Creeley

i got an email today from poetry daily asking for money for national poetry month. the day after creeley dies? shit, and i though terry schiavo's parents had respect problems.

anyway, like lauren, i was stunned by r.c.'s death. i came back from a blustery bike ride by the lake (watching a thunderstorm descend from the lakefront), and had just got in when the news came over the wire - i literally shouted! it was a strange, but i felt like some kind of living link left us. anyway, i too found a good poem of his, to think about his death, but i left it at home, and i'm at work, so i can't really do much about it right now.

so, where's catherine? dear cat, you dropped the beauty bomb in our bathtub and have since been elusive...

l's thing from stein is characteristically amazing.

i do love the patina that a classic attains - i wonder if the attitude behind this profoundly modernist statement hasn't had its excesses also. i'm thinking of good ol' paul mccarthy, the performance artiste.

i love the big idea at the back of this, which l. points out. the in-betweenie world of "b/t rejecting and accepting" - my first impulse is to call that state something like passivity - i mean, in the positive and negative sense. or maybe call it reticence. heraclitus says "nature loves to hide." and pico mirandola says that god/dawg created us to for the sole purpose of having an aesthetic reaction to the world. so, maybe the state of being "b/t rejecting and accepting" is a passive absorption of beauty that exists outside of time (which makes things classic) - cuz, isn't the present tenseness of stein's writing a way of ignoring time? (i haven't read enuf stein to say this very confidently.

oh, i don't know this is sloppy thinking.

acceptance is both the most important act and the hardest. and the most traitorous act too. like, who can accept that the planet won't be able to hold all us people soon? but what do you do? one starts to feel jeffer's determinism in one's bones (ie, that humanity is suicidal) - this is, i guess, where acceptance comes in and says, "hello, want to hear a funny joke?"

on a lighter note, our falcon is back. we have a falcon couple that've nested in the warehouse across the street - it's makes funny squeaks. the winds were real high yesterday, and it dallied like a dart in the wind.

swirling all around this is the "shock of the new" swarms of mosquito hawks.

in memory of robert creeley

i feel kind of stunned to have found out about his death
by accident - i saw a mention of him on a blog and then
found in a comment that he had died today. then found that
he had died in odessa, texas. steve, you should write to us
about the reading you saw in paris.

i opened my creeley collected to a random page and got this one:

"Oh No

If you wander far enough
you will come to it
and when you get there
they will give you a place to sit

for yourself only, in a nice chair,
and all your friends will be there
with smiles on their faces
and they will likewise all have places."

i can't figure out how completely ironic this is - but am happy i fell onto it
for the strangeness, simplicity, ineffability, and balance -

his tricky, precise, thinking/feeling poems work themselves into your mind
and i know that for me they will keep coming back over and over again
even though he
"is beyond himself into the next
thing"

itchy beauty

i just got back from teaching, was staring into space and eating watermelon at the coffee table when i flipped open the gertrude stein book on the table in front of me - randomly lit on this (from composition as explanation) about beauty:

"There is almost not an interval.

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling. Now the only difficulty with the volte-face concerning the arts is this. When the acceptance comes, by that acceptance the thing created becomes a classic. It is a natural phenomena a rather extraordinary natural phenomena that a thing accepted becomes a classic. And what is the characteristic quality of a classic. The characteristic quality of a classic is that it is beautiful. Now of course it is perfectly true that a more or less first rate work of art is beautiful but the trouble is that when that first rate work of art becomes a classic because it is accepted the only thing that is important from then on to the majority of the acceptors the enormous majority, the most intelligent majority of the acceptors is that it is so wonderfully beautiful. Of course it is wonderfully beautiful, only when it is still a thing irritating annoying stimulating then all quality of beauty is denied to it.

Of course it is beautiful but first all beauty in it is denied and then all the beauty of it is accepted. If every one were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic. Of course it is extremely difficult nothing more so than to remember back to its not being beautiful once it has become beauty."

between rejecting and accepting - where is that? - i am curious about this interesting edge between "of course it is wonderfully beautiful" (but this is not its only quality) and when something has "become beauty"/'a classic' (everything else is rubbed off but "this is so beautiful! so good! so edifying!").

it's hot out today - things the heat makes me think of appreciating - beer, laziness, watermelon ice cubes, mosquito hawks, loud slow music. i wish you were all here, we could have a party!

xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo xo

being beauteous

hmmmmm....

i am still meandering around the beauty posts. i think the only way i'm going to write anything at all is if i write notes and rambles for a never to be written post about beauty and its errors.

first - in catherine's post - who is making the error? is beauty itself some kind of error (which is how i read jared's response, that the non-beautiful is whatever is stagnant/rigid/stifling - the beauty is the surprising veering off)? or is an error in beauty valuing something too highly or not highly enough? (or having the wrong idea of what beauty is?)

tony and i just saw the not-super-great merchant of venice movie. but there's that scene where the suitors choose between three caskets to win portia's hand in marriage - and the right one is the lead one that bassanio picks, not the gold or silver the others pick...

so it's the all that glitters is not gold thing - but then bassanio is making an 'error in beauty' to show he understands what true beauty is so that he can marry a lady who is outwardly extremely beautiful, with a huge fortune. not sure where i'm going with this one except that i find it strange. he knows the right answer (conventional wisdom).

in his speech he says:

"Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
to a most dangerous sea..."

