everything: a blog fragments are the only forms I trust —Barthelme,"See the Moon?"

Cynthia Nichols Last modified: All wrongs reserved ©

"Don't think. Blog." —K.Brooks suddenly, it had grown very late —john bremer

April 22, 2007
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PennSound!

"PennSound is an ongoing project, committed to producing new audio recordings and preserving existing audio archives."

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John Chamberlain. Love this guy. Like 3D abstract expressionism.

Dolores James, 1962. Welded and painted steel, 76 x 97 x 39 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 70.1925.
© 2005 John Chamberlain/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Dec. 4 , 2006
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Univ. of New Orleans Poetry Blog project (part of a cyberspace lit course). Includes what looks to be a good list of poet's blogs, though I haven't fully explored it yet.

Fiera Lingue's poet's corner (still exploring this)

Nov. 26 , 2006
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While reading about Cy Twombly's work (for some poems I'm writing about art and artists), I've come across the cultural history of handwriting. It's pretty amazing: at one time, people would choose very specific, formalized styles of penmanship strictly according to their gender, social class, and occupation. Special ribbons and other devices were worn around the hand or wrist for training, intensive drills were assigned students according to the early Spencerian and later Palmer methods, and handwriting was considered an important sign of character. (http://www.paperpenalia.com/history.html)

Spencer's Victorian method was horrendously baroque: "At the height of this movement, some writing masters’ instructions for certain feats (usually illustrative of the masters’ prowess) included holding the pen stationary on the paper while rotating the paper 180° before continuing..."

All of this is relevant of course to Twombly's "Blackboard Paintings," which have been compared to a pupil's writing exercises or even punishment, or a schoolteacher's lecture.

Nov. 20 , 2006
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Seems as though every now and then I write a certain kind wacky, sound-driven poem, sort of Dylan Thomas crossed with Neruda crossed with Louis Carroll.

Since I've been writing about painters, this one's about painting, the wish to paint...

If I Could Paint,

I’d pull big juicy brush strokes all across a wall.
I’d say everything.
I’d cool the bruisy knuckles of the brain,
I’d discover a brain inside the brain,
I’d alert the media by pouring a glossy enamel
from one shiny bucket to another back and forth,
right there in front of the cameras, in the middle of the street, unceasingly,
but languidly,
looking up now and then with a grin,
meaning nothing more than how rueful
and rude and determined
the future can be,
how circular.

And then of course dribbles and splats.

I’d parody my own moaning,
then bemoan my own parody. I’d invent the "vastly
ironical wail"— or some other acceptably oblique
expression of suffering
for the new millennium.

I’d implore the angels of risk, then glom up the rosters,
muck up the fucking routines,
make waiting in lines or filling out forms
a form of fantastic sex, I’d make going to work
and vacuuming carpets and waiting for poems
and losing all our money a form of moaning funny.

I’d paint all the classics, like dread of death,
like desire for death. I’d really go to town on the golden horses of morning.
I’d paint the way days and things go on and on.
I’d draw large windy zeroes and terrified shoes.
I’d sketch an achingly thin scratchy line down the canvas off-center,
I’d impasto blue ellipses on everyone’s lips.

And I’d cry out for help deciphering the night.
I’d ask how to make the inevitable livable.
I’d eat the immaculate strychnine of time—
same as always.

Nov. 17 , 2006
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Twombly's stuff: stupid enough to be brilliant.

People who don't like modern art don't know how to be fruitfully stupid?

Nov. 4 , 2006
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Kirk Varnedoe on the gigantic ellipse sculptures of Richard Serra: "[T]hey are precisely about covert order, the kind of order that cannot be understood but can only be experienced in an overloaded panoply of conflicting sensations: things leaning away from you, leaning toward you, falling over your head, falling away from you..."

"...slur and bend and distension and distortion..."

Kind of wish at times that poetry were talked about like that.

So I've more or less finished up a number of poems about or based on Pollock, and have now started on Cy Twombly. Some of his mid to late-50s stuff is so ugly, odd, and sweet; somewhere between the scribble and the word, the drawn and the written. And so hesitant, fractured, tenuous—at times hardly there. It's like he's regressed all the way back to a child's first accidental and later deliberate marks on a page. Or, given how miniscule some of the marks in fact are, it's like his psyche has shrunk to the size of knat, as far as it can and still construct a visible sign. Teeniest first impression on a surface. So interesting to see incohate and then fully legible shapes, then words and numbers appear with each newer painting of that period. And then these fabulous "blackboard" pieces of the early 70s. Great big nebulae of wordless writing.

And god the Lepanto series of 2001: boats made of paint which burn and melt, seem to cry, rain... It's funny how they hover in space. Bleeding or weeping paint, all downward dissolve.

*

Lately, on the days I don't have to teach, I just fall out of bed, make coffee, and start writing. Almost immediately upon waking—that's when my brain seems to work. It even helps to be a bit groggy (so I'm less self-conscious) (or less conscious altogether).

*

Oct. 16 , 2006
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Include in ms things like keys, sand, shopping lists, dept. memos, emails; signs of presence; or, if can’t include those things, then outlines of objects, summaries of what would have been included, “image placeholders”; including shopping lists which have been played with and roughed up into poems.

*

Image placeholders. Signs of what isn't there. What will be or was. Something loading.

*

Being a visual artist in book of poems while really being a literary artist. Transporting whatever's possible, given differences in two types of media? Transportation.

