CREDO

Linh Dinh, in an interview:

"I'm not avant-garde, simply out of it."

reminds me

hey, i'm reading lyn hejinian's essay 'reason' this morning...wanted to post this bc it reminds me of critiques/support of 'make it new'...also just raises some interesting questions. also note the muted but scenic pound-bashing.

--To value the new was, of course, a widely held and explicit tenet of modernist aesthetics, as in Pound's often cited comment, "Make it new." Viktor Shklovsky's more thoughtful, more self-reflexive, and better-analyzed aphorism, "In order to restore to us the perception of life, to make a stone stony, there exists that which we call art" takes the behest further, making newness not an end in itself but a strategy employed for the sake of the enhancement of experience - and as an affirmation of life. "Only the creation of new forms of art can restore to man sensation of the world, can resurrect things and kill pessimism." Shklovsky goes on, of course, to elaborate a now-familiar set of devices intended to restore palpability to things - retardation, roughening, etc. - that are major elements (and, in ways that can be taken as troubling, even the stock in trade) of so-called innovative poetry to this day (almost a century later). Contemporary poets - myself among them - have embraced this project. Comments variously repeating or attempting to extend Shklovsky's proposition appear throughout my teaching notebooks:

"Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes.
The language of poetry is a language of inquiry.
Poetry takes as its premise that language (all language) is a medium for experiencing experience. It provides us with the consciousness of consciousness.....
.....
Imagine saying that at one stage of life, one's artistic goal is to provide experience (new or revivified, restored to palpability) and at another (later) it is to provide the joy of that experience."

well, that's that. good morrow to you (y'all). i am eagerly anticipating some pictures of the new cow-face.

Bicycle

BICYCLE

Sunglasses chewed off by the blue of the sky

Everything just barely came up to me

From its smell

O, I came upon a wind.

Horse or bike, I came upon a wind.

Transport to the small parts

of summer’s roadside

O, the wheels came off.

This is afternoon, the world goes by.

I love my pet machine upon which

the world drifts saliently,

then am stopped, as if

I knew how to talk to the past

flying through it with steel beneath

no breathing but

the wheel’s form kept to.

My head was protected.

If and only if

I hit the pavement wrong,

a veer or profane wobble

from crossing over,

meeting a roadside dead creature,

stark as pastels.

One’s arms are strange things, don’t cross them.

A buckle in the asphalt the trees make,

the mature or quick growing ones:

they make you real careful, good friend,

Flesh moving along the bone.

madder than a cat

steve,

what would i not give to watch a certain bearded idolator sing a certain song?

instead i am going to work

and did i mention ALL the leaves are brown?



your devoted backing track,


lauren

literalism multiple choice

*The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne,/
Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright.

*Yet the absence of the imagination had/
itself to be imagined...

*There's matter in these sighs. These profound heaves/
You must translate; 'tis fit we understand them.


You should write about Fluxus -

Announcement

Literalism:

"A psychoanalyst might say that the landscape displayed "homosexual tendencies," but I will not draw such a crass anthropomorphic conclusion. I will merely say 'it was there.'

-Robert Smithson

further...

ON A BAROQUE CLOCK

Miniature Greek gods support the Roman hour,
having nothing else to do, or hold
some dead white grapes to girlish smiles
as the time runs around in a gold ring.
Orpheus plays a lyre. Eurydice reclines,
as if the ticking clock was hell's upholstery,
not chalk-faced onyx cast with runes.
Ah Orpheus, dead youth, this is a result
of marriage: when art and wealth conspire,
like Greece and Rome, to demonstrate
that clocks count, you singers lose
maturity, voice, and size, and have to freeze.

-Alan Dugan

Just to say that there is raging and roiling.

esteem and friendship

the person i want to talk to is not currently available. so i am talking to him through what i am reading - "above all what the french call moralistes - writers who delve into human character and behavior" (from the intro to my copy of the letters of madame de sevigne). it's a conversation we've always had - and right now i'll talk to him in any guise i can find him - madame de sevigne reminds me, all the way from 1664. from one of her letters:

"futhermore, if you persist in pitying me for the trouble I am taking to write to you, and in begging me not to go on, I shall think that you are the one who is bored with reading my letters and tired of answering them, but then I shall promise again to shorten my letters if i can; and i release you from the bother of replying, although i enjoy your letters very much indeed. after these declarations i don't think that you can stop the flow of my gazettes. the thought that i give you a little pleasure gives me a great deal. there are so few opportunities of expressing one's esteem and friendship that we must not miss them when they present themselves."

maxims

as i was telling jared yesterday, i'm into these maxims (la rochefoucauld) - i have them in a somber grey book from the berkeley public library that gets weirder the more i look at it - cover illustration is a laughing cherub pointing/mocking at an outraged bust of seneca/cicero/(?) (someone like that).

here are some:

1. What we take for virtues are often only a collection of various actions and interests which fortune or own own industry knows how to arrange; and it is not always through valor and chastity that men are valiant and that women are chaste.

269. There is hardly any man clever enough to know all the evil he does.

19. We all have strength enough to endure the pains of others.

459. There are several remedies which cure love, but none is infallible.

14. Men are not only subject to losing the memory of benefits and injuries, they even hate those who benefited them, and cease to hate those who have committed outrages against them. The diligence of rewarding the good and taking revenge on the bad appears to them as a servitude into which they have difficulty delivering themselves.