a deflection

i am providing a post.
it's the post with the most.
it's like a contemporary poem:

to dasein
to edge

the wandering saints of egypt
sneezed religion.

to drool
you fool.

...

topics on which i am supposed to write soon.
the sixties
thomas hardy
why poetry hates god just like blake said (well..sort of)

or, as robert duncan said

"wrongness that has style"

recently, i have written many poems about the wintriness of the moon.
i believe this to be the pathetic fallacy.
but i was thinking the other night:

was it the pathetic fallacy when the greeks started calling the moon diana?
is it the pathetic fallacy when i start calling the moon orson welles?
or is it not, because both the diana and orson welles are both nocturnal and immortal?

outline for a theory of the sixties.

the sixties were good but i have to stop thinking about them.
they helped me get these nice striped socks by making it okay for marxists to buy things. thank you sixties.

they're stupid because of: sweetness is the forgettable breath of the forgotten exigencies of conviction.

i really need to write about the sixties but it's going to take a couple of days.
rilke must have been a hard person to spend large amounts of time with.

i'm sick of looking at books, but it might just be that i'm sick of winter.

i'll start work on catherine's book very soon - it looks very nice in my mynde.

i think words the dumb kind of good.

"trying to avoid thinking, as in this poem"

flu-sufferer's epic grab-bag (beware!)

i was writing an earlier post (back in the early couplet days) that got lost. in that post, i was thinking about steve’s ideas about form. steve, it seemed like you were discussing form/the couplet as a kind of curb, keeping things reined in. i started wondering if i felt the same way. i had concluded that i think i do proceed with form as curb, but as a teeny little curb – working on a phrase to phrase basis, where the phrase and its sound and sense restrain and determine what come before and after. along these lines, i love catherine’s idea about what the prose poem needs and why. maybe a poem doesn’t have to have lines, but could we say a poem needs building blocks that relate to or rebuff one another to build a larger structure? (to my mind, this could be a structure that’s contradicting itself or pulling itself apart, but the tension of the larger idea is still there in that the ‘building blocks’ – phrases, lines, sentences, individual poems in a serial poem – are placed in proximity.)

so does this have anything to do w/rigor – maybe - well, tracking back i think that this is a basis on which i start wanting to link form to rigor and rigor to attention. the ideal would be the word or phrase you’re on tells you what word is coming next (if you pay enough attention to catch the tiger’s eye or his stripes in the brush...). but then the words and phrases change/constellate relative to what’s around them – phrase 2 shifts depending on whether you read it closer to phrase 1 or to phrase 3. the idea is of moving from inside out – but it seems important to remember that there is an ‘out’, a whole. (sometimes i think i forget that in my love of micro-fiddling.) or, as catherine said so fantastically “The words have to turn in on themselves, around the sound, then bust out!”

i love the following quote from duncan (from the beloved duncan-levertov letters) in that it implies the idea of a unity, a whole, that can include complexity and even (especially?) failure:

“What the creative mind waits patiently for or rages in impatience for is the unifying experience. The artist rightly rejects all solutions and works at the border of necessity: it is the need where the advent may come. This unity – and I would propose that it be thought of as a congregation, wherein a unity of unities appears, each member being center of a wholeness – is a focus or pitch of perception or understanding. The poet comes first to be aware of, to hear, the unity of the poem. It is a complex unity and the experience is that of apprehending what one has faild to do out of what one has done.”

i’m taken with this idea that the work includes the thing your mind jumps to because of its absence – the very thing you have failed to include.

and that unity is a pitch of perception – surrounded by smaller sub-unities, smaller foci of perception (“each member being center of a wholeness”).

....rigor and attention – the idea i’m chasing would be one of intuitive rigor – that is, holding yourself to being every minute right but every minute changing. or not every minute right, but accountable for mapping and tracking the shifts between right and wrong, or the shifts in the world around you and your response to it. keeping tabs on the relationship between you and your environment ... that you have some kind of responsibility, like a stewardship for what you observe, and for marking its response to you.

severity would not have to be stiff when the rigor of attention tells you that you have to jump, hop – change quickly. or, the straight lines are very very tiny and joined to each other to draw curves. rigor could be endlessly qualifying, even endlessly attenuating attention – but the backbone of who or what you are deciding to be snaps it together again. “character is an adventure of the imagination” says duncan in the d-l letters. or, as jared has already said it: “the other rigor i can think of is not a systematic imposed idea of form, but a rigor of perspective that comes out of a person...”

there’s a couple of lines (couplet?!) in one of jared’s poems that i love particularly:

“Our eyelets get notches cut in them
b/c we would not abuse decoration.”