*

Medusa: to kill me you have to look at me and if you look at me I’ll kill you.

Then how do we know you're even there?

I talk.

Oct. 14 , 2006
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hardscrabble

scumbling

scrambled noodlings

scraped crust to dancing filigree

psychomachy

(Vardedoe on Pollock)

Oct. 13 , 2006
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In 1950, Jackson Pollock had his clapboard house re-shingled in cedar. A retired circus clown cut the shingles. In a couple years, the clown would install new shingles on Pollock's studio too.

Pollock said: "I'd give a lot to be as old as that circus clown and split shingles like him."

(Harrison 206-7).

*

rectilinearity

Oct. 8 , 2006
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Still exploring the cartoon icons of my stupid Boomer past:

American Dog        

Ok, I guess you could say
he was circling. I guess you could say he was stuck, stabbed through or pinned
to his bland, Hanna-Barbera backgrounds like the proverbial tail of the donkey
stuck to the brain of the proverbial kid
stuck to the screen, the alluvial mud of the screen like a dream
pinned to money.
His doggy southern drawl was his mark of towering calm.
Didn’t matter either how they dressed his blue dog up.
He sauntered through everything, was never hysterical
like Wylie Coyote or the black and white cat chased by Pepe lePeu.
He was perfectly glad to be stiff as a stick, glad to be sheriff or zorro.
Glad to let others explode, get their skulls pummeled flat,
amount to voluminous wreckage at the bottom of cliffs—
make rubbery holes in the earth from which everything boinged
or sprang zinging refreshed, if sooty, irate,
a little stylized smoke trickling out of the brain.
His corporate-appropriate messes were like far away countries
we can’t find on a map or pronounce.
On The Huckleberry Hound Dog Show, well, who cared.
Everyone recovered from mayhem in seconds
like Americans watching the news.
And he whistled, he sang an old folksong
whose dark sweet story is grief,
if you're listening.

Oct. 6 , 2006
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"Because her work was predicated on an understanding of the self as dynamic and interactive, she was never content to establish a singular style to connote her own individuality, as many of the other Abstract Expressionists did. Rather, she embraced change, which generally took shape through a highly charged dialogue with other artists and herself" (Hobbs, Lee Krasner).

"Did Lee Krasner...never find her true calling as a painter? Or was she a postmodernist before the fact? That is to say, did she reject the Abstract Expressionist myth of natural genius and deep authenticity and by working in a variety of styles over the course of her five-decade career realize the self as a field of socially constructed possibilities?...'Her reluctance (or inability) to settle on a single defining image serves in retrospect as a cogent critique of Abstract Expressionism...In refusing to settle for long on such a limiting tactic, she presents an understanding of the problematics of a contingent self that is particularly germane today.'' It is a canny approach. What might be seen as the central weakness of Krasner's art, its apparent lack of originality or consistent development, Mr. Hobbs turns into a strength, an embrace of complexity and unpredictability" (Johnson, NYT, Oct. 2, 2000)

*

What would "allover poetry" be? (cf Pollock's "allover painting"). Figuratively or literally? I'm not even certain I know how the word applies to painting. Maybe the "surround-sound" quality of some painting, the importance of size so that the viewer is engulfed, becomes herself part of the painting-as-environment? Although it may also mean fullness, "full out to the edges" and without border, the painting as a total entity coming right up against other things without delineation or pause...

Obviously Pollock influenced the whole performance and installation art movements, which dispense altogether with flat canvas so that the art work becomes a literal 3-D space the viewer steps into...

The poems in some of Graham's books have that "without delineation or pause" quality; extreme fluidity and non-closure...One poem kind of running right into the next...

Or how about, not "allover poetry," but "poetry allover"? I.e., poems saturating our living spaces just like advertising does. Poems on billboards, poems scrolling on TV as "pomercials," poems on T-shirts, between articles in magazines, inserted on glossy paper with the coupons and sales flyers in Sunday newspapers, popping up intrusively on computer screens, arriving as spam in email queues, recorded on your telephone answering machine during the dinner hour (those irritating tele-poemers, tele-poets), inserted subliminally into movies, printed on the backs of cereal boxes...

*

Ok, I get it: "allover" = without focal point. The eye is directed       everywhere; nowhere in particular.

The internet is "allover."  TV.  My slovenly brain...                 This blog...

*

Still love these art pieces which mix letters with the otherwise purely visual. There's something about the visual presence of words and letters, or signs which hover between reference and nonreference, which is so intriquing and I can't really figure out why. When the Greta Scacchi artist character in Altman's The Player says, "I like words and letters, but I'm not crazy about whole sentences," I know it's meant to be parodic, but can't help sharing her feeling to some extent.

Pollock's wife and fellow artist Lee Krasner did some pieces with with hieroglyphic-like characters, or incipient letters.

Painting No. 19, 1947-48

Wouldn't it be interesting if color were an inherent part of our verbal signs.

I like the uncertain boundaries of Krasner's "letters." There's a large red and white "W" character (towards lower left), whose right-most slanted line is also the boundary of the square which encloses it. One minute it looks like a "W," the next a lop-sided "M," and the next just a broken-off series of cones, alternating right-side-up and up-side-down. (In the latter instance, we see the space inside the letter, not the letter itself.) The uneven half-white half-red shading further complicates both what and where the "letter" actually is, if it's there at all. Other "W"-like characters in the picture have too many lines or look like several "Ws" linked together. The eye makes out a recognizable "W" even as it becomes a non-W or series of zig-zags. We lose recognition of the thing in the very instant that we recognize it!

