Responsive Form

At the end of Ron's excellent post today on Ponge, he claims that "the idea of poetry as a mechanism for exploring & recognizing the forms of the world (rather than merely superimposing the cookie-cutter patterns of poetry onto the world) remains largely unexplored in American poetry outside of Ronald Johnson’s ARK." I'll grant that the bulk of mainstream poetry leaves lots of things unexplored, but can't one find many examples within "experimental" poetry (or whatever we want to call the kind of poetry "we" like) of the sort of heuristic approach that I understand Ron as describing? What about the work of Larry Eigner, Robert Grenier, Clark Coolidge, Susan Howe, or Leslie Scalapino, all of which I read as attempting to engage experiential forms through a responsive use of language? I'm thinking of books like Coolidge's Polaroid, in which processes of photographic emulsification, exposure, etc., are "translated" via an improvised lexical mimesis, or Scalapino's Way, which presents discrete moments of empirical and emotional sensation as fluidly sympathetic stanzas.

One can go further back and trace this emphasis on a receptive--as against impositional--impulse to general notions of Projectivism, Open Form, Organic Form, or back further yet to Williams and the Objectivists. And once we go that far, aren't we just talking about a trait that inheres on one level or another in at least half the effective American poetry ever written, from Dickinson to Stein to Pound to McClure to O'Hara to Juliana Spahr or Hoa Nguyen?

But one of the most vital inclinations of poetry, any poetry, is to explore and recognize the forms of the world rather than squeezing the world into forms. George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Margaret Cavendish, William Blake, and John Clare were all concerned with doing this, as were countless others.

Another of poetry's most vital inclinations, however, has been precisely to squeeze the world into forms, an inclination that is most successful perhaps when it manages to create the illusion that those forms were there all along, or at least that they belong there where they may not have already been. Milton. Pope. Zukofsky? Many of the Language poets?

Dickinson Poem 854

This may be my favorite Emily Dickinson poem:

854.

Banish Air from Air--
Divide Light if you dare--
They'll meet
While Cubes in a Drop
Or Pellets of Shape
Fit
Films cannot annul
Odors return whole
Force Flame
And with a Blonde push
Over your impotence
Flits Steam.

The poem can be reduced to a referential precis--natural energy cannot be canceled out, only pressured into atomic nodes that then resist containment via explosion. One can also make that familiar kind of formal argument wherein the compressed monosyllabic middle of the poem fanning back out into stanzaic width corresponds to said theme of constrained forces finding release. But I like most of all the flirtation with complete asyntaxis and ungrammaticality, the way the words break away from their functions within the economy of the "sentence" and hover over around and under each other like wandering bugs, or bubbles in a kettle.

Milton & O'Hara

To whom the wilie Adder, blithe and glad.
Paradise Lost 9.625

Look at the way this line fits together. The t / w consonantal pattern of "To whom" repeats (morphemically) in "the wilie," and the vocalic pattern long i [+unstressed syllable] / short a [+d] then slides (phonemically) from "wilie Adder" to "blithe and glad." Like the coils of the serpent undulating forward, each leaving the trace of its configuration behind for the next one to fill.

Something like this happens in Frank O'Hara as well. Granted, Milton's verse structure is artificial in the extreme (i.e., crafted according to deliberate and painstakingly controlled principles of meter, balance, verbal harmony), whereas O'Hara's is often dashed off to fit and fill whatever cocktail napkin is handy, but there's not such a divide there as it might seem. In each case, a formal constraint determines the results: in Milton's case the epic convention, the blank verse, and the Latinate diction; in O'Hara's the exigencies of the "lyric moment" and its arbitrarily available materials. What both poets share is a sharp instinct for the sensual decorum of a given phrase, line, or sentence—what pants will fit best in a particular situation.

