Make It Quick, You're Holderlin Up the Line

After Jared suggested looking into him, Holderlin's been occupying my brain of late. One of the poems I like best is as follows:


The Ages of Life

You cities of Euphrates,
You streets at Palmyra,
You forests of pillars in the desert plain,
What are you?
Your crests, as you passed beyond
The bounds of those who breathe,
By smoke of heavenly powers and
By fire were taken away;
But now I sit beneath the clouds, in which
Peculiar quiet comes to each one, beneath
A pleasing order of oak trees, on
The heath where the roe-deer feed, and strange
To me, remote and dead seem
The souls of the blessed.


For some reason it felt very light to me at first, and still feels light on some level, which is odd given the flashes of dark content (that last phrase didn't really register with all its bizarre bleakness/negation until I'd read the poem several times). And even now after reading it I'm left feeling like I've just participated in some ethereal meditation while watching a city or two get hit with a wrecking ball. Maybe the metaphysics lends a buffering distance, I don't know... I find this especially cool considering this was written right around 1800, pre-a lot of stuff. Also, the enjambment here in Hamburger's translation is no more radical than that of the German
original, at least as far as I can tell. I remember Donald Justice crediting Pound with inventing free verse somewhere around 1909 (although he might've noted something special about Pound's free moment that I've since forgotten), but it seems I often come across earlier writers marching to the beat of a free jazz drummer, at least temporarily. Of course, often those instances are in fact the fragments and failures of writers who are becoming increasingly insane, but I take what I can get. Other moments in the Holderlin book are also very interesting and enjoyable, like this one, from a poem bearing the title "Colombo":

... For action, to gain is
The most amiable thing
Of all

Indigenous dwelling and order, thoroughly compact,
To learn sparse beauty and figures
Burnt into sand
Out of night and fire, full of images, telescope
Polished until it's true, high expertise, that is, for life
To question the sky.


Then later in the same poem:


... The terrestrial orb, Greek, childlike in shape
By force under my eyes
Lulling to sleep, like the spirit of poppies compressed
Appeared to me

That is wholly you in your beauty apocalyptica.


(That last line was Friedrich, not me. Unfortunately.)

Tha Lynx

is a nice cat.

i had a whole nice thing to talk about, but i'm just going to write and say hello, though i say hello via email all the time anyway.

"Murky Tofurkey" b/w "Somnambular Treetops in Closing"

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A nice moment for you all from last night:

With Iowa City putting on its best ghost town airs because of Thanksgiving, I stopped by That's Rentertainment to stock up on $1 movies, enough to keep me from missing the presence of other human beings until Thursday, at least. Then on my way home, I stopped into Georges and ended up talking to John Wheeler-Rappe for awhile. After we'd touched on Humanism one too many times I started to get sleepy, so I shrugged on my smoky coat, grabbed my movies, and headed homeward. As I neared the corner of Market and Gilbert, I found myself admiring the tree in the sidewalk in front of Artifacts, how it was still in possession of almost all its yellow leaves while other trees were and are completely bare. Slowing, I looked up at it and was further impressed by its abundance of large seed-pods. There was a rustling sound now coming out of the tree, and when I did a double-take I realized that what I'd taken to be seed-pods were in fact small birds, and the interior of the tree was absolutely packed with them. My stopping to stare left them flustered, and now they were pinballing right in front of me from branch to branch, chirping with alarm, shaking leaves loose, but never leaving the tree's protective vest. Then after a minute or two they settled down and chirped in a less agitated way, seeming to tolerate my presence. (I wished you were with me, Jared, thinking you'd be able to identify them -- they were a small species, finches maybe, with a couple of big pigeons in the mix.) It was really lovely, though, and there were so many of them. Really cold and late, too, and completely quiet streets. Light from the paint store sign across the street was hazing into the branches. Right before I turned and left I found myself tempted to compare the birds hidden in their tree to Workshop students, but then I chided myself, saying For Chrissakes, man, leave the poor little birds alone.

Hmmm, was there a point to this story? Answer unclear, try again later. "This is a Poetry blog, Kramp! Shut your yapper before I report you to Boss!" Well, thanks for humoring me, because I guarantee I would have forgotten the whole moment otherwise.

Here, to make amends, a few scribbles from my sleep last night:

I'm headed headward. King Endward VI.

Mono-Magics.

I'm pined inside a constant instant.

There was one more weird one, but the grammar was all convoluted and it's escaping me.

Happy Thanksgiving, at any rate. Wish you all were here.

Ghost in the Poem Machine

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This weekend in Chicago I had an experience that seems familiar, and I'm wondering if any of you can relate to it. I was standing in Jared's living room, browsing through his books, and I picked up an Ammons book for a second. Flipping through once or twice, I landed on a poem that immediately struck me -- I don't know what it was exactly, something about its weird descriptions of peat-bogs rising and falling, its idiosyncratic but masterful development -- and it seemed unlike anything else I'd ever read. Jarod came out a moment later and we talked briefly about Ammons and then moved on to some other subject, but not beforeI'd pencilled A.R. onto my "oughtta-read" list.