(mentioned bc 'guiled shore' is my current favorite phrase and i'm trying excessively every day to work it into flaming t.)
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i like the idea that there are errors made, but eventually one learns to fit them in to a larger framework - that the error in valuation/beauty is necessary to catapult you to a different order, where that error fits in as beauty. that is yet another idea ripped off from robert duncan. i was trying to allegorize this on the phone to jared in terms of the clothes i wore in high school....
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....but if you can flip perspective on an error so that it becomes beautiful in a new order - or as part of a whole which needs it - i guess the reverse could be true - that something that previously seemed beautiful becomes horrible in a new context. i guess i'm thinking more morally here though maybe there are aesthetic things too. or what about things that are so mixed up that they aren't readable/judge-able as beautiful or unbeautiful?
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the whole idea of beauty makes me think also of contemporary art. there's so much out-running beauty, in a way. (i.e. things are critiqued in terms of being 'too aestheticized' .) if you see beauty that way, it's the force of assimilation. it interests me that things that were anti-beautiful when they were made (like minimalist boxes) seem beautiful now. they jumped us over into another order of beauty. or they were gentrified. but how do you ever get out of that hole?
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or maybe they weren't meant to look un-beautiful - does a challenge to the art before you that gets on your nerves mean re-defining where beauty is? (i.e., beauty is not the stable, it's the contingent - or, beauty isn't making something that looks beautiful, it's making something the shock of whose ugliness/starkness will cause people to act in a more beautiful/ethical way?)

i'm complaining to tony that i can't write this post (he's working behind me at his desk) and he says "beauty is a trap." he means the concept beauty...he goes on to elaborate...."is it how something looks? is it how it's made? how it works? how it affects people? how it fits in to a system?" i like this so i'm transcribing it.
------------------

continuing in the documentary mode, i guess because this strikes me as a tangled issue, the jay-z line "i'm che guevara with bling on, i'm complex" keeps running through my head over and over.

in other news, we watched dirty dancing last night (my first time seeing it) and went to go see guitar wolf. the music was good but it was so crowded and violent - an angry houston rockabilly crowd - i kept getting elbowed in the head and becoming older by the minute. a woman's very long and very blond and very scratchy hair was being shoved into my nose and mouth and eyes - i eventually started desperately pushing on her head as though it were inanimate to try to clear a little breathing room - not very beautiful behavior by me....

hello hello hello hello!

A Spring Message from Nathaniel Tarn

::

the great birds of the sea
do not to the great ocean down
& dive he would say
mostly for food
but for eye's joy
hermit's happiness
on this lone shore
saint to be himself alone--
but, inasmuch as
they fly in company of kin
& never solitary
so that their time is a history
(as we understand it
thus, it is for the hungry in ourselves,
the humanity which is our nature,
that, like us, toiling,
they down to smelt & worm,
their lovely passage a banality
to fill the belly
they and we must march on
if we are to grow
legs, wings of willing

Some Final Thoughts

so, i haven't talked to catherine, and i've already misinterpreted her ideas, sufficiently twisting them to my own ends, but i could not but return to it.

so, i've been deep in heraclitus, who is, of course a pre-socratic, and therefore works b4 the allegory of the cave, the oldest exposition of the problem of mimesis (isn't it?) at any rate, h. says the following:

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

i've quoted this before, but i wanted to mention it in terms of both c's question, and also something that has repercussions for all of us, living as we do in the age of me me media, and intense horrors of disinformation. so, then beauty becomes a kind of unmediated thing. i was reading a review j. harrison did of duncan's 'bending the bow.' he says:

'the poem is not the paradigm but the source, the competitor, not the imitator, of nature.'

wot? well, you know, that beauty upwells from the poim, not from its errors or rectitudes.

and, finally, words from duncan:

THE TONE OF A VOWEL HAS THE COLOR OF A WING

yuh goddam right!

so, i love the f word

fuc fuc fuc

What Would Stevens Do?