An untitled piece, from Poems Retrieved:

what strange cataract the peculiar
perfume seeping into
the haze of feeling
a dynamic loss like the gentian
an a
a, a, a, the blue steel mill the
effort and a fight afterwards in the street
towards which the cranes are flying
and the pillow is plowing and the orgasm
is nearing it is all happening in the
street where it should in the cold light
of many disinterested eyes you told
them to be there and they are there and
we are not there too as in a battle
[October 21, 1962]

Considered by itself, the penultimate line ("them to be there and they are there and") almost doesn't count as language, let alone poetic language. But, inserted between the near-iambic-pentameter of "of many disinterested eyes you told" and "we are not there too as in a battle," it is infused as by a "contact high" with those framing lines' aural resonance. It thus becomes possible to hear a jazzy thrum in the characterless monosyllables that form the line, uninteresting in themselves but given personality by their audacious isolation. This is related to the technique used earlier in the poem with the more radically asyntactical two-line sequence "an a / a, a, a, the blue steel mill the." In the middle of all those bland articles, "blue steel mill" sits like a ... well, like a blue steel mill, visible as such against that sub-prosaic background of minimal verbal units.

Guest Poet Dept.: Michael Magee

The Idea of Order at Modesto
Michael Magee


The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And the chief power of wealth is to wear the spirit
Of contentment on the wisdom which is better
Than the wealth of every sun's inspection
Of the hidden water also, below working classes'
Coition, plunging head into water, swallowing thick.

Allah sends down water (rain) from the sky,
Ordered you to give them Burroughs' "The Rare
Jewel of Christian Contentment," page 19.
A trick consists of four qualities: Guile-
Lessness and simplicity, purity and contentment,
Sweetness of water and honey and curds.

Delving even deeper into a wealth
Of information--jails, airlines, freeways, bridges,
Town water, railways, trams, man, a way of life--
Language hopefully not understood by sharks
Or giant squid loosening tiles and sucking
The wealth out of the women carrying water and washing.

Well, the Ministry of Health would just love to burn
Pizza-drops after the Bishop has bolted the gates?
Coming into contact with the polluted water,
A new car, big-screen TV or any other form.
Hornet, all evil great and small, each beastly
Little squid, ambition's like a circle on the water.

The dropsy'd thirst of empire, the daughter
Of Franco's notoriously promiscuous brother,
Ramon, recesses beyond. I vowed that when
My health returned I would not hearken to Him
In the pulpit, nor abstain from eating, drinking.
The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world.
An average glass of tap water has passed through.

Guest Poet Dept.: Rodney Koeneke

Blogg*er
Rodney Koeneke


First I read the other blogs and get all misty-eyed:
Vicious Cargo
Sigue Sigue Samurai
Maenads Ate My Oysters
Amaryth’s Fertility Room

Not having kids, not going to school
I mindmeld with an array of daily visitors
screens flip from classroom to business to leisure
Roll / trill / flip flip / kickbox / Genghis Blog!!

We’re so bored down here in shipping, we’ve got
Daughter’s Market (book)
Brave on the Rocks (another book)
Naked (sorry, book)
Ghost World (my leisure blog)
I remember what they used to be, cute little flipbooks, coded rings
fragrant ringlets hauled off ships
that flipped from horizontal
to vertical position at will

Now I feel all sorry for Cathy--She makes me like
this awesome blog (“Papercuts: A Low Hug blog”)
and all I do is wiggle my toes in leisure. Words bleed
from blog-infested Florida leisure village
and all I write is Cookie is so cute, I feel obliged
to blog about guy in Receiving with grody leisure suit

& that's the whole point—to flip unseemly power
& hope we’re not so sanguine about Google
buying Blogger
{Google + Blogger = Mainstream weblog acceptance...}
Evangelism’s what I do off-blog, but to power moby’s leisure
past alt-rock, pop, old pop, new pop, dancy
then build a mental structure I can move in
flip-side of love, the dark & sleepless moments
that I blog in, alone & never having praised so much, not ever
the discount flip-flops in which I like to shower.

Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter"

Why I Am Not a Painter


I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

In a way, this is one of those “toy poems”: it hinges on the joke of the title’s promised explanation never being delivered, just as “SARDINES” never shows up in “SARDINES,” and oranges never show up in “ORANGES.” There are teases interspersed throughout the poem, suggesting that we might get our answer at any moment: the “Why?” of the second line, which is followed only by a restatement of the title’s assertion (that he is not a painter); the “for instance” of line 4, further leading us on; the “But me?” of line 17, which seems to promise that we are getting back to the point; and the last line and a half, in which we are set up grammatically by “And then one day” for a big payoff demonstrating the key difference that keeps O’Hara from being a painter, but what we really get reads more like a revelation that the poet and the painter are the same. The failure, or refusal, to follow through on distinctions reaches a thematic crescendo in the third stanza, with its three underdetermined oppositions: “words, not lines”; “not of orange, of / words”; and finally the enigmatic declaration, “It is even in / prose, I am a real poet,” where the implied opposition is ... what? between non-prose and poetry, which is to say between poetry and poetry!

