Wednesday, October 6: New Writing Series, UC San Diego

Notes on "Causal Mythology": Berkeley Poetry Conference, July 1965

A page from my notes on Charles Olson's lecture, "Causal Mythology," at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in July '65. This isn't the legendary talk later in the week (although I have notes of a sort on that as well), but an earlier, more intimate moment in a classroom.

Eight lines down, the giddy, 17 year-old exclamation “GINSBERG JUST BORROWED 2 PIECES OF PAPER FROM HERE -->," with an arrow toward the spiral binding.

Understand that Ginsberg and Olson were people I had been reading before I arrived -- so to see them walk out of those pages was eye-popping.

The indented parts were my attempt to represent what Olson was writing on a blackboard or tablet at the front of the room (can't recall which).

More to come in some form later. . . .

 

Click to enlarge image

Thursday, September 30: Living Writers Reading Series, UC Santa Cruz

Rebecca Harding Davis: Lost and Found in Family Pictures

The picture on the right is Rebecca Harding Davis. Is the picture on the left the same woman?
(Click to enlarge image)

Recently the pictures above came to light in the collection of an older family member (who scanned them), and we're trying to identify the woman on the left.

We know that the picture on the right is American writer Rebecca Harding Davis (my great grandmother's sister) -- or certainly identified as such, since it appears on the covers of at least two books and elsewhere.

One friend says, "I do see a resemblance, a strong one, in the curls, shape of head, and the facial configuration right below the lower lip."

That would be my impression as well. What do you think, dear reader? Is there a science to this kind of informed guessing? Are there people who specialize in it?

If scholars have seen this picture before, I would be very interested to hear.

The originals are in Connecticut and I'll be there in late October (after my reading with Jerome Sala at the Poetry Project in New York on the 27th). I will of course be eager to examine them, looking for clues of any kind. There are, apparently, others of interest, including a group photo taken (according to writing on the back, or so I'm told) by L. Clarke Davis, Rebecca's husband.

But these, and some intriguing others, are unidentified. Lesson: label your pictures immediately (she said to herself).

One thing that's beyond eerie for me is the arresting resemblance between the well-known picture and my own mother. That could be Cynthia, as easily as Rebecca, looking out at us from some strange remove.

The Fudd-Lieberman Ticket: Elmer Meets Joe in a Paroxysm of Delight

Self-love conquers all, even that wascally congwess and that unpwesent pwesident.

The Giant (from Kate Greenstreet)

I was knocked out by this extraordinary little movie. It's a piece of one of the short films from the DVD that'll come with Kate Greenstreet's new book, The Last 4 Things, when it's published in September by Ahsahta Press.

If there's a better poetry clip anywhere, please send me a pointer. (Seriously. I'm interested in this stuff.)

But it seems to me we could all go to school on this one. Even more astonishing to the technically-challenged among us, she made it herself.

At the moment, I can't even remember how to blog.

I Am Not a Crook's Head

Courtesy of Daniel Bouchard: micro cartoon-clips of Tricky on the march!

The Poet, Burning His Own Work

Carl Spitzweg, "The Poor Poet" (1839)

"The poet writes while huddling under his bedcovers and wearing a tattered coat and nightcap. The writer has been burning some of his own work - most likely volumes I and II since volumes III and IV remain in bundles on the floor. The fire in the room has obviously gone out since the poet rests his hat on the cold stovepipe and no live coals are visible in the stove. Indeed this cold stove is the darkest part of the picture and symbolizes the writer's sorry state of affairs."

Paavo Haavikko, "A Flower Song"

Paavo Haavikko, 1966

A Flower Song

The fir-trees at play;
comes raining down
ceaselessly;
O you, the wood-cutter's
daughter,
steep as the mountains,
as gruff and as gorgeous,
listen,
if you never loved, if I
never loved (your
bitterest words
when we parted), O listen —
the cones, raining down upon you
abundantly, ceaselessly,
without mercy.

— tr. by Anselm Hollo

Paavo Haavikko (1931-2008)

Life being short, poverty and wealth
     are final verdicts, in that
poverty and life are of equal duration
     and wealth and cold indifference
are perennial and hereditary, like diseases.

(from May, Eternal, 1988, tr. by Anselm Hollo)


And, briefly:
The old part (1754-1762) is known as
The Winter Palace.
Accordingly everything,
Floor, ceiling, walls
Is covered with these exalted beings:
Venus, Jupiter, many ladies
Of a full-bodied vintage.
You can still see how many a man
Lost head and hat
By the Berezhina River,
You can see that Borodino
Was a victory;


Of such
I'm talking, here,
Under the roof
Thatched by my hair.