The first thing that came to mind, catherine, was steven's "anything is beautiful if you say it is," a first class invitation to aesthetic sophistry that i'm inclined to want to follow. when thinking about an 'error in beauty,' the idea brings so many things immediately to mind (the inherence of one in the other being the first thing). when you speak of an error in beauty, is this a betrayal of a beautiful subject, acting in bad faith as a subject, do you mean?

ok, i'll just make some quick statements and then think about it more and then come back with more.

i guess mishearing and miswriting are not quite errors, but they seem to me to have the quality of errors, of overheard voices, whose truth or falsity dissolves in the act of applying your imagination to murkiness. this is, what duncan calls (when speaking of pindar) a "wrongness that has style." this wrongness (which is also the wrongness of "large bad picture") is integral to my conception of the role of the artist. the idea of error that this stance imagines is a skeptical attitude toward the world. that the world's imposition of "rightness" and "right thinking" or any kind of orthodoxy (which pains real beauty with its appearance) is that which the writer must deny.

This denial, however, is not so much a romantic, subjective denial as it is a denial of bad information, of humans misleading one another for whatever reason (avarices, powers, pettiness born of squashed conceptions of the individual). Error becomes verity, because smugly reported truths (as opposed to er, beautiful errors) are errors of process. Now, i guess this is where my imposition of my own idea of your "error" comes from. My error is a static state. One errs, veers from a dogma in order to find larger errors which are not faulty because of their place on a scale of imposed rightness.

Yeah Yeah.

Also does this world of error include the accidents of the bricoleur, of the wayward (wyrd, weird) mis directions of the weather's butterfly effect? the complexity of the poet's reading and writing in time, the progression of which is tiny dreads when the poem is being built or polished?

there is of course, the internal feeling of error, in which the writer makes a statement that is not true. this has two categories:

a) it is not true
b) it must be admitted, truth (or fixity on a scale of rightness) be damned.

so, if the error is generated by the person and poses a threat to the person's morality, then the error must be toyed with. if it outrages the poet, that is, it must stand.

but, if it is just not true, with no interesting fireworks or sparks, it cannot stand.

ok, am at work, must go.

jared

i've been drinking trader joe's new hefeweizen, so sue me if i go too fast

regarding prose poems, from the nyt's review of ashbery's umpteenth, latest book.

For variety he also includes several prose poems, including the long title piece. At least since ''Three Poems,'' which were in fact three long prose pieces -- a flood of sprawling, unparagraphed sentences -- Ashbery has been overly fond of this dandified, hybrid form so beloved by Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein, among others he has acknowledged as influences. But the prose poem doesn't bring out the best in him (or in anybody else for that matter, except for poets like Charles Simic and Michael Benedikt, who treat the whole notion with a certain amount of irony). The long sentences, loose and rambling, let all the music leak out, and they often feel arbitrary, made up on the spot:


Smack in the limousine, the friendly fog next door placed a hand on my shoulders, cementing matters. The professor looked wary. 'Flowers have helped pave roads,' he mooted. The ocean filling in for us. Too many vacant noon empires, without them you can't rule a hemisphere or be sated other than by watching. Our TV brains sit around us all brave and friendly, like docile pets.


This isn't poetry; it's -- well, prose, and not particularly interesting prose at that.

naught

i apologize in advance if this comes off as solipsism.

it's the dog end of winter, so i wanted to return to the lordly and isolate suggestions of optimism. as i've talked to everyone on the phone recently, everyone seems to be quivering with a bit of "no bird dawn" as far as poetry goes. so, i'd been thinking about lauren's world of optimo (from the anguish of last fall) x-ed with other intimations of mortality.

i talked to this poet dude recently who said he only writes during the summer, and i thought this was interesting -winter up here (in the "alpine" world 2 b precise) is so hard to write through that it seemed good to fire off a bit about some of the pain(ishness) of writing during a time of death and hibernation, or chilling at least.

what to say? i think it might be a good idea to completely beg off of writing from january - march. why? a time of reading & reflection, an inside tyme perhaps. who cares? oh i don't know, i'm really floaty right now, and i can't really say much- considering the steadiness of gray.

i still don't think i'm going to be writing anything about the sixties soon. it's a subject that's so big and imp. that i haven't got me little head around it yet. oh i know, how about a reading list of interest:

the shape of content, by ben shahn
san francisco renaissance: poetics and community at mid-century, by michael davidson
leave the room to itself by g. foust.
the new gocco guide, by claire russell (the how to manual for my new printer)
gilead, by marilynne (dude, earle mccartney is thanked in that shit! he's a star...)
the art & thought of heraclitus

oh fuck, is this pretentious? i'm trying to write something, but my head is incredibly blank.

but dude, heraclitus has all that dry/moist metaphorics for a soul...it's really weird!

oh yeah, i got a poetry magazine tote bag at this lil event yesterday. (printer's ball)

and finally, pete coco's blog

babiesarefireprooof.blogspot.com

has gotten in trouble with the powers that be. the way pete tells it, someone on the blog said they didn't like ben marcus' writing and apparently ben m. has become a reader of the blog - anyway, he fucking complained to connie about it! what a lame-o! i know he's a good writer, but shit...

anyway, i think i won't be able to do much til the daffodils come up.

yawn, whine,...

vim vim vigor.