O’Hara wrote famously in “Personism”: “As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.” The formal elements in the poem—which basically amount to its division into lines of verse and three stanzas—are conspicuously unmotivated, as though they were there for no reason other than to lend perfunctory evidence for the poet’s claim that he is a poet, and thus make the whole apparatus just sexy enough to win our assent (unless we’re Mike Snider). Similarly, the misleading grammar of deferred explanation that runs throughout the poem manages to keep the title in our memories as we read through to the end, but only on the vaguest level, so that when we get to the conclusion, we might tend to think that we have missed the point rather than that the poem has failed to follow up on its question. Perhaps in order to distract us at the last moment, the final stanza invokes an ecstatic (but again, only obliquely and perfunctorily so) moment of “insight”: “how terrible orange is / and life.”

One way to frame all this is to say that the poem depends heavily, as many New York School poems do, upon the principle of equivalence: “blank” or “empty” formal place-holders are inserted in place of the “substantive” verbal “content” we expect, and prove to be as effective as “the real thing.” We know that this principle works quite well in everyday life: conversations that are largely phatic (“you know, it’s like, um ... yeah ... so, I'm all--whoa”) nevertheless manage to “work” at maintaining an active circulation of information. What enables them to do so is a familiarity between addresser and addressee: a mutual trust, endearment, receptivity. O’Hara’s great accomplishment was to generate this sense of intimacy between himself and readers who would never be allowed to know him. In “Why I Am Not a Painter,” he (it is he, O’Hara himself, certainly--who would ever question it?) strays from the point in order to seduce us, to enchant us, with his scatterbrained nonchalance. The poem, or specifically, the form of the poem, is a plain pair of pants. It’s the way he wears the pants that counts.

--------

An e-mail from Michael Magee helps me to realize that I've been misreading "Why I Am Not a Painter." Mike writes:

I've always thought (won't surprise you) that there's a relatively serious philosophical point being made in "Why"—FOH refuses to answer that question either philosophically (metaphys, ontolog) OR empirically (like, "because it's a pain in the ass to stretch those canvases"). The answer is, like Pollock, a big finger pointed at the medium: "I use words, painters use paint." (Even one word is "too much" for Goldberg.) Duh! But it has all of the impact of Pollock, throwing us back into the poem and onto the words the "dumbness" (Pollock again) of them. "I go and the days go by / and I drop in again. The painting / is going on, and I go, and the days / go by. I drop in." Well, hello, Gertrude, this is Frank; Frank, Gertrude.

The opposition in the phrase "a / whole page of words, not lines," then, is not between "words" and "lines," but between "page" and "lines." Thanks, Mike, it makes a lot more sense now!

Unfortunately, this lets the (hot) air out of much of my analysis. Still, I think what I said still holds about the basic function of emptiness in the poem's form, an emptiness as of empty pants, waiting to filled by the poet's attitude, or cute butt, or whatever.

Mexican Poets Report

Yesterday, went to see Dolores Dorantes, Jen Hofer, Rebecca Seiferle, Angélica Tornero, and Heriberto Yépez at a colloquium at Cabrillo College in Aptos and a reading afterwards at the Watsonville Community Center. Both events were loosely structured around two recent anthologies: Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (2002, Copper Canyon Press), edited by Monica de la Torre and Michael Weigers; and Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by Mexican Women (U of Pittsburgh P, 2003), edited and translated by Jen Hofer. Here's a preliminary report that ran a few days ago in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The colloquium was sparsely attended, which was disappointing, but the reading drew upwards of 70 people, with a pretty even balance of Mexican and non-Mexican attendance.

Reversible Monuments looked like the less adventurous of the two collections, based on what I could tell from a brief browsing at the book table and from some of the participants' comments, but it does contain Heriberto, so it's got that going for it. The poets in Sin puertas visibles, however, were all selected and translated by Jen. You know what that means, if you know Jen's work. If the two participating readers represented therein--Dorantes and Tornero--are any indication, which I'm sure they are, this book is a must-own. I'll have to order mine online, as I only had three bucks on me, and was limited to buying Heriberto's Duration Press chapbook Babellebab. Get your copy of both these texts now.