F   _  M   O  =  X   S   b   Q '  Z   K  ~ U   a  P  6

x  .   q  y  `   c  [   8    Q b - Ö

Some "letters" seem to cross the boundaries of the little squares, are only apprehendible if the eye starts to "read" the squares together or in larger units.

And of course there's texture and the tactile element...It's hard to tell from a bad print, but it looks as though she probably applied the paint pretty thickly, so there's a slight bit of relief from the canvas plane, while some characters look almost scraped-at or just slightly recessed. Some looked clearly and sharply demarcated, some drippy and swirly...

The picture's a little claustrophobic-feeling to me—no space at all anywhere between characters. Not just an endless chain of signifiers but the air itself choked with them...         ©                       $                                                     #

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"...the impermanence of existence, and things in a state of disappearance” (Rosenberg on de Kooning)

*

"'Depth in a pictorial plastic sense is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull.' Hoffman is telling us that forms in a picture, as in this untitled watercolor, can be seen as receding or advancing toward the viewer based on their color and arrangement, creating movements, rhythms and tensions that are independent of describing any objects" (Witherspoon Art Museum on Hans Hoffman).

Oct. 4 , 2006
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Great—a Pollock-like website for "drip painting" play.

Sept. 30, 2006
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Intrigue of the Line

Frank O’Hara’s, in the longer later poems, always feel like lines
lopped off at either end. They don’t entirely move
down and to the right to the right
down and to the right the way lines in poems often do. Rather, they point sort of east
as well as west, proverbially Janus-brained, or rather, that is, I think what they almost
do is float.

*

According to Fried, Jackson Pollock may be the first at last to liberate
the optical
line; that is, in Pollock, the optical line no longer merely serves
to bind a shape, delineate a plane. It’s line
become the painting and the point. Do you
follow?

*

Google’s gathering of definitions
for line is freaking vast. Snippets and snarlings,
my darlings:

squeezed into sameness; "she got out of line"

“they were descendants of one
individual, all warriors”

a single frequency

a slight depression in the smoothness
of a surface; my face is gradually growing full
of hideous lines. the line of soldiers
advanced

“what line
are you in?”

channel or means

circuit or loop

a particular kind of product; "a nice line
of nuclear devices"

the customer’s maximum credit

short personal letter, said to be
dropped

conceptual separation or distinction; a very narrow line
between fascism and
America ”

reinforced; lined hearts are re-
inforced,are more enduring “To cover the bottom and sides of a cassoulet, mold or terrine with a thin layer of bacon, pork fat, flavorings or pastry. Cake pans are frequently lined with parchment paper to prevent the cake from sticking to the pan after baking”

(infinitely) thin, (infinitely) long, geometrical object one can always find exactly one line that passes through two given points; the line provides the shortest connection an infinite path connecting an infinite number of points length without breadth or thickness the trace of a moving point a spatial location defined by a real or imaginary unidimensional extent

a spatial location
defined by a real
or imaginary
unidimensional extent.

thin, plastic snake
jabbed into a vein

she did a
line

a melody

the correct path of a putt to the hole when putting

the Liability
line

rope put to use on a boat

things one behind another

the main direction
of attack (high/low, inside/outside), the current odds, the current location
of the pen and the pen’s
destination the line
stretched clear
around the
corner

*

We were headed, headed out, we
were going in a direction.

—Mark Levine

Sept. 24, 2006
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Notes Toward the Possible }II{

Gigantic, symphonic poetry performances, lots of voices reading lines together, with occasional counterpointing, coral accompaniment, etc. —what in the hell would that be? I know "sound poetry" experiments have been done, and that various recent performance poets and spoken word or slam people have done some more elaborate oral stuff—see Spoken Word Revolution—but I can't help but wish for something in which the poetry per se is also extremely good. Some of the better SWR stuff is fun, but the poetry itself is pretty mediocre at best, if not just embarrassing.

*

Something like O'Hara's "flat surface," but with the other “surface” too—the everyday consensual depth which is necessary, which keeps bread on the table...

*

How to find everyday consensual faith in something “there”?

To be played with bongos and congas and a corus of three.

*

Why not a page as big as a Pollock canvas? Or at least maybe 17 x 11, to be folded and inserted into a pocket in a book, like those books with maps or CDs? Big page, lyrically full of “splotches”—both readable as regular segments of poetry as well as with amped up word music, language bits, visual material, prose.

Sept. 23, 2006
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Still kind of cooking with this Pollock stuff. Here's another one.

Later that same day...

A little later still...

But this is human life:  the war, the deeds,
The disappointment, the anxiety,
Imagination's struggles, far and nigh,
All human; bearing in themselves this good,
That they are still the air, the subtle food,
To make us feel existence, and to shew
How quiet death is.

—Endymion, Book II, l.153-159.

Sept. 22, 2006
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Phenomenon

void and solid partnering in the snaking whorls... —Varnedoe

So when he gets to the brush-
just-above-the-canvas phase, when he switches to sticks
that move somehow both smoothly and snappishly,
working one protracted motion gradually all across
with the same no-contact discombobulating gap —well, Christ,
it’s wonderful. To be at such unsettling remove, yet still, somehow,
touching. And to wind up with a “picture” which is “done” which he never
touched. As if to say, here. Here’s the actual record
of what I didn’t do. Done. What I said without making a sound. We’ve got solid
proof.

