genteel commentaries and interviews that were recorded. The reason I’m fixating on these fragments is more than just idle salaciousness, or playing to Williams-bashing. Since I’m reading Paterson once again, I wanted to take on a challenge. Since I, like many other readers, find his formulations “man like a city, woman like a flower” etc., inane and glance over such with embarrassment or intellectual indifference, I wanted to take them seriously, since they are part of the structure of the poem. How did Williams theorize sex and how does this theory inform the poem? By passing these passages over, we are lacking the type of vigorous imagination that Williams is calling for—that which sees what is before you clearly. Even though these little biographical tidbits give us a sense that—though he be suc-sexual in things sexual—he has quite a bit of issues with sex (and race), we might be giving the poem short shrift by taking references to sex with too much literalness. Again, I’ll admit I might be perversely generous here, but it seems a productive, counter-intuitive inquiry to take up. I’ll probably approach this issue in later blog entries, but I think one thing to think about is that he’s obsessed with this notion of unity, design, and the one, and that identity categories that take on the guise of “difference” (starting with the idea of “woman”) are an instance of a kind of divorce (a favorite word for Williams). So Williams’ poetics, which implies an intense unity with the object, a kind of spiritual-optico marriage with things, also implies the “unity of man” ideal of the Enlightenment to make it work. And as was troubling for Enlightenment thought, he is troubled by that which splits from his optics, and exerts difference, desire, and distance. I think he does not ignore these splits, but makes them very palpable (as with, for example, the Marcia Nardi letters), so that his poem is able to be a performance of the problem rather a symptom of his anxieties.

In Spite of the Grey Secrecy of Time

Since there was some talk recently on the web concerning Allen Ginsberg’s singing of Blake (here at PoemTalk), I decided to revisit my earlier plan to put some of Ginsberg’s letters in Paterson to music. Once I heard the drony, chanty quality of Ginsberg’s harmonium-backed quaverings, the project suddenly seemed more doable, but I think I ended up sounding more like a drunken Irishman than Ginsberg—cosmic troubadour and prophet of the Fall(s). You decide—and of course are welcome to come up with your own riff on Ginsberg’s letters for inclusion on Impossible Object! I took not a few liberties with the original, some of which are, admittedly, outright mistakes (I misread “phase” as “phrase,” although I still think I like “phrase” better, at least in the context of the song; it’s a word not as caught up in the extended weather imagery of the letter, so maybe it’s not such a sin?): Here is the original:

Dear Doctor:
In spite of the grey secrecy of time and my own self-shuttering doubts in these youthful rainy days, I would like to make my presence in Paterson known to you, and I hope you will welcome this from me, an unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county of the world. Not only do I inscribe this missive somewhat in the style of those courteous sages of yore who recognized one another across generations as brotherly children of the muses (whose names they well know) but also as fellow citizenly Chinamen of the same province, whose gastanks, junkyards, fens of the alley, millways, funeral parlors, river-visions—aye! The falls itself—are images white-woven in their very beards. . . .
I do not know if you will like my poetry or not—that is, how far your own inventive persistence excludes less independent or youthful attempts to perfect, renew, transfigure, and make contemporarily real an old style or lyric machinery, which I use to record the struggle with imagination of the clouds, with which I have been concerned. I enclose a few samples of my best writing. All that I have done has a program, consciously or not, running on from phase to phase, from the beginnings of emotional breakdown, to momentary raindrops from the clouds become corporeal, to a renewal of human objectivity which I take to be ultimately identical with no ideas but in things. (172-73)

And here is the song,
I am accompanied by the piano and sleighbell talents of the immaginarium light outreach inner~youth center, with whom I share a rusty county of the world (. . . well actually, we are in contiguous rusty counties.)
“Brighten/ . . the corner where you/ are!”

(image of unknown young poets meeting older known poets courtesy immaginarium light outreach inner-youth center)

To Lead the Mind Away

Joanne Hsieh and Jesse Roy, who last year regaled us with their song of Sam Patch, have produced another Patersong especially for New Jersey as an Impossible Object. From Book III (The Library), their rendition of Locust Tree would beat Williams reading it hands down, although were he to be backed up by Allen Ginsberg on harmonica, Marcia Nardi on bass, and Joe Gould on the spoons, he might have provided more competition.

For there is a wind or ghost of a wind
in all books echoing the life
there, a high wind that fills the tubes
of the ear until we think we hear a wind,
actual .

to lead the mind away.

Drawn from the streets we break off
our minds’ seclusion and are taken up by
the books’ winds, seeking, seeking
down the wind
until we are unaware which is the wind and
which the wind’s power over us .
to lead the mind away (96)

(Click on image for song. Joanne Hsieh on piano and voice; Jesse Roy on guitar and voice; Recorded and mixed by Jesse Roy).

The Wonder Years: Carole Maso on Paterson

Novelist Carole Maso was born in Paterson, NJ and in many ways is a writer deeply informed both by the stylistic licenses Williams took, as well as by the aura of his presence in her first city. Maso talks of Wonderbread trucks, grammar school pride, Armenian silk workers, and other Patersoniana in this recent interview, again fairly unedited. I regretted later on not asking her about how she felt about the Marcia Nardi passages, especially after reading her say in another interview: “Only a college-educated white man can write enormous, sloppy, sometimes unreadable books and be labeled a genius. If a woman attempted such a project she'd be laughed or scorned or ridiculed off the scene. Or worse, ignored.” I did later see her at a reading, and we briefly talked about how Williams was canny to fess up to such power dynamics by including the Nardi letters to him, warts and all.
Maso talks about her upbringing in Paterson: (3 min. 24 sec.)
Moving through a modernist masterpiece: (4 min. 25 sec.)
Hardship in Paterson: (3 min. 9 sec.)
Paterson and Paterson: (1 min. 56 sec.)

