He Looks Like My Grandpa

Duncan at an event. Phew. I've been able to write again, mornings have been freed. I'm currently reading:

Jorge Guillen
Daniel Brenner
Edmond Jabes
Holderlin (love me as i believe)
Pound ("messed up the music / to speak clearly")
Bay Poetics

Looking at:

Carl Andre
Michael Heizer
Jessica Stockholder (who has a piece called "on spending the money tenderly" - she really actually is a poet).
Hamish Fulton

And armed with all these, adjacent to the typewriter, continue apace with the mss. It's taken me months of not writing to figure out that what I thought of as a "new" manuscript (after a long talk with catherine about what i thought of as the "old" manuscript) has been latent in the old shit all along. So, I realize that everything that I've been working on is a continuum. I'm being a good pre-socratic in this sense. So, the old mss (which hit revision #20 last week) is still being (what michael heizer would call) in-filled with new poems. More and more, the basic thing seems to be, as I've mentioned ad nauseum, the path. the fall. the thing. the pathetic fallacy thing balanced by the heraclitan in-your-face variety of inquiry (that which can be beheld by the senses, that i consider best) with the kind of typological, dante-by-way-of-duncan interpenetrated understanding of the perceiving of the inhuman thing happening and the perception effects (cf Duncan's incredible "Apprehensions" in Roots & Branches).

So, the manuscript demands some kind of concentric organization, full of cognizant violations of the circle. I'm in the middle of a poem whose form is based on Jabes' "Soleilland," in which an increting (a process of internal secretion) refrain (My Love a country...My love a country a town....My love a country a town a room) reproduces in the linear motion of the poem thru time, line, and page, a process by which the poem turns along axes which themselves move (I'm thinking of the lunar cycle, kinda).

But will the mss get that form? I think, maybe. It seems to have taken years to find its place, its way of acting among its moving parts. I can see now that the importance of the "object among objects" idea of Oppen's has important repercussions fo the shape of poems in manuscripts. If they are to be set next to one another, which arguably, can resonate with little care put into it (bricolage-ism-ness) can make its oscillating proximities ring with the kinds of chance that scare paranoid astronomers (we can see from the movements, that an asteroid will hit the planet...or come close). So, you see, proximity is still a matter of finding typology in the shapes of plants, in the findings of the viewer, in the heraclitan immediacies of seeing and then calling out some succession of words and repeating. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Or, as Kim Levin said of Jessica Stockholder, an mss can "orchestrate a tender collision."


HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

The Cloudbuster

One of the ways people are trying to respond personally and emotionally to the destruction of the planet is via cloudbusters. I was first introduced to the idea by Kate Bush, whose tune "Cloudbusting" really contained some of the weird romantic sense of technology that is both the hope and pain of such, er, follies.

Harper's ran an amazing article recently, called "Owning the Weather" which really, finally, provided me with a framework for my pro-pathetic fallacy leanings, which is pretty much what I've been looking for ever sense I read "The Snow Man." Anyway, the author, a wonderful romantic lefty, used his cloudbuster on the Republican National Convention: See?

Anyway, this is really the kind of thing I want my next book to deal with. The persistance of romanticism, forces of spirit etc, in the world of the discredited attempt at wonder.

Anyway, I love the cloudbuster and all it represents as an anecdote to bureaucratic asshole madness.

Long Live the Pathetic Fallacy

those motherfuckers

Why I'm Proud to Be an American

6.6.06

Why I Love Auden

"Of course, one can be wrong about what's good or bad. Taste and judgement can differ. But one has to be loyal to oneself and trust one's own taste. I can, for instance, enjoy a good tear-jerking movie where, oh,an old mother is put in a home--even though I know it's terrible, the tears will run down my cheeks. I don't think good work ever makes one cry. Housman said he got a curious physical sensation with good poetry--I never got any. If one sees King Lear, one doesn't cry. One doesn't have to.

---

I suppose I should also mention how the auden looked as an old man was one of the primary reasons I wished that I was a poet. He looked, towards the end, like the bust of a frog sculpted out of horse diarrhea, topped with marjorie perloff's wig. she just set it there to dry it out after getting caught in the rain. I mean, we should all have such a face.