Of course, the whole personality-celebrity thing
poses problems. Much as I love the Guggenheim Mural,
the photo of him in his apartment
at 46 East 8th Street with the bare
canvas, 1943-44, all silhouette—well, how ponderous. How
embarrassing. Somebody took a snap
of the Great Man before the Blank Wall, and of course he famously
took months to even lay on a stroke. Staring at the blank. Eyeballing the big
zero of existence. I mean, I can’t tell if it’s preposterous
self-inflation and posturing, or the most insanely great example
of Real
Thing the world has ever known.

His silhouette's a cut-out
of a guy, all inky black emptiness where a person should be.

Or else some kind of person-ness, presence, full
to the top. Full out to the very edges.

Phenomenal, gorgeous mess of things, I’ll give him that.
Even the whole Wyoming cowboy thing's a hoax.
Yeah, born in the “wild west” of Cody, but grew up, in fact,
in Southern California. And Cody, for God’s sake, in fact,
is hardly something firmly
"authentic," a fin de siècle
tract-development scheme…

Enough to make the mind
loop-de-loop, swirl, swarm, implode,
and vaguely truckle off somewhere…All motion. Real. Pure. Impossible. American.

Sept. 18, 2006
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Ok, so here's a poem modeled on "action painting," "all-over painting," "the drip method," etc. Trying to do something with Pollack's methods—but without imitating Ashbery, O'Hara, et al.

American Grain Revisted (Voice Painting)

Still a draft!

Sept. 17, 2006
___________________________

Still thinking a lot about Pollock. The language of some art history and criticism is at least as stimulating as discussion of poetry (from Varnedoe's Jackson Pollock MOMA catalogue):

"a direct improvised 'flow', without reference to ciphers or language"

"heavily reworked surfaces"         sacerdotal, hieratic

"caked layers of pentimenti"       "a zone of loser scumbling below"

"over-under, smooth-turbulent relationships"

"The definition of a form by the overpainting of a background; the dissociation of line from the task of binding an edge; the sense of horror vacui; and the layering from broad movements to an independent scattering of graffiti"

"from sculptural to planar"

"from strangled to voluble, from scraped crust to dancing filigree"

"all over meander of surface loops and tangles"

"...Surrealist automatism involved the idea of 'discovering' a figure in tangles of random, 'mindless' doodling; but Pollock's first poured works seem to have been applied over existing figures, in elaboration or partial camouflage."

"Arriving at the end of a long period in which he...had been caught up in debates between classical traditions and modern art, and between personal liberties and social repsonsibility, this painting was a huge machine for reconciling opposites...its violence roared off the canvas without any compromising bow to standard forms of narrative or allegory. It brought together myth-symbols of suggestive ambiguity (in the psychomachy of horse and bull) and a wrenchingly unequivocal language of extreme suffering...[about Guernica]

"a way into an abstraction that seemed to keep a grip on significant content"

"the works were primarily intended to appear meaningful while not knowable"

"blunt contours, coruscating passages of thick paint, and raw juxtapositions of hot and cool hues gave the canvas long-distance impact and surface life at once bitingly aggressive and creamily sensuous"

"spiky linear energies"

"the picture's torquing"

*

Love the physicality of those phrases; textural descriptions of texture.

*

"...one of the most salient works of fusion between the figure and abstraction in American painting; its uncoiling, leaping relentlessness rivals and complements the densely packed angularity of that picture. Tellingly in terms of their future work, de Kooning compresses a Picassoid vocabulary of the body down to a humid flesh-pit of volumes and joints, while Pollock agitates a less heatedly carnal tarantella of stick-figure vectors. The overlays and dissociations of the other early canvases—between broad planes and linear rhythms, between figure and ground—here become interlocks, with void and solid partnering in the snaking whorls. Each square foot of the surface is closely like each other square foot, yet there is inexhaustible variety; and, among the other presentiments of the poured canvases to come, the evident sense of top and bottom in this vertically painted frieze doesn't prevent it from being almost identically powerful when inverted...Within this wrap-around embrace, Mural also overwhelms by the explosive confidence of its rendering. All the scumbling, layering, and rigidity of other early work is massively blown away, and the brush rushes, bounds, and hooks across and through this brambled thicket with a coherent brio virtually unmarred either by rote repetitions or by slack idling."

*

Not to suggest that poems can be written in the same ways—verbal language just isn't the same thing as visual—but that painterly notions suggest possibilities for the verbal, maybe possibilities utterly untried before. Wondering if the verbal possibilities of abstract expressionism haven't yet been exhausted (by Ashbery et al). Language poets took it all one way, but I think there are lyric possibilities drawing on Pollock that haven't been explored. (The language poets completely shut out the reader, prohibit "entrance," and wind up privileging theoretical reflection about the work—theory which brings us fully right back to bourgeois convention and if anything only reinforces bourgeois conventional illusions of meaning.)

Sept. 16, 2006
___________________________

Oh Yeah Baby, Baby, A River

steps into us not just twice
but ever after, burning
over and over and over
all through us, it's got to, well,
circulate.

So what if I split
my infinitive? Every day I split my
infinitude: me
and you. See? It’s
called marriage.