(from The Winter Palace, 1959, tr. by Anselm Hollo)

Where Metaphor Comes From

That place where you throw sand in the air and get to call it rain.

Hello, Blackheath NSW and Cleveland OH --

didn't mean to worry anybody. . .

Goodbye to All That

Weldon Kees

Wonder whether I'm the only person whose first thought on being wheeled into an ambulance was "I have to stop blogging." My guess is no.

Anyway it may have been my second thought because, as you can imagine, things at this point were running together a bit. My first thought was maybe more like "This is incredibly weird."

But there I was with Joe, a sturdy, bear-like human being, and he was cheerfully slapping electrodes under my clothes and we were making a sort of psychedelic small talk.

In any case I'm okay — I just fainted for the first time in my life and had a small seizure (apparently fairly normal when the brain's deprived of oxygen) and scared my husband half to death.

This all happened in a restaurant and he had to shout "Help!" at a certain point and this is not something that Finns (a very reserved people) are wont to do, unless forced to the greatest extremity.

So the whole thing has taken a lot out of both of us and I just thought I'd keep you (faithful reader) in the loop.

Will I stop blogging? Probably not entirely, at least for now — but I do have to change the way I do it and the way I do a lot of other things, or these tangled ganglia are going to assassinate me.

So (speaking of tangled ganglia) here's one of the finest poems of the last century, for my money — one that, as usual, seems strangely apropos.

ROUND

"Wondrous life!" cried Marvell at Appleton House.
Renan admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly."
But here dried ferns keep falling to the floor,
And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead,
A blow to the Herald-Tribune. A closet mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly."

Flaps like a worn-out blind. Cezanne
Would break out in the quiet streets of Aix
And shout, "Le monde, c'est terrible!" Royal
Cortissoz is dead. And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. The soil
In which the ferns are dying needs more Vigoro.
There is no twilight on the moon, no mist or rain,
No hail or snow, no life. Here in this house

Dried ferns keep falling to the floor, a mouse
Rattles the wrapper on the breakfast food. Cezanne
Would break out in the quiet streets and scream. Renan
Admired Jesus Christ "wholeheartedly." And something inside my head
Flaps like a worn-out blind. Royal Cortissoz is dead.
There is no twilight on the moon, no hail or snow.
One notes fresh desecration of the portico.
"Wondrous life!" cried Marvell at Appleton House.

— Weldon Kees

Radical Stupidity

The phrase "radical stupidity" popped into my head the other day and I'm not sure whether it appeared in order to describe this Ukrainian army recruiting video (which I had not yet seen) or as a promising name for a new school of poetry.

I prefer the latter but we can confidently build the church of radical stupidity upon this rock. Because the clip (which is apparently quite real) effortlessly attains sublime heights of cheesiness that Sacha Baron Cohen can only dream of.

No translation necessary (as you'll see) but here's somebody's stab at it:

girl 1: would u take us for a ride on your BMW?
BMW driver: even to the end of the world!
soldier: hey, i’d like to drown some vodka, girls!
girl 1: just a second!
girl 2: where do you live?
soldier: right here - daytime at work, and at night in the clubs!
girl 1: which work???
soldier: contract of course!
blonde girl: contract?? marriage contract or what?
girl 3: army contract, stupid!
BMW driver: hey, don’t you wanna ride in my car?
girls: forget it, take yourself for a ride!
narrator: it’s about time for new heroes! with contract based service in ukrainian armed forces!

Self Portrait of Sylvia Plath as Wittgenstein

My copies of Court Green 5 arrived, featuring a Sylvia Plath Dossier. Just starting to read it but this jumped out at me, from Jason Schneiderman's five-part "Anachronistic Fair Use Self Portraits of 20th Century Sylvia Plath (with 'Daddy' Fixation)":


Self Portrait of Sylvia Plath as Wittgenstein

1. There is a Daddy
1.1. The Daddy is the case
1.2 The Daddy does not do
1.3 The Daddy does not do
1.4 The Daddy does not do anymore
1.5 The Daddy is like a shoe
2. There is a daughter
2.1 She lives in the shoe-like father
2.1.2 The daughter is foot like
2.2 The daughter is poor
2.3 The daughter is white
2.4 The daughter has foot-like lived in the father shoe-like for thirty years
2.5 She barely dares to breathe
2.6 She barely dares to achoo

The whole series is a lot of fun, especially (for my money) "Self Portrait of Sylvia Plath as F.T. Marinetti" and "Self Portrait of Sylvia Plath as Tristan Tzara."

