Something Happened to Me

Ok, if you click on this link, you will see that it has been reported that I am one of the people missing in that avalanche that happened in British Columbia. This has everything to do with poetry, because I read this as a report of my death, oddly enough. I'm not trying to be morbid, but it suggests things about the potentially wide possibilities of having a "map of misreading."

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/4123282/detail.html

a little thing about the sixties will be up sometime today - about sicksties poetry, i mean

The Ritual By Which the House of Our Life Was Erected

Lauren, I know you hate the bright lights and all but I have to say something: Jared read me a few stretches of "Flaming Telepaths" over the phone last night and it absolutely lit me up. I couldn't believe how strange and good it sounded; more than anything it felt like something I'd been expecting. And the ideas of the poem have been revolving inside me all day today, generating little thoughts and sparks and such. Inspiring, in other words... I was amused this afternoon remembering the post in which you described writing out a huge dark mass in which moments would glint occassionally, the amusement stemming from the amazing lack of darkness in what I heard (if I'm correct in taking darkness to mean confusing and densely boring language). Dense though the "The Hotel Family" section was, there was much more in the way of glinting going on -- flaming, even, appropriately enough. So pardon me, but I just had to say something.

And everyone, just in case this isn't common knowledge, Scott Inguito has a blog up at solarguano.blogspot. com. As of now it just consists of a few of his Spicer letters, but it was nice to come across while I was riding my pegasus through the stellar firmament a few minutes ago. Maybe if we press him he'll put some more of them up over there.

My Couplet, My Cupola

Now it's my turn to be chomping at the bit to join a conversation (O 'tis a planet replete with obligationz that keeps me from thee, Plaxterk Owel) because the couplet was both my beau and my bane for awhile there. In fact, I began to worry at one point that I was hopelessly mired in its track. The reasons for this were basically ones that have already been touched on in this discussion: the orderliness was welcome at a time when my poems seemed hopelessly haywire, because it made the haywireness seem like it might be intentional (and tensional) and I was thus off the hook, temporarily – I could sit back and let the poem chatter to itself like a set of wind-up teeth without any accompanying guilt; similarly, the regular injections of space really alleviated the claustrophobia plaguing my poems at the time. I almost think of those space breaks as breaths for the eyes. They remind both the author-docent and the reader-tourist that there is no need to hurry through this attraction, it'll be open for hours yet... So I suppose writing in couplets was a perfect way for me to self-medicate my own short attention span and tendency towards hastiness. Like: OK, Kramp, no logrolling down this here hill because it's got all this speed bumps and mule trenches to contend with – just walk like a regular person, breathe with your eyes, it'll be fine.

(I'm glad that Jared quoted from "Nosferatu," too, because that poem was written right at the tail end of my main couplet phase, right as I was beginning to seriously engage with, well, tercets (next on the food chain, I guess). If it were just a block of text I think it would be a little too intense, or a little too sweet. And Lauren, I don't know if you remember those two dream-poems I gave you right before you left – those were just a little later, a relapse into the easy comfort of the couplet.)

Beyond spacing and ordering, a couplet is quite alluring to me, aesthetically. I don't know what it is exactly. The excerpt from H.D. gets at it, I think. Something about the way that a couplet allows for both a sense of tidiness and also a pretty radical and repetitive vertical enjambment – it both frees me up to play and also encourages a burnishing of each individual couplet so that each becomes almost its own curio. I would hate to think of it this way all the time – poem as assemblage of bric-a-brac – and curio is certainly a shitty word. Maybe artifact is better, which I like because, to think about time periods as was suggested with the H.D. thing, poems do exist temporally even though they're slammed onto the page with a great simultaneity (by the writer, by the printing press, however you prefer to read that). They're not like music that can only exist temporally in an unspooling present. Rather, because they can be leapt around in and spliced by the reader’s mind, they're more like a music that, unless read aloud and therefore in sync with that present, exists almost historically or somehow relative to history – they share with history a temporal plasticity. It seems both briefly interesting and obnoxious to read poems as histories and stanzas as tidy or untidy epochs on a historical chain.