Tree

Outside the window, that shrub or tree
or whatever it is that keeps growing like a bitch,
no matter how we do
or don’t tend it,

is looking pretty all-over anxious.
It knows that winter is tip-toeing darkly towards us,
thinking we can’t hear.
The leaves stick out now every which way,

and clumpfuls shudder in the wind
all unevenly. They’re green but a little bit down,
a little bit squalid-chaotic. And now, right there,
forebodingly right in their midst,

a cluster of utterly dead ones,
crispy & the color of old woman’s skin.
Some of the live ones keep trying to cradle it, sort of,
while others among them are leaning and leaning away: get me

the fuck out. And some are just hanging loose, just letting
themselves whirl
all over kind of slobishly
and with Northern Plains insistence by the wind.

My sister Susan and I used to reel that way
when no one else was at home.
We’d put on the Stones or someone full blast, lock the front door,
and then go running crazy all over the house.

We especially relished
letting our long hair flop over when we put our heads down.
We took our cue from Janis, known as Pearl,
whom we’d seen on Ed Sullivan or some other show.

Janis the Hellacious, the first female star
to really abandon herself to the beat. Really and wholly wig out. Really and totally freak
every mother on the planet. Her body went into convulsions
on network TV. Her kinky explosion of hair

would not be ignored, Dan. And her voice—well, hell,
something had utterly pulverized
it yet she could still blast it out. It was Janis who taught us
the lunatic blues and the bleeding whisper

of not forgoing the world,
hell love the damn world, dance it for as long
as you can stand it, since anyway wind
will never let us stop.

Every Channel

Does a bull fight have to kill the bulls
to be the beautiful and terrible and real
and humanly necessary because grimly redeeming
ballet of death? My friend Cindy tells me that, in the south of France,
they don’t kill the bulls. And there’s more than one terero.
Everyone runs around, I guess, luring the bull
in beautiful directions, beautifully,
but still with real danger: she and her husband
saw that a matador’s pants
were ripped down the leg. Ripped, she said; no blood,
but close. That close. I don’t know.
Is it all just sentimental goo
that we can’t stare straight
into the lean mean fact
of animal
death? Is it one more stupid
and cowardly evasion
like buying our food wrapped in plastic, disguised
in every way we know how?
We pray. We play. John and I pay
top dollar not to think about death. Even though death
is ever on every
channel.

Sept. 15, 2006
___________________________

Watched a fabulous documentary on Pollock today (Jackson Pollack, 1987). Wonder if his paintings can be fully appreciated without the film footage of him in action. The finished product is wonderful, and distinct from the live event of him in action, but still. I don't know.

Constantly wonder how principles of abstract expressionism can be applied to poetry. "All over painting." All over poetry. I know O'Hara, Ashbery et al actually did it, but I envision an enormous visual poem—real poetry, every bit as good as we'd hope it to be on a regular page, but with, at the same time, an integral visual component. Shatter the line between verbal and visual... It seems to me, right now, our next real task. Or not shatter—create or find the line where the two really are in action together.

*

A big poem about, and in dialogue with, and in voice of
Pollock as he's moving.

*

"As to his driving—Jackson did more than drive when he drove. He really did a form of expression, one would say, and he sometimes would express his anger by speed" (Jeffrey Potter). Apparently many of the abstract expressionists "used cars dangerously." "Automobile as lover, mother, and angel of death." Potter's comments on this remind me of torear.

Maybe art needs real, literal encounters with death. I know that performance artists have done it. Has a poet ever done it? Or its equivalent in poetry?

A big poem written in a dangerous place.

I know poems engage death all the time in myriad ways. But wouldn't it be interesting: some kind of actual visual poem event which in some way, like a bullfight, involved physical as well as psychological and emotional risk. What would that be?

"Poem Written While Jumping From an Airplane"          

"Poem Written While Drowning"

"Poem Written During a Car Crash."   Talk about "action
painting"...

I've neglected my body so much recently, I'm in the middle of slow-motion suicide.

Poems Written During Slow-Motion Suicide

*

We need some new, refreshed understanding of the unconscious which accounts for language-oriented theory of the last three decades. Does this understanding exist somewhere? Throughout the Pollock documentary, references to the unconscious just didn't strike me as right or valid or accurate or something anymore. Even though yeah, I believe it the unconscious. Over the summer I looked into recent re-workings of Jung in film studies and elsewhere; it would be so interesting to find some refreshed formulation.

*

Reading Lyn Hejinian's Best American Poetry (the Lehman series) 2004. I think it's one of the most interesting of the whole series. Maybe someone like Edwin Torres is doing the visual-poem the way I'm kind of envisioning it.

click here for his page at EPC   "What was thought to have clarity is now diffused by possibility" ("The Theorist Has No Samba!")

*

"Is possibility the goal...or only the instant before doubt?" ("TTHNS")

Sept. 6, 2006
___________________________

Found a great anti-corporate culture website from the UK called Banksy. (Thanks Becca.) Nothing spectacularly new, but it does its thing really well.

Sept. 1, 2006
___________________________

9:30 am

magazine: etymologically storage

8:45 am

Somebody Doubts It, So I Have Heard

Reading some long 19th century Navajo chants. They're all gorgeous, though I like the lyric effects of trimming them down (adapted from The New Anthology of American Poetry, Axelrod et al.):

In the House of the Red Rock,
There I enter;
Halfway in, I am come.

