The Ironic Midden

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.

Poet Beats Fire at Its Own Game!

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

Old Home Day, and the Old, Old Home

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!

10th & A

"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.

Still Not Convinced!

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!

Vast Ventriloquism

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

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.)

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)

Green Bottle Blues

In the first installment of the new podcast project PoemTalk, three poets discuss William Carlos Williams’ short poem “Between Walls.” It seems that since PennSound has posted all of Williams’ available readings, people are starting discover with dismay that his reading performances do not give any clue as to particularities of the line as he wrote it.
One could speculate whether he knew what the heck he was doing. Maybe he felt too constrained by the genteel context of the pre-Beat-era public reading to really perform his lines as written. Regardless, I liked the almost petulant flavor of his home-recorded reading: he projects the word “nothing” as if he wanted it to be an object . . . a "something" beyond him. “Broken” and “bottle” are flung far enough from the body so they could stand off and judge it; or rather, not even that far—it’s more like spit in the wind. (Cf. Marinetti, whose flung words transform the provincially trapped poet, merging into an international technosphere.) The poets had a good laugh at the improbability of doing a podcast devoted to Paterson: Do it!
My only criticisms at the onset of this well-produced and interesting project are the tag line and the intro. The idea of “close but not too close reading” is a cute phrase that conceals a lot of culture war ressentiment—and it has always seemed to me disingenuous for the poetic avant-garde to disavow the theoretical practices that have helped over the years create its core audience. And the intro sounds much too much like that of Martin Spinelli’s Radio Radio (which, because Al Filreis sounds almost exactly like Spinelli is just . . . weird): so Al, if you need someone to design a new intro for you, call me!