It's Hard to be Hydrocephalic

Last week, New Jersey as an Impossible Object taped Graham Stowe singing his Patersong "The Skeleton of Peter the Dwarf" based off material from Books I and IV (pp. 10 and 192 respectively). The music is by Jonathan Sircy. More of their songs based on Paterson can be found on archive.org. Graham is a doctoral candidate here at the University of South Carolina, and is embarking on a dissertation about Williams' Paterson and Olson's Maximus Poems. Along with Kenneth Camacho, he's kept a blog, The Paterson Project, which documents their use of Paterson as raw material for new poems and songs.

The Skeleton of Peter the Dwarf

It’s hard to be a hydrocephalic.
54 inches, head to toe
(27 from my chin to scalp alone;
That makes me a marvel.)

Washington came to see me
(the man, not the city; or, maybe, the city is the man).
He looked at me; marveled at me;
I answered with inactivity.

I floated along, day to day,
endlessly rocking,
loving Jesus and preacher’s conversation,
swelling with pride at the show I could provide.

It was hard for me to move,
my head being so huge,
but I got by without going out;
keeping to the cerebral.

my head's got its own box now,
it's lost all its water!
and now they say my skull is a marvel!
but they say nothing of the parts of me everyone's had.

What I never told in my time
was that, more than theology or phrenology,
all I ever wanted out of life
was to not shit in my cradle.

A tiny outhouse with plenty of headroom,
straps to hold me up and a stand
from which I could read
my Bible or a dirty magazine.

Oh that would be marvelous.
“A marvel indeed,” they would say,
as they tied me in and
sang of my tenacity.

When All Is Become Billboards

I’ve joked that my next project might be Olson’s Maximus Poems, if only because I would be able to summer in Cape Ann rather than northern Jersey. It is interesting that in today’s Gloucester—locus of Olson’s Maximus—most of the street signs are half-hand painted. Could it be that this folksy interpretation of common signage is a response to Olson’s :

But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?

when even our bird, my roofs,
cannot be heard

when even you, when sound itself is neoned in?

I picked up Maximus a couple weeks ago, and reread his piece on projective verse, since I’ve taken on a grad student who is working with both Williams and Olson. This student also has an uncannily similar Paterson blog, in which he and a collaborator have used the book as an occasion for new poems and songs. (note: I am not the professor on campus who “is constantly apologizing for Williams's inability to keep out of other women's beds” but I’d be interested to know who is; sounds like a stock character, though) More from them, soon. Nevertheless, Olson’s stuff is among the many poems and secondary materials I have been trundling through this fall, but have not had the opportunity to synthesize yet for the blog. For example, I reread Eliot’s The Wasteland because Cooper had a copy of the same edition I had in college, and the wee periwinkle paperback made me nostalgic, so I read it, and enjoyed it . . . which may complicate my previous positions, but nevertheless . . .