one reason i bring this up is because i’m always managing to misread ‘eyelet’ as eye or eyelid...."our eyes get notches cut in them..." so the line has come to have this sub-meaning to me about how a response to the world, to what we see, cuts notches in our own eyes. if you figure out 'what is outside' it has already recoiled back into your thoughts about it - affected or re-tuned the way you think. and tracking these turns, these calibrations and motions out and back, is something that matters. is a part of not abusing the outside as fodder - not just allowing oneself to burn the outside up in the 'fires and pyres' of one's own emotion/sensibility about it. jared, hope you don’t mind me reading my own concerns into your poem this way; i love the lines for themselves and what they actually say, too!

in an awkward transition to 'rigor-in-architecture', steve, i wish i could remember more of what tony and i were talking about, and i’m kind of worried about misrepresenting his ideas. the best i can come up with: tony seems to dislike – in contemporary practice – the idea of making a grandiose, sculptural building, plunked down in its surroundings without a relationship to them. when i think of the way tony works, i get the idea of rigor as systems responsible to each other – that the parts of the building are interacting with each other, with the surroundings of the building, and possibly with a larger context. interacting not in an arbitrary way, but with each system shaping the other and creating the necessity that it is the way it is. another way to say it would be that tony likes to invent rules for himself to follow, but he doesn’t like the rules to be totally arbitrary (or purely formal) and imposed on the space – he seems to derive his rules from the space or conditions he’s given to build in. kind of a form follows function thing, but with a fairly loose definition of what form is and what function is. i guess i would say that part of his rigor is ethical: he doesn’t want to do work that is self-serving.

trying to come across a happier definition for rigor in the dictionary, i didn’t really get one, but i did come across the nearby:

rigeroso – (for music) rigorously, in firm accent
rig-out - a costume

sorry to stretch out this post endlessly, but i wanted to throw in a couple of quotes about henry james from a book i really love, called henry james and modern moral life. (re-reading it, i realized that basically all my ideas are just ripped off from henry james.) the trajectory of the quotes: first, two quotes about how james makes paying rigorous attention almost impossible – endlessly suspended, conditional, discontinuous, and backward-leaning. then last a third quote that i think shows why he makes paying attention so hard – because it’s so hugely important....

1. "None of these characters know yet what they intend, not because such motives are hidden from them or because they hide them from themselves, but because James has “placed” their motives in some complex, fluid social space among them all, showing us their incapacity to act except in the light of anticipations and expectations massively uncertain.

And this is meant by James, I think, as radically as it sounds: as if a future negotiation among participants could end up determining what could now count as the “real” motive in the past, almost like “backward causation” in physics."

2. “The great density of the opening pages of James’s The Golden Bowl is a density of nearly unmanageable possibilities, not of hidden meanings or self-deceived motives, “actually” there, waiting to be seen or exposed. And the resolution of such possibilities does not require honesty or deeper insight, but does require a kind of dependence on and engagement with others, personally and individually, a commonly made meaning, one might say, all as if all and any meaning could be only determined “retrospectively,” and “cooperatively,” as if life cannot be lived as life, but only as material for remembered life, to allude to Proustean affinities. As with Proust, life seems lead in perpetual future perfect tenses and subjunctive moods in the Jamesean universe. Not, my motive for X-ing now is M, given my current understanding of situation S. But, I will have meant to X, because of what will have been M, should the situation have turned out S."

3. "Understanding in James is still linked to the possibility of getting something right and to assessing the rightness of actions, and the inescapable claim on us of such a possibility is treated quite realistically. What we are trying to get right, what it would be to get it right in our dealings with each other, what especially this all requires now, all form the central core of James’s great animating question."

Tony V., Legendary Instigator

I just came across the two rigor posts for the first time, and while I need to think about this a little bit before jumping in completely, I did have a little thought: Jared's last post, while packed with interesting stuff, contained one sentence that really illustrated an effect of rigor I think quite by accident: "Boy, am I spinning out of control here." Now this is a feeling I can definitely relate to -- I think I've even written something very similar in one or two of my own posts here -- and when does this feeling of spinning out of control occur? During an intellectually rigorous delineation of an argument. Now as poets I think we would all agree that relinquishing control is a good and even necessary thing. I would suggest as a development of this, though, that there are different types or levels of control at a given moment, and while we might be adept at giving up control on one level, we might have a much uneasier or more difficult time spinning out of control on another. The rigor which formal constraint requires I bring to, say, a sonnet, often has the effect of causing me to lose some control on a level I wouldn't otherwise have access to -- and this is the very control that debilitates me most as a poet. So perhaps this form-induced disorientation is similar to the blog-as-whirligig phenomenon that a couple of us, at least, tend to experience. Lord knows I make more discoveries in a half-hour of, shall I say rigorous, writing here than in a half-hour of driving around in my car listening to Poison. (Not that Poison isn't a stimulating and rigorous whirligig in its own way, but you understand.) And if you were to look at my couplet ramble as an example, you'd probably notice that over the course of the post my thinking repeatedly shot away down paths that at the post's outset would have appeared to me to be completely overgrown.