Jen didn't read any of her own stuff; she did, however, accompany Dolores Dorantes and Angélica Tornero with her translations of their work. For Angélica, it was very straightforward: she would read her poem, then Jen would read the translation. For Dolores, they made more of a duet of it: first, Dolores would read some lines, and then Jen would take a brief section and read it in translation, and so on throughout the poem, so that it was basically Dolores with occasional back-up vocals; then, they would read the same poem again, but with Jen reading in English all the parts that Dolores had read before in Spanish, and Dolores doing the shorter parts in Spanish that Jen had done before in English.

I should point out that of the five, only Heriberto, Dolores, and Angélica are actually Mexican. Rebecca Seiferle and Jen were there in their capacity as translators. (Jen did live in Mexico City for three years, but she's from Berkeley originally.)

Heriberto read a poem in English that consisted of a list of ways to "know you have a body."

Heriberto read a statement at the colloquium in which he explained that he had made a decision to write any poems that he would read in the US solely in English rather than Spanish, in order to use the language against itself ... to use English as a "second Spanish."

H.D.'s "Helen"

Ron discusses H.D.'s short poem "Helen" today. It's interesting to hear the perspective of a poet coming across this piece for the first time, as he is; "Helen" happens to be one of the first poems that captured my attention as a young adult, in the late 70's or early 80's, when I read it in some collection or other--either the Norton or one of those Oscar Williams pocket anthologies (which I loved because they had little postage-stamp-sized photos of the authors checkered across the cover, including Williams himself in his silly bow tie). Like Ron, I was fascinated by the poem's vitriolic sharpness, and its elegant interplay of formal closure and openness. Here it is again:

Helen

All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.

All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,
God's daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.

It never occurred to me, however, to think of this poem being a direct expression of hatred toward Greece as a nation; "Greece" here seems utterly fictive, a mythico-historical abstraction. If anything, it is a paradigm for "civilized" society in general. The overall context of H.D.'s mannered classicism seems to militate against a specifically ethnic or political reading.

Ron writes that this classicism sometimes enables H.D.

to achieve a space that the Russian formalists would have characterized as 'unmotivated' or plotless. Often, it provides a kind of buffer or privacy for Doolittle, enabling her to speak intimately & directly without having to address the issues implicit in being identified with the speaker—that’s part of its function here. Often too classical facades disguise the depth of her challenges to the received terrain of language.

I get lost in some of the hiatuses between these assertions. I almost feel as though Ron is deliberately writing "New Sentences." I get that the Hellenisms allow for an unmotivated space: as I said before, the valuation "myth" tends to override any determinate local reference. I can also follow the claim that this tactic lets H.D. speak as an Other, simultaneously inhabiting this imaginary subjectivity and distanced from it. But I don't quite see how that is happening in "Helen." First of all, who is the speaker? One of the Greeks? A dispassionate modern reader commenting on the ethics of antiquity? Helen's lover, or her own alter ego? Certainly there is no clearly delimited persona here. How then can there either be or not be identification with the speaker?

Just typing that out, I see that maybe that's what Ron means: the classical conceit allows for a kind of "positionless position" from which to speak. But this brings me to the greater problem--in what way is the facade "too" classical? Or is this poem an exception to the rule? If it is not, what exactly is being disguised in H.D.'s challenge? What "received terrain" are we talking about? Classical discourse? Or poetic language generally? Or if it is an exception, what precisely has happened in this poem that allows it to escape the trap? Does it have to do with the tone of hostility that Ron perceives? Here as well, I'm not sure that I hear the hostility in the poem being directed against Greece--either real Greece or fabular Greece--as clearly as Ron does. Does it have to do with formal effects of pacing and rhyme? Ron makes interesting observations about the way the maid/laid rhyme precedes a final line that prohibits closure, but what does this demonstrate exactly, and how does it relate to his previous claim about the poem's "absoluteness of hatred"?

I'm playing the interrogator here not so much because I think that Ron is especially "wrong" about anything, but because like him, I'm intrigued by the poem, and I'd like to be able to discuss how structure works along with theme to make it so forceful, but I'm just not satisfied with any of the readily available explanations for this. I continue to be skeptical about arguments that attempt to map form (rhyme, meter, enjambment, and so on) directly onto meaning (referential or emotive). I think these structural features work on us more by the way they remind us of other structures in other texts with which we have certain relationships than by any ingrained semantic properties.