So last night I'm at the UI library. I grab the same Ammons book. Look through it. No sign of the peat poem. Sure, there were poems with the word "peat" in them, but nothing resembling the poem as it existed and still exists in my memory. It's almost like going one day to visit an old plantation house and seeing it in full swing, belles sipping lemonades on the veranda and all, and then returning again the next day to find only mouldering boards and broken panes and a big pile of Spanish moss. Like reading Ammons' secret haunting poem which has since reverted to its usual disguised form. A silly thought, but nice, and I can't help but think that this has happened before with writers that have grabbed me -- the first response being unaccountably strong and not necessarily based on the text at hand but on something that is sensed furling and unfurling behind the text. Anyone else ever had this kind of mis-read happen?

I ended up checking out not that book but another, called The Snow Poems. Very strange work. Rough and ragged as hell. I'm not sure if I love them exactly, but there's something going on here. In honor of Theis's cheese standing alone, here's part of one called "Hard Lard":

so that we can achieve the podium of
inhumanity, the clearing, wherefrom
we can look back and away to the
astonishing thing, man's rise and demise,
and then what, the crazy universe here,
here, here for thousands, even millions
of years, going on with purposes, if
any, not ours: room
enough for every correction of view,
where perspective is never sold out, utero,
utero, the
commencement before the commencement:
snow sounds like gritty pellets
on the panes:
I thought it was a mouse in my paperbox

Hard to take it out of itself, though -- the whole thing is one sentence, I think, four pages long. Ends with:

hard fart hard tack I feel so much
hard ware hard sell better on my
hard head hard boil feet provided
I have something
to lean against

Oh yeah, and right before that ending he says, "a poem is a machine made out of worlds/ a poem is made of words fed to machines," and this I like.

Hey People!

dear catherine,

i sat behind al grossman today at hass' talk about zukofsky.

dear lauren,

thx (dolby) for the msg. i'm going to call you right now.

dear stephen,

see you in a minute.

Against a "Never Let 'Em See You Sweat" Aesthetic

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Catherine, I'd heard from some little mice that you were in recluse mode, but you know how mice are -- they tend to exaggerate. However, now that you've blown off the Joyelle McSweeney reading I think I'm going to have to resubscribe to the mice's digests. How could anyone refuse such an evening of mice? Such usual and delicate cheese? Such cautious sniffing of air? (Yes, it was every bit as wonderful as it sounds.) And all the while Joyelle just groomed herself up at the podium, tapping the microphone with an extended claw. Waiting and purring for you. And she realizing along with the rest of us that our best collective chance of spotting The Is this fall was slowly slip-sliding away in Prairie Lights.

"When will I see you again?" That's what Neil sang in my head. Jan looked sad.

Pine. Lick. Glitter a little. I certainly felt obligated to go, after cribbing all those Lit handouts of Joyelle's back in the Miriam day. "Definitions of Poetry Terms." Man, was I relentless. A machine.

"Meanwhile in other realms big tears were shed"

- John Keats, "Hyperion"

The reading itself? It was okay. No Julie Englander, so the star-power of the event was significantly diminished as a result. (The room really was dimmer for some reason.) Jan filled in and was breathtaking as always (although I can't be impartial about this, as I'm secretly kind of in love with her). Joyelle laughed a lot and talked really fast, which made it seem as if she wrote really fast too; which thus made it seem like clever, well-crafted verse comes really easy for her; which at first struck me as being a little obnoxious, and I felt envy. It wasn't until the reading had ended that it occurred to me that maybe I most appreciate poetry in which I sense that a writer is grappling with something difficult. Maybe this is unbearably Harold Bloom of me (daemons and forebears and agonists, oh my!) , although I think my thinking goes back to one of those Aztec spells I was fascinated with our first fall in Iowa City. In the middle of a chant came the instruction, "Merge yourself with difficulty," and this struck me as being as apt a description of poetic/artistic aims as any I'd come across yet. Not that achievement is impossible, or that everything should be grueling, or even that facility and difficulty are diametrically opposed (I think of Emily Dickinson's excellence as being an incredible combination of her intellectual and liguistic facilities with her graspings at straws -- her genius to some degree lying in her ability to forever seek out and explore new difficulties). However, I do like the idea that at some point glibness, if pushed at, has to fall away, and at this point the Commandrine* will be at temporarily relieved of her command simply because she's as lost as the rest of her underlings. And still she has no choice but to continue speaking, and her laughter now might be the most difficult thing of all. Or not. But it does get interesting, at least for me, when everyone simultaneously asks, "Who's driving this car, anyway?" This coming from a confessed control freak who has driven countless poems off of the stupidest cliffs imaginable -- I hope at least one of you is smiling at the irony.