In the house of Blue Water,
There I enter;
Halfway in, I am come.With your mind enveloped in dark cloud, come to us.
With the near darkness made of the dark cloud, of the he-rain, of the dark mist, and of the she-rain, come to us.
With the darkness on the earth, come to us.
With these I wish the foam floating on the flowing water over the roots.

To-day, take out your spell for me.
To-day, take away your spell for me.
Away from me you have taken it.
Far off from me it is taken.
Far off you have done it.
Happily my interior becomes cool.

Happily the old people will regard you.
Happily the young people will regard you.
Happily, as they scatter in different directions, they will regard you.
Happily, as they approach their homes, they will regard you.
Happily may their roads home be on the trail of pollen.
Happily may they all get back.

That may read better with the last stanza cut. "Happily my interior becomes cool" is awfully nice. Maybe the last stanza could just be a whole separate poem. Here's another one:

On the black mountains, she walks far around.
Far spreads the land. It seems not far to her.
Far spreads the land. It seems not dim to her.
On the summits of the clouds she sought the gods and found them;
Somebody doubts it, so I have heard.

One more:

The earth is beautiful.
The earth is beautiful.
The earth is beautiful.

The top of its head is beautiful.
The soles of its feet are beautiful.
Its feet, they are beautiful.
Its legs, they are beautiful.
Its body, they are beautiful.
Its chest, its breast, its head feather,
They are beautiful.

The earth is beautiful.
The earth is beautiful.
The earth is beautiful.

Aug. 30, 2006
___________________________

Here's my O'Hara imitation, based on his later, long-lined-and-little-punctuation pieces.

Doing a lot of Frank in my Creative Writing Studio course.

Aug. 26, 2006
___________________________

Never realized it before, but I guess my poem "Funny Language" is sort of close to the kind of surface poem you get in O'Hara. The whole first section lacks symbol, has no "hint of mysticism" (O'Hara qtd. by Perloff 24), except near the end, and there's it's just commenting on the wish (by the library perv) for that "hint." "[T]he smallest look of surprise" is really the smallest rupture of surprise, since what is finally desired is some break in the claustrophobic surface.

(I'm not in any way likening the quality of my poem to the quality of O'Hara's of course; just interested in the whole surface thing...)

*

O'Hara quoted by Perloff (he's talking about the art of David Smith): "This is no longer the Constructivist intersection of colored planes, nor is the color used as a means of unifying the surface. Unification is approached by inviting the eye to travel over the complicated surface exhaustively, rather than inviting it to settle on the whole first and then explore details. It is the esthetic of culmination rather than examination" (24).

What's interesting to me here is to consider Whitman, whose aesthetic certainly seemed to be one of "culmination." Yet it was at the same time of course transcendentalist and symbolist. Which means his poems, really, reveal both of those tendancies in the American ethos? Well, maybe. Maybe not—different sort of accumulation is at play? I don't know...Maybe any discussion or work of or about "surface" inevitably implies some notion of depth, interior, meaning...

Pollack's work likewise can be read as mystical, unconscious absorption into the moment as well as ongoing surface movement which defies representation, symbol, and any notion of in and out, shallow and deep, etc.

Paratasis, paratactic structure: "and...and...and..." No contrast, depth, emphasis. All details on same plane, flattened out...

5:18 pm

Just one more thought. It's interesting, that, for the most part, O'Hara's work was never really organized into books through the course of his career. (His "writing career" in some ways didn't actually exist.) We just wound up with a gigantic Collected after City Winter, Meditations in an Emergency (1957—he didn't really put this one together; his friends did), and Lunch Poems (requested by Ferlinghetti in '59 but he procrastinated till '64). You can look at the work of so many writers these days as distinct series of books/statements, but with O'Hara we just get the whole shebang which in many ways is so utterly right--his complete body of work can be seen as "accumulation"; it invites us to "travel over the complicated surface exhaustively" like the very paintings he admired and individual poems he wrote.

Aug. 25, 2006
_______________________________________________________________________________

Revisiting tons of Frank O'Hara. Still so much fun, and interesting how well he ages. I remember reading him in that Arcata bookstore years ago, I was just a kid, totally charmed and maybe a tiny bit weirdly repelled by that voice...so many long talky throw-away impromptu lines (as I thought at the time) right there alongside sudden, odd, moving zingers (throwing a chair in the air to aggravate the truly menacing; after practically going to sleep with quandariness; buttered bees, hum-colored cabs, scrofulous puss; I am naked as a table cloth, clasp me in your handkerchief like a tear/trumpet of early afternoon...). The identity of those long fluttery lines (in the bigger, denser poems mainly) now seems so interesting and completely original. They're lines but seem to have their lineness, their identity as lines, specifically stripped away. They're always open on both ends and neither end- nor front-loaded. It's like they have no center of gravity. Also the interplay of surface and (possibility of) meaning or depth now strikes me as much more complex.

I think it's as Bakhtin says: some writers write for the future. I.e., certain facets of a poet's work simply can't be identified until we've been prepared by the future to see them... I had to read Jorie Graham, a poet born well after O'Hara, to appreciate O'Hara as I do now. It's funny too that he took so little interest in publication, awards, the whole recognition scene. It's as though he knew his time was future time...

Aug. 20, 2006
___________________________

Has anyone ever worked really fully in the interstices of language and the visual arts where language is priviledged...as in a fully realized lyric poem which is also fully realized visual art—and not just word as decoration of course and more than what the concretists did. Where the values of the traditional lyric are still in place but just furthered.

