dowsers/ephemera

I've been working on a series of new poems. they're occasional poems in the same way that joanne kyger's poems are occasional. their occasions are today and yesterday and the day before. the forms, such as they are, aren't forms, but are rather a small set of constraints:

1. no titles.

i used to consider titles as vortices that spit up and were reabsorbed by the actual hugeness of their subjects. so, for example, an explicit title such as "remembering a fear as manifest destiny" acted as a kind of flexible support to uphold and be simultaneously reabsorbed by the actions of the poem, in all its mediation and estrangement of experience. so that the poem could contain autobiographical details, references to american adventures abroad, and vacation souvenirs while being controlled by the suggestions of the title.

i began, however, to see the title as a constraint on the poems ability to move. i remember full well kilgore trout's (or vonnegut's?) condemnation of the abstract paiting with the title "the temptation of st. anthony," and while i most certainly don't share the condemnation of the abstract (entirely, see ben shahn) with these new poems, i wanted to let the direction of the poem be freed from such a constraint. i preferred that the constraint serve, as much as possible, as a point leading to expansion, (an independence, missouri of the mind). Therefore, I preferred that the constraint not appear as a constraint, which is how my young poet mind conceived of sonnets, though i know it ain't true now.

2. the date of composition listed at the end of the poem

this, again, is jacked from Joanne. it's an attempt to get a more subterranean sense of poetry. secret, heraclitan moisture (which is as negative to him as it is positive to me). pnuema, most of all. plus, i liked the idea that the day is not created or inscribed in the annal until one has gone through the process of reading about the creation of the day. uh huh artificer.

this is also an attempt to counteract, for myself, the more macho tendencies of the land artists i love. when i think of michael heizer, i want to be simultaneously in a helicopter over his city, and a tarantula traversing its concrete.

3. the revisions have to be completed that day.

this ain't no "first thought, best thought." no. it's an attempt to get the polish off, so you can lacquer the teak in the summer. got it? i was reading a william bronk essay, and was kind of surprised to find out that he just kind of went with his first drafts. and the more i thought about it, it kind of allows me to linger in the moment of composition, oh holiest place, for a more sustained period. too often, i allow myself to set that moment aside, trusting that i can re-enter it. but that seems wrong right now. there's also the r. hass anecdote which suggests that duncan never revised, that he'd put down a poem unti the next line came to him. now, this is the whole serial, poet-as-radio thing, and i like it. it has the beauty of the language singing through you, that "listen to my word, not to me" heraclitan thing.
i thought i'd escaped heraclitus, but that heraclitan logos, the shared, overarching insistence on the variously breathed word, allows the conduit situation quite nicely. and returning to revise a poem put me in control too much, i think.


"as it goes
it comes to me"

-r. duncan