New Brutalism and Toy Theory

Thesis: the New Brutalism is a toy movement. Not in the sense that the individual writers' work is toy poetry—on the contrary, what I have seen is sincere, elegant, and complex. But the "movement" itself stands awkwardly apart from the work, like a host who can't find a chair at his own party. It doesn't have anything to do with the work, which is part of the point: "New Brutalism" doesn't mean a damn thing. It's a phrase from an Ashbery poem ("Daffy Duck in Hollywood"), which is about the least amenable source one can imagine from which to extract a palpable credo. To adopt it as one's group identity is to hint at an indebtedness to Ashbery, which is the kind of thing that invites comparisons to the so-called Elliptical Poets. This has already happened on at least one blog. But aside from their mutual interest in lyric as a privileged form, the New Brutalists don't have much in common with les Ellipticistes. For one thing, they have senses of humor.

What makes New Brutalism toylike is the sense that it is nothing more than a beanie cap with a cool insignia on it, though the wearers may try to find deeper meanings in the etymological implications of brut-, and to find other ingenious after-the-fact ways of making the cap fit. Once we accept this, and agree to go along with the joke (if we do agree), we observe that it can be made to fit, just as any other random phrase probably can. It may be just a toy, but like a toy piano or a toy car, it stands in for an ideal object; and, like those toys, it may have the potential to transform or critique the contexts in which the objects are initially situated when it is inserted in those objects' stead.

More on "Toy Poetry"

Nathan Austin writes from Buffalo:

Really like the idea of "toy poetry," and am inspired to respond. As you suggest, important not to use the term in derogatory fashion, but to reinvent the term: "toy" not as something trivial, un-serious, put away as a childish thing but rather "toy" as a material key into an imaginative space.

There's a horribly cheesy song I'm reminded of, from long ago, called "The Marvelous Toy"—I think it was written by Tom Paxton and covered by several 60s folk bands (I think I remember the Chadd Mitchell Trio's version), where the toy works in precisely this way. With its buttons and mysterious nature (and its onomatopoeic sounds), it opens up an imaginative space. "Marvelous" from the song's title taken here in the Surrealist sense: the aesthetic object not conventionally beautiful, but capable of creating through the "convulsions" (Breton's word) of its "nonconformism" (Breton) "a new super-reality" (Lippard) of "transgression" (Bataille). (Not that the song in any way implies Surrealism's radicalism; it's really quite sentimental and stupid....)

Or, in the case of Williams (whom you mention, by way of his "Red Wheelbarrow"), the poem as a product of "imagination." Not "toy" here as escapism or triviality, but "toy" (working as a key to WCW's imagination) as alternative to the "beautiful illusion" "to whom [the poem] is addressed" (quotes from Spring and All). After all, it is the imagination that remains undeceived in the great destruction and re-creation of the world that opens this book. And Williams's description of the poem as a "small ... machine made of words" suggests exactly that it is a toy (to my mind, at least, particularly in the emphasis on its smallness); and what does this machine produce (aside from the "zip," "pop" and "whirrrrrrr" in the song)? Zukofsky answers, at the close of "Statement for Poetry": this toy/machine transforms readers into poets. "The reader," he says, "becomes something of a poet himself: not because he 'contributes' to trhe poetry, but because he finds himself subject of its energy" (emphasis on "subject of its energy"—the poem as a machine transfers energy [anticipation of Olson] to the reader who is transformed by it).

In other words, rather than "toy" in its derogatory sense meaning "infantile" or "frivolous": "toy," rescued from those ideas, as a challenge to monumentalism and thematizing systems. Think of Max Ernst's La Femme 100 Tetes. Think of Joseph Cornell's work, in its smallness and literal use of toys (I love the chorus line of tiny lobsters). Marianne Moore's poems (or more so her notes on the poems). Think of Roussel's writing in both the novels' details and the writing of the novels themselves. Or, for a more recent example, the films of Guy Maddin, which have in their fairy-tale qualities and emphasis on Roussellian tableaux vivants, a toylike aura.... Or the use of toy instruments by such bands as Os Mutantes and Oh-Ok.

What someone should investigate is the fact that so many of these "toy artists" take up radical politics.