So I hope I run into you soon, Catherina. Don't believe the Hyperion. Don't make this any harder for us than it already is.

* (One of Joyelle's characters)

Ah, Yes

Thersites - what a clever benighted bastard.

From "as you like it":

Duke Senior (in the forest of arden)

now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
hath not old custom made this life more sweet
than that of painted pomp? are not these woods
more free from peril than the envious court?
here feel we not the penalty of adam,
the seasons' difference, as the icy fang
and churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
which when it bites and blows upon my body
even till i shrink with cold, i smile and say
"this is no flattery; these are counselors
that feelingly persuade me what i am."
sweet are the uses of adversity,
which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
and this your life, exempt from public haunt,
finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
sermons in stones, and good in everything.

a bit cheesy, but that "feelingly persuade me what i am" is awesome!

and true.

This and Which (the Sandwich)

http://cogsci.berkeley.edu/lakoff/metaphors/

my brother was nice enough to send me the above - thanks josh - jared suggested that we post it, so this is my return - for you jared, and our shared shakespeare experience - cranky and bowed -but with the help of troilus, which in my book is classified as a comedy, so maybe the political bitterness is thus washed:

"Lo, lo, lo, lo, what modicums of wit he utters! His evasions have ears thus long. I have bobbed his brain more than he has beat my bones. I will buy nine sparrows for a penny, and his pia mater is not worth the ninth part of a sparrow. This lord, Achilles - this Ajax, who wears his wit in his belly and his guts in his head - I'll tell you what I say of him..."

tony and i went to a lecture tonight that was 1 1/2 hours long but only one sentence long. i can't remember any content, but i do have in my head a river-tributary pattern...."architecture could be this blah blah blah, which blah blah, or it could be this, as it is not, which blah blah blah, as then this is, here which is not..." and on flowing to the delta where the lecture built itself, crescendo city. (i'm back with terrible puns.) to tony, i called the lecture the 'this and which', evoking the pattern, and he said hopefully, 'the sandwich?' so hope falls but then it springs, as jared would remind me.

"How now, Thersites? What, lost in the labyrinth of thy fury? Shall the elephant Ajax carry it thus? He beats me, and I rail at him. O, worthy satisfaction! Would it were otherwise, that I could beat him while he railed at me."

Aurora Borealis, The Icy Sky At Night

According to the news, the auroras of autumn may be visible in chicagoland tonight, which means, we'll probably have to trek out of the dreck in order to get away from da lights...anyway, i want to find out how it feels to see them there, up above, like snakes.

ho ho. i'm in a great mood b/c i had the extreme pleasure of teaching that bad azzzz mutha billy shakespeare. YEAH! HO HO HO! i love that man...WHOA!

Where is Every Body

Where are you all? In Winnetka? In Iowa? In Houston? In Pilsen? in Cognito? In Frames like a Flaming Telepath's visions of other people's memories? In the violence of representations?

I went to see Allen Grossman give a talk on Hart Crane's "The Broken Tower" last night as U of C. it was actually pretty interesting and reminded me a lot of Pound's method of criticism - he didn't read the poem in terms of the poem at all really - he read the poem in terms of the history of towers (Babel, Tor Ballylee, the tower upon which Oppenheimer placed his first bomb) and also, mostly, God. It was that kind of exhilirating generality that could be really annoying as a scholar but which I kind of love because you feel the full force of a reader bearing down on a little poem - what I liked so much about it was that it was read in terms of the reader, not in terms of the poem - I mean, the text was central, but it was more of a locus rather than an object like WCW talks about it. it was 'free-range' reading.

i was there with nate and m. savitz, and also a couple of old friends from berkeley. it was kind of nice, and grossman has that hilarious harold bloom academic eastern accent, which, to me, is more funny than bugs bunny.

anyway, catherine, thanks for the love poem. "what the world...needs now..."
so, when will i hear from you, my friends? one feels the lonely vacuum of the world when one's beliefs are completely invalidated by fear, as this week's political show demon-strated.

love,
jared

A Public Service Announcement from Alan Dugan

ON BEING OUT-CLASSED BY CLASS

Where I came from is torn down,
where I'm at is condemned,
and where I'm going to
is not built up yet. My Grand
Father steamed away from yours
for eats! regards! and joys.
Better to be Dugan the Cop
and never have to talk about a shitty past
than to be classed out
of the potatoes in the old
sod. He dreamed America up, and I
played Indian against
his cowboy lies because:
tradition is for the rich
to love, the clerks
to ape, the poor
to suffer, so I wander
to take the air, regards and joys.
Where are they? You
will tell me. Anyone
free of your slavery
is better off in his own,
so Up the five-hour day!
Up art! Up the I.R.A.!