Aug. 19, 2006
___________________________

Mark Levin's new book, The Wilds: man, such strange, interesting stuff. In some ways I think a bit of Merwin's earlier books, where the voice is disembodied and the setting metaphysical or surreal, though here the quality of randomness is different and things aren't so much surreal as aggressively, self-consciously made up. Oddly assured assertions in a wholly arbitrary setting...Odd little narratives, every line a quiet, excruciating surprise. Can't put my finger on what he's doing...Ashbery is definitely a factor. We don't "enter" into or identify the way we do in traditional fiction narratives; instead we're forced to engage the stories as language...Every element of a given narrative has a general, allegorical feel, though there's no one-to-one correspondence to an abstraction, or it's as though the abstractions are all destablilized...Speaker says, in "Quarry," "I am after that echo which he/has produced." He wants the mythic resonance of the archetype, but doesn't start with images and things from a stable, external, quotidian landscape. Instead, makes up those images and things, searching for the echo...Like using words, narrative elements, images, characters, details of setting as arbitrary divining rods...Normally a writer starts with the given external world and works from there toward the "echo"; here he "sends out" characters, images etc. as trial balloons, keeping whatever effectively does echo and then cobbles the narrative from that... A narrative emerges which is dependent upon where the echo got heard...the "plot" is the string of resonances...

I know I'm getting obscure here, the stuff is really intriquing, ellusive...So freaking refreshing to come across a new sensibility...

12:15

Drafts, new and newly resuscitated:

Creation of Eve at Posters.com

Creation of Eve many revisions along

Jet Stream on the Far Northern Plains

Ars Poetica

The Wind, Without Impediment, Makes a Blizzard Horizontal

Backyard Poems

7 pm or so

Watched a documentary on Rauchenberg. Can't help but think of ways to do in poems what this guy did with things, settings, paint. Making prints on material of every sort. Poems themselves as prints.

Aug. 18, 2006

widdy

widdershins

wickiup

Aug. 15, 2006
___________________________

Schmuck Alarm: I’ve Been Known To

repeat some pithy, important, exact and wonderful fact
I got I don’t know where,
to students
for years
until, one day, someone says:

“Wasn’t that Italian, not French?”

*

Notes Toward the New Poem ?

poem modeled after the sit com, even with "commercials."     pomercials.      
(advertising other poets, art, loopy lept-to images?..). every line practically a punch line; poems and jokes

poem made up of "if" conditionals followed, not by "then" clauses but by "depending upon" conditions. If...If...If...If...

*

avatar; embodiment

*

responsibility and blame come down to          me

who slides away from under the         accusing eye

as it absorbs me and becomes the

guilty party     

*

*

little intoxicated day,      holy!

(computer translation of a Rimbaud line, "Morning of Drunkedness")

Aug. 10, 2006
___________________________

Ok then, so what are my poems' flaws? Sometimes too fast; I don't elaborate a thought as fully as I should. Too much gesture. Too much space. Spacey. I don't know. I don't know what those flaws are. I speak them therefore love them.

Ammons Did Garbage; Now We Need a Collection Called Recycled?

cans, somewhat crushed; cardboard flattened and big
pungent bottles of still gritty cleansers, drained; a few glass items like wine and beer,
more heavy and more musical
than any of the other
junk when they get tossed in; newspapers we are not wholly
willing to throw all out,
since they are good for household
paddings and linings

*

sin is far and away what makes
the world something
to think about

in a world prior-
to-sin there is no belief.
there is just is.
belief is only what you get
in a situation sufficiently
fucked up for it.

*

grooming does for
baboons most of what words do for us.

—A.R. Ammons

when I kid around
I'm trying to get into position to be serious

—A. R. Ammons

Aug. 4-5, 2006
                                                                           ___________________________

Reading Lorca on duende, and cruising websites on bullfighting.

I'm usually grossed out by the thing, I have trouble killing even a bug, but the history and art of torear has always intrigued me, no doubt since I first read The Sun Also Rises in college eons ago. I think if I could find a real one, one in which the odds really are pretty even and the matador isn't given special protections (relative to whatever are standard), one which is "authentic" according to its (presumably) best traditions—well, it would be darkly thrilling.

I think Americans need something like this—we clearly find violence fascinating as all shit, continual violence in movies and on the tube; our mortality and physical being obviously have a terrible hold on us, although this us undoubtedly because, even as our media obsesses over it, we repress it sickly. Why else put our dead in grotesquely expensive, opulent and daintily lined containers? Why else all the shaving, surgery, cosmetics and ghoulishly stretched and made-up celebrity and news anchor faces? The skinned, boned, chopped and SaranWrapped meat in the market? The only kind I can usually make myself eat. Maybe we need a sport or art which would more honestly acknowledge and deal with our utter terror of death. Recent movies like Gladiator and the return of heinous old fashion bloodbath battlefields on the screen are probably an indication.

from The Spanish Fiesta Brava:

Let's look at the nature of this cultural expression so innately Spanish. What is bullfighting? Is it barbarism, a sport rooted in the hunt or, an artistic expression similar to the dance? There have been many different opinions, often colored by the cultural background of the person expressing his or her thoughts. However, most Spanish people agree that it should not be considered a sport. Indeed, the translation of the Spanish term torear into the English word bullfighting, shows the prejudicial view of this event in the Anglo world. A person would have to be insane to fight a 1,200 pound beast; the objective of the bullfight is, in fact, the opposite: to avoid a brutal confrontation by using the human attributes of intelligence, grace, and elegance. In a sport, the important thing is to win; the sport fan is satisfied with the accumulation of points, hits, and records. In bullfighting, there is no scorekeeping. Satisfaction is implicit in the expected triumph of human cunning over brute force; a bullfight fan screams olé not because the matador has won, but because of the manner, the form, the grace, the wit, the dexterity of the torero performing a veronica, a natural, or any other pass with the capote or muleta, as the piece of cloth that he holds in his hand is called. The trophies awarded to the bullfighter are often nothing more than the people's momentary show of emotion; it is not unusual for a matador who may have only performed one artful move in the entire event to be the true winner of the day. For just as in painting, singing, or dancing, the quality that made that move special cannot be quantified or described. The appreciation of its worth is intuitive.