I'm tempted to follow up on this idea of rigor allowing for (or even demanding) increased attention, but a) that's all pretty obvious, I guess, and b) I'd like to hear what you all think about this as it stands. As for the prose poem melee, I'm not going to touch that hot potato just yet. (Although it does perplex me why you people are always bagging on poor Mr. Tost.)

Oh, one other thing, Lauren: I'm out of the loop enough not to know what T.V. had to say about rigor in architecture. What sparked all this? Could you recap a few of the dear man's thoughts for me?

Rigorous Roast Beef

well, good, the fires & pyres of prose poetry.

those stein poems are amazing, and only heighten the urgency with which i need to purchase dat book. they are musical, obviously, and, as i think you were saying, the reservations i have about p. poems really probably has more to do with the coolness factor - that is, because it's kind of the form du jour. i suppose i'll allow myself a prose poem in a dozen years (actually, i did one once - it was a scene in which a surfer i know went to a magic shop in reno - reno is, or was, a very wicca high desert place - at a party once, i was talking to someone, and she said she could see spirits floating over my shoulders - dry heat blavatsky). some problematic prose poems, a la t. tost, disliked by some of this blog:


It’s like waking up and kissing a mirror good morning. The challenge is finding a reason. One approach is holding onto the ball, staying in bounds, waiting for the clock to run out. There are lots of reasons strutting around, flapping their wings, but they are often stupid reasons. Entire towns sell their souls for any number of reasons; people die for one, maybe two reasons. I had a pet chicken. Echo. He was my favorite chicken. Had him when I was a child (first chicken best chicken). Tonight the night is a black moth. A spoon grazing my lips. Tonight the night is a black mouth. They killed my favorite chicken. Tonight the night is a black month or a red month. It's December. A man passes a door three or four times before he realizes it’s the way out.

ok, part of the issue, as lauren sets it out, is that these sentences aren't long enough! there is no sense of the power of syntax, of the power of syntactical transformations - this poem knows where it's going at each pause of event. in contrast to "structure of rime two," the odd authority of this poem does not come from its realization of the transformative suggestions of a hierarchy of transformations - in the "rime," the mere fact that these poems about "rime" are in prose are the first suggestion that everything is poetry, that, even prose is part of a larger chain of being (not to get all dante about it).

oh yes, and this poem's ending slams the door shut on that poor chicken, there is no fanning out, there is so sense of marginalization which p. poems always need to enact, oh so fucking abstract! what i mean is, that since the p. poem is a "marginal" (in the sense that it exists on a border between two, more absolute forms, it needs to exist in the flux of its marginality. my favorite margins are marshes, also known as, marges (margins) margents, sloughs and estruaries. the world of the marsh is a semi-world. if it is in a delta, there is the added marginality of the water, which is saltier than river water and less bracken than sea water).

i think my point is clear - but to clarify: poetry is the marges of the sea. like that wonderful poem of janet frame's:

Sunday Morning

Salt water is poetry.
I did not decide this
or prepare a statement
to astonish; it is always

my pleasure on Sundays
looking out of my window
at the petal-white Dunedin light
to trace the green stalk

to its roots in the sea,
then say as the tentacles
take hold and I drown,
the oxygen of silence withheld--

salt water is poetry
not mine but the providers
whom I thank by reading
and wish never again to breath the silent air.

not a perfect poem, but the flowering city stretching its roots to the sea is true to the idea of our source in the sea.

as for the issue of rigor, i'm kind of surprised that we've never really talked about this idea before. in an early draft of a poem written in order to sneer at the idea of the individual, i wrote:

a poem,
feuds with its sentence

makes a tensile arrangement
a friendship
a concentration
made
from
impulse,
warringly.

at any rate, you see why it's a draft. but, when i look up rigor in the dictionary it says: "strictness or severity, as in temperament, action or judgement. (from latin, "to be stiff")." it doesn't seem to me as negative as this definition wants it to be. well, rigor. i suppose there are a couple of varieties. there is the imposition of rigor, which comes out in the world of the new formalists perhaps. in these, (i think particularly of anthony hecht) there is a woship of a particular rigor, which is formal. this is a kind of empty rigor, a rigor of the received. the other rigor i can think of is not a systematic imposed idea of form, but a rigor of perspective that comes out of a person - treats one's world with a severity. why? because, in the fractiousness of postmodern worldliness, we must be rigorous with ourselves and our surroundings. two quotes, from duncan's letters, and from heraclitus:

"as i think, the isolate particular experience labors to bring forth itself as the eternal communal experience; ie as language (of picture or words or music and dance). a mystery of creation in participation. we labor to mak the war *real* to make it really happen so that it will speak to us. as we labor to realize life. if we did not so labor we would not, i suppose, experience fear or wrath, our reactions as its reality grows."
DUNCAN

"whatever comes from sight, hearing, learning from experience: this i prefer."
HERACLITUS

rigorous attentiveness is needed to bring aerie or difficult things into the realm of experience.

i guess that, in some ways, rigor, for the poet, is the struggle to be attentive to the seen and unseen.
boy, i'm spinning out of control here.

i guess that rigor is about form in the sense that it is what form, when it works, is supposed to provide a poem. but, if we follow levertov's "notes on organic form," that "there are no doubt temperamental differences between poets who use prescribed forms and those who look for new ones...their conception of "content" and "reality" is functionally more important. On the one hand is the idea that content, reality, experience, is essentially fluid and must be give form; on the other, this sense of seeking out inherent, though not immediately apparent, form." this suggests to me that the real importance of rigor is about perception, not about, you know, working habits or struggles with vocation or whatever. the real rigor is, how to rigorously attune oneself to particulars of the whole. (subject left intentionally absent. the subject is "it" - i read too much duncan.) so, rigor, for me at least, is the same as attention, alertness, the rigor then becoming a complete part of the act of knowing or seeing, not something tacked on at the end when one is writing. know what i'm saying?

ok, i'm going to kinko's to make more copies of the frontispiece for "measuring"

roast beef

--as i was saying to jared yesterday, the only problem with this blog is that when everyone gets excited by discussions of a topic, it goes silent, bc we start talking on the phone (or, you midwesterners, in person). i’ve been meaning forever to post my defense of prose poetry (against jared’s charge that it isn’t musical). so i’m going to do a minimal, lame version of my defense...as a phosphor trace of large excitable phone conversations. my exhibit a (from tender buttons):
-----------------------------------------
ROASTBEEF

In the inside there is sleeping, in the outside there is reddening, in the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. In the evening there is feeling. In feeling anything is resting, in feeling anything is mounting, in feeling there is resignation, in feeling there is recognition, in feeling there is recurrence and entirely mistaken there is pinching. All the standards have steamers and all the curtains have bed linens and all the yellow has discrimination and all the circle has circling. This makes sand.

--here’s another fun one (just because):
------------------------------------------
A TIME TO EAT

A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorised and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy.
-------------------------------------------
and, huzzah, my exhibit b:
-------------------------------------------
THE STRUCTURE OF RIME II

What of the Structure of Rime? I said.

The Messenger in guise of a Lion roard: Why does man retract his song from the impoverishd air? He brings his young to the opening of the field. Does he so fear beautiful compulsion?

I in the guise of a Lion roard out great vowels and heard their amazing patterns.

A lion without disguise said: He that sang to charm the beasts was false of tongue. There is a melody within this surfeit of speech that is most man.
What of the Structure of Rime? I asked.

An absolute scale of resemblance and disresemblance establishes measures that are music in the actual world.

The Lion in the Zodiac replied:

The actual stars moving are music in the real world. This is the meaning of the music of the spheres.
----------------------------------
in both cases, i think the prose (or semi-prose) calls attention to things being twisted and heightened in the sentences – sound, syntax, transformations of sense that aren’t just easy surreal stuff bc they are also transformations in the language. (i throw in the surreal comment because i was wondering if one of the problems with some prose poetry, or that makes it read as unmusical, is the idea of transporting some kind of dream/surreal ‘poetic logic’ into an inert prose vehicle. but if that’s the fault of prose poetry, then wouldn’t all poems we don’t like be the fault of poetry poetry ?)

i know this isn’t exactly an issue, since i know that jared actually likes the same prose poems i do, at least for the most part (which is why i can enjoy bringing up the duncan). but i do wonder if you think that prose poems are more likely than other forms to make their writers inattentive – i.e., do you worry that they allow people to do something that seems surface-ly cool without giving much thought as to why? what if tomorrow couplets become the flavor of the month? eh?

in a slightly related issue: what do y’all think about the issue of rigor in poetry? tony was talking tonight about rigor in architecture, and it interested me. i was thinking about how someone like spicer can seem really sloppy and really rigorous at the same time (in a good way). the idea of rigor feels related to some of these ideas about form, clarity (what it is, how it is obtained), outwardness, abstraction, and skepticism that it seems like we’re interested in in our different proportions and ways. and then it also kind of sounds like a horrible trap, which makes it appealing to kick around.

one kid in one of my third grade classes is making a little booklet (on his own, not under my direction, he just showed it to me) called “the ways people act”. it was really charming, not least, i'm embarassed to admit, because i get to be a character...the way i act is that i smile a lot, according to the book of ways of jw banks.