Reminds me that I left Longfellow and Wittgenstein hanging last year when things tightened up (not that Henry and Ludwig noticed). Intend to knit those loose ends back together in due time.

Also in the dossier and the rest of the issue, as edited by Lisa Fishman, Arielle Greenberg, Tony Trigilio, and David Trinidad:

Dossier: Sylvia Plath

Amy Gerstler • Amanda Auchter • Terrance Hayes • Anne Shaw • Jane Satterfield • Kristi Maxwell • Tim Dlugos • Jeanne Marie Beaumont • Baron Wormser • Ron Koertge • Judith Harris • Rachel Loden • Ivy Alvarez • Amy Newman • Rebecca Laroche • Sara Burge • Sarah Murphy • Amy Lemmon • Angela Veronica Wong • Susen James • Leanne Averbach • Kathleen Ossip • Patricia Spears Jones • Robyn Ewing • Peter Davis • Michael Broder • James Brock • Robert Siek • Jim Klein • Nicholas Grider • Meg Barboza • Jean Valentine • Maxine Scates • Diane di Prima • Muriel Rukeyser • Lee Ann Brown • Sylvia Plath • Laura Mullen • Wayne Koestenbaum • Jan Beatty • Jason Schneiderman • Debora Kuan • Mary Jo Bang • Susie Timmons • Jenny Mueller • Judith Kroll • Catherine Bowman • Lee Anne Sittler • Scott Keeney

Poems

Jan Beatty • Susan Briante • Sarah Blackman • Daniel Khalastchi • Noelle Kocot • Michael Montlack • Chip Livingston • Kristin Abraham • Kevin Carollo • Susan Cataldo • Chelsey Minnis • Ross Middleton • Brian Young • Daneen Wardrop • Margaret Brady • Ron Koertge • J. G. Brister • Neil de la Flor • Maureen Seaton • Amanda Nadelberg • Jeffrey Bahr • Karen Garthe • Mark Yakich • Jenny Mueller • Sharon Dolin • Dorine Preston • Kristi Maxwell • Zach Savich • Kathleen McGookey • Aaron Anstett • Jason Labbe • Grace Ocasio • Noah Eli Gordon • Joseph Campana • Julie Carr • Mary Ann Samyn • Jack Anderson • Jordan Davis • Denise Duhamel • Steven D. Schroeder • Kathleen Rooney • Brent Goodman • Nathan Hoks • Roberto Harrison • Suzanne Rhodenbaugh • Andrea Rexilius • Stephanie Strickland • Nancy Kuhl • Todd Fredson • John Azrak • Kerry James Evans • Sara Michas-Martin • Terita Heath-WIaz • Allison Campbell • Michelle Taransky • Anne Heide • Ron Drummond • Sarah Vap • Jason Schneiderman • Pat Nolan • Jim Klein • Emmy Hunter • Tom Christopher • Ian Harris • Adam Clay • William C. Olsen • Caroline Morrell • Chad Paries • Alice Notley

Ordering information here.

Nixon Vets the Candidates

Dick thinks Susan could have been a little more tactful about his White House years in the comment box over the weekend. But he's grudgingly consented to give us the benefit of his counsel on some of his old enemies and new bêtes noire:

Romney:

Another rich boy who thinks he has it coming to him, like Kennedy. He'll probably fold, like his candy-ass father after he talked a big game.

Thompson:

Dumb as hell but friendly, as I said when he was my mole on the Watergate committee. Sam Dash ran rings around him, and he's even dimmer today.

Giuliani:

Used to think I saw a bit of myself in him in his better moments. But of course they're not like us. They smell different. Plus the bastard compared me to Bernie Kerik.

McCain:

Growing on me, especially after he appointed Fred Malek (who counted Jews for me in '71) as his national finance co-chair. Even calls Malek "an inspiring public servant who has served our nation well." Credit where credit is due.

Huckabee:

Best instincts of this bunch of clowns by far, even if he does look like Gomer Pyle. What's in the water in Dogpatch, Ark.?

Clinton:

Whatever it was, she didn't drink it. Now Bill loved the lucidity of my mind, like Gergen said: he got me.

But I always say that if the wife comes through as being too strong and too intelligent, it makes the husband look like a wimp. I mean Pat is spinning in her grave, for Christ's sake. And she never had to lock up the interns.

Obama:

We don't owe the blacks a damn thing. Especially one who thinks he's better than we are.

What's Segretti up to these days? We need someone working full-time on that middle name.

Gravel:

Did his best to screw us with the Pentagon Papers, back in the day. Now everybody laughs at him, which is perfect.