Anyway, I really like the Lawrence excerpt and how he maintains a certain plasticity of form. My tendencies have always been to lean on form a little too hard, both because of the way it shores up my ruins and also because of the ways it fucks me up and gets me away from my first impulse. I, personally, would gladly have continued with the couplets in the Lawrence poem so that a space break would set off a new couplet beginning "So morbid, as the Italians say." That I’m amused by this odd and momentarily dislocated statement probably just reflects my chintzier sensibility. In any case, I’ve often felt deep admiration for writers who entered into and then broke free of forms, who did whatever was necessary to fight their way out of rigidity. And if couplets can be one thing, for all their cuteness and their unitness and their ability to jackhammer the poem’s walls and their propensity to fuck up rhetoricians big time, they can be rigid. Like time/history, maybe -- and maybe my admiration for writers who insist on newer and more plastic forms comes from this: I recognize in myself too much tendency toward rigid regulation, too much allegiance to a calendar-way, too much acceptance of things-as-they-are-and-must-be, and thus I appreciate deviation from locked poetic form as being both wild and a little utopian and maybe even antihistorical. – So now I’m saying that poems are antihistories? I evidently don’t really know what I’m saying. Maybe that poetry and history are two strands in a larger, darker braid. Maybe shifting a poem’s form so that it avoids a visual tick-tock emphasizes its difference from history and measured past time and linearity and enables it to briefly exert greater power. Brother Poetry Left Hand wrestling the purely historical right. Greater braid-power from the frizzy strand.

I'm starting to feel stoned, so I'll cut this off, now that I'm nowhere and unclear whether I even said anything. I guess that’s the beauty of the esoteric.

And while I'm at it, I have this wonderful Golden Dawn to tell you about, Mr. Crowley...

992 arguments

hello dear hearts -

jared, like we talked about on the phone, i have a hard time thinking about couplets - i especially am not really getting my head around what writing an entire poem in couplets would mean. it's hard to think about what something means w/out something else for it to push off against. but for that reason i like your idea (also discussed on the phone) of the couplet as a good home for localized chaos. that is, because of the space around it and its appearance of orderliness, it carries and sets off strange, unaccountable moments of language/idea very well. like dark spots in the middle of glintiness.

we were also talking about the opposite kind of thing, which i've been interested in lately: big rough patches of tumbling, disorderly language, with little clear bits or jokes in the middle. not that the clear parts or silly parts would be placed exactly - i think the fun part of the idea to me is that those parts would be different for every reader. and that they emerge from the big language tumbles (little glints in big dark) just on the principle that something has to glint, relatively; something engages the attention most because your eyes/brain go somewhere. then hopefully behind the hook of reading 1 there's a bigger (less shiny?) hook on reading 2. thinking about this makes me want to ask jared, and others, how planned working with form is for you. my understanding isn't that you (js) were writing with couplets for a particular effect, but that you wound up writing in couplets and wondered what it said about couplets that this group of poems went toward them. that's more how i work anyway. which is kind of weirdly backwards, huh? like doing an experiment, getting a result, and then having to do more experiments to figure out what the result is. maybe that's why i like horoscopes...they kind of seem like equally backwards experiments....

anyway, i've already rambled far afield, but the gist is it's easier for me to think about couplets when i think of a poem reacting against them, or expanding and contracting from them. (by the way, on those lines, i looked at 'measuring' just now and noticed that you didn't write any of those poems _exclusively_ in couplets - the closest is all couplets but ends in a tercet. hmmmm...) i was looking at some d.h. lawrence and trying to figure out how couplets interact with the rhetoric. he seems to like to start out with couplets. i feel like they have a thump of conclusiveness to him that he thinks is funny. that makes him want to repeat them (or their sense) with something added that then begins to push him on to flights of idea. then he brings himself down to earth in more couplets, which have the thump again of a stated idea, often something common-sensical or very pronounced ("this is _my_ idea"). then he pushes off from them again. something interesting w/that - he begins on couplets much more than he ends on them, they're like seeds. here's a bit from "medlars and sorb-apples" to illustrate all this abstraction:

"Medlars and Sorb-Apples (D.H. Lawrence from _Birds, Beasts, and Flowers_)

I love you, rotten,
Delicious rottenness.