Nevertheless, based on my reading on the subject, my practical experience as a matador, and my intuition, I define bullfighting as a type of dramatic ballet dance with death. As he would in dancing, the bullfighter must control his movements maintaining the rhythm, not of music, but of danger. On stage, a faux-pas means an interruption of artistic flow; in the bullfighting arena, a mistake could mean the death of the star of this drama.

Between the bullfighter and the bull there should always be a relationship based on distance. This plastic art form is based on the fact that the matador's dexterity makes him the creator and master of this relationship, instead of allowing the bull a chance to take command. In theory, this artistic event is simple, the difficulty lies in carrying out the task. The bull, by his very nature, attacks everything that moves; the man, unrelenting, standing tall, exhibiting elegance and poise, should move the cape in such a way that the bull will pursue it without ever catching it, and at the same time, in order to enhance the feeling of danger, he should direct the trajectory of the attacking animal as close to his body as he dares. Not so close, however, that in order to avoid being injured or killed, he should have to briskly step aside, because by doing so he will disturb the fluidity of the movement. Referring to this skill, a Spanish critic of this art form once said: "Anyone can bullfight if he knows the technique, anyone who has courage. The difficulty lies in being able to bullfight like Belmonte or Manolete as if the bulls were made of glass and one were afraid to break them."

I suppose it does seem very male: death and nature as adversaries, and someone of course always has to be killed someone else glorified. That long sick patriarchal tradition—I pitted against You—of which, perhaps, the bull fight is a best and most beautiful instance. After all, it beats the shit out of that other manifestation of the Western tradition: War. Especially contemporary war which may annihilate billions and risks the very planet and humanity itself. But, still, isn't the bull fight grotesque and wrong-headed...Perhaps there are other ways to respect and fight the Bull, as Lorca calls it. There are, these days, apparently, bloodless bullfights in which the bull does not get hurt. But I don't know. This may just be another example of our need to sanitize and prettify and repress death, imposed upon the very ritual whose purpose was a confrontation with the Inevitable genuine enough and terrible enough and now enough to allow for actual beauty, innovation, and the signature of a single human being and even a single bull. Someone turning the inevitable and the truly terrible into dance, skill, flourish, distinction. In a show with real risk; a nonshow.

Interesting to use the word "real" again. Feels interesting to use it too without quotation marks. I think that, when talking about death, we can maybe forgo the quotation marks. I think that, after several decades now of intensely inverted self-conscious theorizing, we can forgo the quotation marks (and, who knows, maybe even the irony). Because everything, now, is in quotation marks, and so we come full circle to an odd, ironic Purity. Neil Young's Really Melodic Really Loud Guitar Feedback as on Rust Never Sleeps kind of ironic purity or ironic Romanticism.

*

Yep, there are female matadors.Matadoras.

Juanita Cruz, first matadora.

Most famous contemporary matadora: Christina Sánchez.

*

In our books and news and movies and games, we constantly play-act encounters with death. But we don't see death in these things. When I give my lit students a novel or poem which forces a painful or otherwise unpleasant encounter with death, they think the author is weirdly obsessed and morbid. They are unable to see that their whole culture is neurotically fixated; that their own consumer habits reveal them to be neurotically fixated themselves. This is the strange accomplishment of the contemporary Hollywood movie: in inundates us with graphic death even as it permits us to evade and repress death, even as we step out of the theater feeling morally secure if not self-righteously right and even anti-violence!

TV's Law and Order may be among the least hypocritical, though. Maybe. What's fascinating is to go from the initial scene of the murder—the chaos, the gruesome visceral detail, the utterly provisional and out-of-control moment—the human—all the way to the "civilized," suit-and-tie courtroom with its rigid enforcement of ritual containment, the strained exercise of straining Reason trying to pat our panic on the head. The ending is often ambiguous, the good guys sometimes lose, there are worst shows on the tube.

You're either dead or you aren't—right? So maybe it is just us and the Bull. Can't escape the binary, there is a legitimate binary.

Then what I want is a re-twisted me & you, new doubleness. New kinds of dance, verónica, natural, or farol. America will never truly have the bullfight. So what can we have...

The poem? We can't have freedom from death, but we can have an elegant encounter with death.

Interesting and funny to use this language again: "genuine" "real" "power" "beauty" "elegant"... god even "deep"?...

*******

I'd like to see a kind of critical theory that bleeds, seeps, scrunches, fucks.

And should I tell this to my Lit Analysis students in the Fall? :)

July 29, 2006
___________________________

The screen cursor blinks and doesn’t move forward. It could be a finish line or a starting line or a boot in the face.

And it is.