Fosse on My Left and Jehovah on My Right

My copy of Paterson disappeared in the vortex of my apartment. That's not an excuse for no recent posts. But I was thinking that, perhaps, the book became invisible through frequent handling; that, like the purloined letter, it was so unavoidably and continuously present as to render itself invisible. However, instead what happened was more interesting. It had been on the piano stand, having fully evolved into music. I had been trying to figure out how to score the Ginsberg letters, which I thought could either be done--in the hands of a capable avant-folk strummer (not me)--a la Incredible String Band (imagine the line "When I come back . . . I'll have W. C. Fields on my left and Jehovah on my right. Why not?" done with the Scottish psychedelic crooners' twang) or with a typical boho jazz accompaniment, of which I am more capable, but would still be lacking someone with Ginsberg's voice to drive it home.
If I had actually lost my copy, I would have lost these notes (below) which are written in the backcover. I could say I wrote them there as the dance-grammar for a possible work entitled Paterson: The Musical! but they are really there just because I had the copy of Paterson on hand when I came upon the following while buying tap-sneakers in a dance store in Asheville, NC: a list of the names of Bob Fosse dance moves, "The Language of Fosse." I'll list this lost language in case I misplace it again . . . a particular type of "idea-in-things":
parallel attitude
hieroglyphic
Calypso run
hat trick
hinge layback
front attitude swipe
4th position turn
chasse changement
shoulder knee pop
monkey down
meltdown
Italian changement
foot drag, puppy dog hands
crescent jump
backbend layout
matador
spender pose

Notes on the Paragram: Poetry and Comedy 2

When I first went to Paterson about a year ago, I was struck by the absence of any trace of William Carlos Williams. No monument, no mention in the various “Visitor’s Guides to Paterson” outside the Cultural Center (it was 6 AM on a weekend, so I must admit that I didn’t go in the Cultural Center, but my guess was that inside there was no undue reference to the doctor.) The best I evidence I could find was a place called “Doctor’s Cave Lounge Go-Go Girls.”
What I did come upon was bronze statue of Lou Costello. The statue seemed to be language’s bronze cheer to poetry. The star of films like Buck Privates, Pardon My Sarong, Here Come the Co-Eds, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein would have more cultural importance to Paterson than the man who wrote a modernist epic poem about it. Not that the readers of this poem haven’t returned the favor. After all, most poets I have talked to have either never visited the actual place, or if they have, they have not expressed any desire to return, since the poem itself provides better returns on revisiting. But the question that immediately comes to mind is, what really was the better poem . . . Paterson or Who’s On First?? Or maybe, we should instead ask, what was the most influential. Was Who’s On First? a gateway drug for poets like Charles Bernstein, the Henny Youngman of Language Poetry, who wrote “Who’s on first? . . . Only the real is real” (“Whose Language”)?
Or take this passage (please), from Paterson, which seems to deconstruct the question and the pronoun, oscillating between it and I, in ways that are not foreign to Costello’s abuse of “who,” “what,” and “I don’t know”:

Who is younger than I?
The contemptible twig?
that I was? stale in mind
whom the dirt
recently gave up?
. . .
A mere stick that has
twenty leaves
against my convolutions.
What shall it become,

Snot nose, that I have
not been?
I enclose it and
persist, go on.

Let it rot, at my center.
Whose center?
I stand and surpass
youth’s leanness.

My surface is myself.
Under which
to witness, youth is
buried. Roots? (30-31)

[12/2/06 correction: however, later I did find Williams made it onto the timeline inside the Cultural Center, along with Allen Ginsberg, and Al Tangora, "World's Champion Typist."]

Outside Myself There is A World

Day Five
I set out with Alexis Bhagat and Sahra Walker to try the heart of Paterson once again. I seem to have many mistaken notions as to the nature of this heart. For instance, I have been avoiding the falls: touristy, too easy. After another long, hot day, however, we drive down Ryle Rd. past the old factory buildings and the animal shelter, park the Buick, and take the wooded path to the falls. I am thinking that I have failed to connect to the city. However, in a quiet corner where the falls eddy at the mouth of a mammoth open pipe, we meet Tony, for whom the falls is the true Paterson in contrast to the commercial, violent, and seductive forces of the street. Contrary to what I had been thinking, for Tony, the falls were a site of black power, the psychic center of the city's integrity. The rest was Babylon. The waters of the Passaic seemed to hold powers of self-actualization. You could also probably do drugs there. Tony was both doing drugs and self-actualizing, but using one to pry free from the other. And he was also writing poetry. Here's some of what he recited for us: "She turns over her life everyday, like a hamburger slaving over the heat. Constantly constantly all they want and eat and beat is beef and beef. Cow after cow after cow I ask now, when will they just want milk?" The prostitutes on Van Houten St. seem to be a continuity between Williams' world and Tony's. We leave Tony and end up at the library, where I find out that all the archival Williams materials are in Hackensack.