I love to suck you out from your skins
So brown and soft and coming suave,
So morbid, as the Italians say.

What a rare, powerful, reminiscent flavour
Comes out of your falling through the stages of decay:
Stream within stream.

Something of the same flavour as Syracusan muscat wine
Or vulgar Marsala.

Though even the word Marsala will smack of preciosity
Soon in the pussy-foot West.

What is it?
What is it, in the grape-turning-raisin,
In the medlar, in the sorb-apple,
Wineskins of brown morbidity,
Autumnal excrementa;
What is it that reminds us of white gods?

Gods nude as blanched nut-kernals,
Strangely, half-sinisterly fresh-fragrant
As if with sweat,
And drenched with mystery.

Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns..."

it goes on, the stanzas get longer. never returns to couplets, though there's a tercet before the last stanza. what else are couplets? my stupid, buffy-obsessed brain wants me to talk about buffy the vampire slayer rather than couplets right now. maybe my brain will be content with listing. bufffy, spike, anya, xander....ha. maybe there's a vampire-lovers group in houston that tony and i could join. i haven't been obsessed with a tv show in a long time. i think this time in houston is my second adolescence.

before i finish devolving, i wanted to bite at the obvious provocation of prose poems moving in contempt of music or whatever. ha! i'm not going to argue against it now, but i will............

in conclusion, much love from me and tony.

And a Related Question

Has anyone read Levertov's "Notes on Organic Form?" I think it's related to my questions.

What is a Couplet?

I was rereading Steve's poem "Nosferatu" from the "Spectres" thingy, and I want to use it as a way of thinking about the couplet. His poem is in couplets, and my recent poems have been using couplets as a strategy.

"Nosferatu" has a sentence that spans four couplets:

The roosters won't give me the thumbs-up,
but held neck-first over cuspidors they come

to order. In inner circles assembled at the kraal--
mom-hen with womb, dad a monk in purplish pall, kids

such sorry dross - my family with candles
swings the senate through its black mass, we green-

horns using Crowley maps and roots
of our tree, reliving Tucson,

lighting an easter fire - yes, now feathery Mother
in Sorrow. Apoplectic laughter might ensue,...

---

there's something about the noise of this poem that challenges my idea of the couplet. "to order. In inner circles assembled at the kraal--/mom-hen with womb, dad a monk in purplish pall, kids:" the movement of the poem is musically associative,
"in inner circles" is tightly wound around the initial vowel sound, and yet the way it follows the enjambment and full stop of
"to order" is a challenge to the order of a couplet, enjambment and all. the visual order of the poem allows the freedom to play such chaotic games with this parliament of fowls. My own idea of the couplet, would retain the order, the tidiness of the sight of the couplet, and does not trouble the form as much as this poems does. it uses the balance of the couplet against itself; contrariness in action!

I looked for mentions of the meaning of couplets from reacent readings:

here are a couple of suggestions from the world:

From "The Lives of the Poets," on the subject of H.D's "Trilogy:"

The triplet and couplet stanzas are capable of delivering image *and* narrative, but are most effective in weaving connections between her own age of crisis and those ancient ages that feed her imagination...her father has a symbolic place, the gods become God, eternity is a fact:

Ra, Osiris, Amen appeared
in a spacious bare meeting-house;

he is the world-father,
father of past aeons,

present and future equally;
beardless, not at all like jehovah,

he was upright, slender,
impressive as the Memnon monolith,

yet he was not out of place
but perfectly at home

in the eighteenth century
simplicity and grace;

then I woke with a start
of wonder and asked myself,

But whose eyes are those eyes?...


Whatever the tensions there is a way to find order and connection. It is deliberate and admits surprises.

---

and then, this is from the princeton encyclopedia, which refers mostly to the rhyming couplet:

the couplet is open and enjambed, i.e. when the syntactic and metrical frames do not close together at the end of the couplet, the sentence being carried forward into subsequent couplets to any length desired and ending at any point in the line.