Edwards:

Elmer Gantry in a $5,000 suit. All that poor-mouthing about his father the millworker: what a load of crap. I know what it means to have nothing, but we're Republicans. We don't talk about it.

Kucinich:

Are you shitting me?

The guy I don't understand is the other Dick. Why isn't he fighting for it? Did he set his own office on fire?

I'm pinning my hopes on a brokered convention — which could happen if the voters never settle on any of these pygmies.

So if they deadlock in the Twin Cities, I'll be there before you can yell Milhous. I'm just saying.

A Poem for Primaries

The above tricksy dicksiness, of course, from the great Pat Oliphant (born in Adelaide, Australia — who knew), a greeting card in my collection since MCMLXXXII. "Of tendentious or tangential topicality, tickling the turbid, turgid, turbulent twitwits of our tempestuous times," it says on the back.

My own recent disappearance owed as much to a medical mystery tour as to my mother's death, fresh as that peck of dirt may be. We were at a cardiologist's office at the height of the recent violent gale and it drove me back to Julius Caesar's tempests dropping fire, my first WS ever on the page and to passages like this:

Now could I, Casca, name to thee a man
Most like this dreadful night,
That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars
As doth the lion in the Capitol,
A man no mightier than thyself or me
In personal action, yet prodigious grown
And fearful as these strange eruptions are.

And those eruptions and passages — given the just-concluded Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary tomorrow— put me in mind of my own WS (but this time Wallace Stevens) spoof, written right after the capture of Saddam Hussein:

MILHOUS AS KING OF THE GHOSTS


A cold cellar-hole at the end of the day,
When faithless pretenders cover the sun
And nothing is left but my candidacy—

There was dead Checkers with her list of slights,
Slow tongue, green bile, black list, white mind
And April, cruel as rumors of my demise.

To be, on the lawns, where no helicopter lands,
Without that preening statuette of dog,
That dog surrendered to the moon;

And to feel that the light is a Key Biscayne light
In which everything is lofted up to the elect
And no returns need be tallied;

Then there is no use in counting. It comes of itself;
All the blue votes turning a brilliant red,
Even in Chicago. The wind moves on the lawns

And moves in myself. The last Iowa sweetcorn
Is for me, the snows of New Hampshire drift up
Into an empire of self that knows no boundaries,

I become an empire that fills the oleaginous pipelines
Of the earth. The bitch is still yapping
By gravestone-light and I am whipped high, whipped

Up, sculpted higher and higher, cool as a sphinx—
I sit with my head like a Rushmore in space
And the scrofulous hound smelling blood on my wings.


From The Richard Nixon Snow Globe, Wild Honey Press

Is Christmas over? A good thing, perhaps, to judge from my sleepy progeny:





But they're still playing the holly-jolly muzak in the doctors' offices, for which (at the very least) someone should be ritually disemboweled.

Too many wake-up calls of late, as if we needed them, but I'll be here as time and vicissitudes permit, with love (real and true) and poesy for all.

The Moist Lotus Open Along Acheron

photo by Timo Ketonen

A whelming if not overwhelming time. You'd think I would like a drug called Versed, but I didn't. When they pump you full of Versed and Fentanyl and then (later) tell you to go home and not make any major decisions, you have to wonder what they're imagining.

As somebody else must have said (please come forward mysterious personage), I'll cross that bridge when I jump off of it.

But things are fine: one is just rather tired of death and tubes and Versed. Flames shooting out the windows of the Old Executive Office Building, as though even the vice-president's walls were longing for release.

Goodbye, goodbye — no more water, the fire next time. Or Mayakovsky: "In the church of my heart the choir is on fire!"

Indeed. Only a couple of weeks ago the title of an Alan Williamson poem had sent me spinning into the dictionaries: I had heard of psychopomps before, but somehow I had never been besotted with them.

Now I was, since the OED said they were "conductor[s] of souls to the place of the dead. Also, the spiritual guide[s] of a (living) person's soul; a person who acts as a guide of the soul."

And there was this, too, in the OED, from a letter of Rupert Brooke: "I, Hermes-like, am coming to fetch you psychopompically to Hell." Even if "the handsomest young man in England" (as Yeats called him) has not been kissed by time, this is a missive I'd dearly love to finish.

Because wasn't this what I was trying to be for Richard Nixon: his Charon, so that he might see (in Sappho's words, tr. Mary Barnard) "the moist lotus open / along Acheron"?