---

both of these are not very helpful. I think the only other time I've heard the properties of the couplet discussed was something brenda said about the "doubling effect" that the visual effect of isolating the two lines. This seems interesting, but i'm still not quite with it.

i guess my interest in the couplet has more to do with the typographical shape of the couplet. I imagine that the shape of the couplet kind of lets air in. There is a pause, whether there is punctuation that suggests the pause or not. it's kind of a williams/oppen technique (i remember my college professor asking us to take "the red wheelbarrow" out of lines and write it as prose...phew...) and is completely set against kenneth koch and those kind of things, i guess also against "howl." a technique of stasis that plays against the movement of syntax (and also complicates and puns with syntax by making line breaks fuck up sense in a poem. i hate it when k. koch does that - all confusion and glibness.

but also, i think the couplet has an aural component; when reading, you pause across the line and it forces the punniness.

what about the sense of doubleness - what does that mean? i like the idea from the H.D. stuff that the couplet is a way of allowing disparate time periods to interact, but i wonder if it's a kind of romanticism to apply such ideas to the material fact of the couplet? you know, the way that 'major' and 'minor' keys are said to be happy or sad, though that meaning is arbitrary and culturally bound.

what is the relationship of form to the comfort of the writer? is there a natural form peculiar to each poet?

what does the couplet make you guys think of? does the big space interrupt syntax too much?

the couplet seems to me to be the farthest thing from the prose poem, of which i remain a resolute enemy. They proceed in contempt of music.

that said, i read a sonnet of d.b.quick's in poetry recently, which was another case of too much music. the word *precious* comes to mind, but preciousness has its virtues. OK, virtueless preciosity.

Yes, the Reference is Intentional

I haven't thrown up anything lately, so here's a new poem... I think the special FX are pretty mediocre, but the acting is really actual... Hope you're all well...

Against These New Quiets

I am unclear
what distinguishes good slayer but
hooves galloping on jumbled cobblestones
behind your face begins: a city – pyrite,
neo-Gothic with its gabled roofs –
I found myself there well after the sun
had died, among an enclave of the damnedest
critters: hirsutes and brunettes; wearing slippers
and smoking jackets: I referred to them
as quiets, and what else? One of them by
himself made the most ample chandelier-
lit chamber claustrophobic as the Pit;
only a quiet holds such absorbent power,
and drones on and on in perfect self-esteem.

Surely they were famous, these new quiets,
to be so boring. Cogs perpetuated,
turning in the many-candled room,
and a quiet rose among the space, ahem,
and spoke her word like a burnt sacrifice.
I wished I’d worn sabots. Instead I clicked
like dice were tumbling in my throat and asked
the girl beside me, Who died? At this, her mask
of clerk skin rippled; she said nothing, then
replied, Be quiet: they’re poems. It seemed insane,
this diorama, and bawl, all of a piece
with the pyrite I adored. I couldn’t leave.
Still, slayer’s cavalry was nowhere near,
had disappeared alongside of the sun.

I asked the girl again. I asked the mace
clenched in her right fist and after wept.
The mistletoe above us wielded
little influence. I clicked away
and, clad in somber hues, said quiets sneered
like librarians. To the crows inside
night’s radar dish I fed my lowly moans
from the plush hall and interrupted again,
gasping: Still, volume takes place somewhere, right?
And the sun-kiln still churns somewhere, riot-loud
despite these quiets, voids and other nuisances?
The Chicagoan girl regarded the mistletoe.
Me: It has to, if only to kill with yellowing
the precious, pure idea on display

in every wedding chapel, every mind.
She said, You lost me there. I said, I find
the noise more real than its silent frame.
She whitened. She said yes. Then slayer came.

HAPPY SWAYING LIGHT YEAR

littlebook
Originally uploaded by Ronnie James.

Pictured here are Steve's painting, Lauren's copy of henry iv, pt. 1 and a christmas card from my uncle Herschel.