Surely I could not be as cruel as she was:

Rich as you are

Death will finish
you: afterwards no
one will remember

or want you: you
had no share in
the Pierian roses

You will flitter
invisible among
the indistinct dead

in Hell's palace
darting fitfully

I should be more cheerful by New Year's! Bah humbug, fellow curmudgeons.

The Important Looking Men (with a Note from Mairéad Byrne)

Late one October night I read all of Mairéad Byrne's Talk Poetry in one addictive sitting, greedily, as if it were a plate of hot onion and cauliflower pakoras, which it was.

I asked her to say a few words about her poem "The Important Looking Men," her crisp and spirited book or anything else that struck her fancy, and her comments follow the poem.

The Important Looking Men

The important looking men are not always the important looking men. Sometimes the important looking men are women. Sometimes the important looking men are the woman with the brown helmet of hair, head tilted attentively. Sometimes the important looking men are not the important looking men but visitors from out-of-town where they are not important either. The tortured artist is not always the tortured artist. The tortured artist is not always the guy in the thin cardigan smoking a cigarette outside the studio. That might be the electrician. The tortured artist is sometimes the small priest who stands in the corner of the salon balancing his cup of tea. Or the woman nobody sees. The lover is not always the lover. The lover can be a liar, refracting images of himself back into infinity. The lover might be this beagle, this couch, this slipper, this child who shouts out to me this morning late for school — tumbling from his father's car & again from the side-walk — Clio's Mom! Or this other child, this evening, alone, walking home, who tosses his glorious hello across Camp Street to land at my feet.

--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==





Mairéad Byrne writes:

This poem was originally called "Appearances." You can see that's what it's about. Usually, poems begin with titles for me; this one oscillated between two titles. Ultimately, "The Important Looking Men" was irresistible.

Flat statement is very much part of Talk Poetry, even flat contradictory statement, as this early poem on my blog indicates:

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

WRITING PRACTICE

I write every day.
But not really.
But really.
This is a new way of speaking.
Talk poetry.

Except for "the important looking men," who are generic, the images in the poem are all very specific for me. "The woman with the brown helmet of hair, head tilted attentively," or "solicitously," as it once was, is a colleague. "The tortured artist" is glimpsed on my way to work. The small priest is Gerard Manley Hopkins, isolated at a soirée hosted by John Butler Yeats, when William was about 17, the star of the show. I guess the woman nobody sees is Emily Dickinson, although she was seen by many she loved. And that's how the poem goes. I didn't always find love where I looked for it but it sprung up around me nonetheless. The child tumbling from his father's car is a boy I know. When I taught poetry in my daughter Clio's third grade class, the children wrote list poems beginning "I wish." He wrote "I wish Clio was my friend." He wrote more than any of the other children. He had a lot of heart and was not afraid to show it. His father was sick at the time I wrote the poem. He was a single parent, his three boys lived with him. He died this year. The second child who shouts out to me in the poem is also a boy. A valiant, friendly boy.

The public schools in Providence — and in all American cities probably — are very poor. It really grieves me. The children are made grey. But I have faith that they are untarnishable.

Speechless

Woody Allen on the WGA strike, via the union web site.

Have been a bit speechless myself, for different reasons. It's amazing how sick you can get when you put your mind to it.

Actually overdosing on the vitamins and so on but would much rather be out on the picket line.

"What say you / soldiers of the lyre, we wait / for some o’clock and then stop / singing? Oh I would stop, oh yes / and let the feckless meadow fill / with xylophones and snow, the striped / tail of the muse slap in her burrow."


(from "Poetry and Sorrow in a 'Right-to-Sing' State")

Rose, Oh Pure Contradiction

photo by Timo Ketonen

Season of faxed cremation papers, which one shouldn't read, one really shouldn't.

But here's arguably the best blurb ever:

Since Knox favors premise over conclusion, her poems simply speak — they do not explain. In this way they are not entirely unlike scripture. The part that is unlike scripture is the one that’s like “Wait, I was reading these poems and laughing but my hearing aid fell out and then my face just kind of blew off in a beautiful rainbow spray of bullshit-dissolving napalm.”

This from Sarah Manguso, writing about Jennifer L. Knox's Drunk by Noon. I'm looking forward to the book, and perhaps (with a virulent head cold) living up to its title.

But what else might one expect from someone capable of writing these lines, as Manguso did in her book Siste Viator (wait for the last rim shot):

My great-grandmother's lamp is mine now. It is made of rose quartz — that is, it is made of poetry.

More poetry: A coin you dropped when you took your pants off is still on the floor. Please come back and pick it up.

More: The scar on my hand I got cleaning the house for you has outlasted you. In this way you are indelible, but only as long as I have my hand.