A gem of a quote from John Latta

Sometimes the quality of writing to be found in poetry blogs is so exceptional both author and writing deserve special mention. Here's a gem I recently discovered at John Latta's Isola di Rifiuti.

I can't honestly say I've seen a better characterization of the spirit of our poetical times than this: this is T.S. Eliot stuff! And I can't say anyone is likely to find poetry commentary as erudite and creative as Latta's. Jerome Rothenberg does come a close second (in case I'm accused of favouring the traditionalists). I've begun to read Latta for insight and enjoyment: intelligence of commentary based on wide reading as well as his own uniquely stylish prose. All significant writers possess both.
_________________
                                                                     2


Contemporary trends assume that art is like a fountain, when really it is like a sponge.
   They have decided that art ought to gush, but it ought, rather, to suck up and absorb.
   They assert that art can be divided into categories according to means of representation, when actually it is composed of organs of perception.
   Art must always remain among the spectators and see things more clearly, more truthfully, more perceptively than the others, but in our day it has resorted to using face powder and dressing rooms and displaying itself on the stage. It is as if there were two forms of art and one of them, knowing that it holds the other in reserve, allows itself the luxury of perversion, which is tantamount to suicide. It makes a display of itself when it ought to get lost in the top gallery, in anonymity, and be unaware that it cannot help being discovered, that while shrinking in the corner it is afflicted with a glowing translucence, the phosphorescence that goes with certain diseases.

"Towards a blog poetics": cont'd

The January 13 to 28 blognoscenti posts generated the following sentences, ready to be added to our "Towards a blog poetics" text (see below).

January 13: The first true finished or rather author-made language that the reader rather than the author consciously (or unconsciously) determines through choice of contents is, of course, what emerges.

14:  Learning about the days formed out of  classical shapes (a poetics ready to remix & rush ahead!) is a new knowledge of poetry where what's left out is still something of value.

15: An excellent place, my heart, a god and demon that carries out my Poetry.

16: The book, giving away free poetry, may have the attributes of a single poem.

17: To some translations mean a celebration and mourning, the Soul found in collections & adopted by artists as an introductory defense of the uneasiness of art that reflects upon the paradoxes of masters.

18: Only a film by the poet will be apt to find the once-fruitful visual presentation decorative and sensual.

19:  Instead of dying out here's a beautiful little haiku  & book presented (two sides of the same coin); Pound's masterful Cantos, helping people understand the great poets, copresented with a constraining taxonomy.

20:  In all seriousness, an indecorously veiled poetics, filed under poetry specimen, is a sort of spruced up anthology appearing from around the web.

21:  Look, I write today a series of  grand poems on the premature death of the anthology.

22: The title of a poem will be a lyric gift encountered often.

23: This is a recurring refrain, the divine breath that solicits any and all types of poetry.

24: The characteristics of 'visual poetry' convey multiple meanings and (say it) blank faces: a complete range of poetry.

25:  Paradise Lost, a science-fiction piece, in another Pulitzer prize-winning book of poems, is any New-Poetry.

26:  The ancient theatre in a single poem, all this waiting for inspiration, catches us sometimes going to a ransacked seventeenth century."

27: After a brief break I think of literary conversations, works, poets, & schools, compelling videopoems or new trends or Mayakovsky and Mathematical Poetry.

28:  Having just fallen in the forests and least equipped to search for large understandings, I marked, as is my custom, four of the stars of many talented poets.

I will always capitalize 'Sentence' to mark its significance as a product of blognoscenti sources.
Again, I'm aiming for a standard 10-page long 'Intoduction', with about 12-13 Sentences per page (or an 'Introduction' of roughly 130 Sentences or so). After this I will post individual blognoscenti citations by numbered entries and not by date (as I've been doing): numbered entries appear in parentheses after each day on which a Sentence is generated. Sentences can be easily verified (and fact-checked, as it were) by counting them in sequence and tracing them to their original sources (whatever the date) in the blognoscenti sources site.

Every dated entry is given an individual numerical count corresponding to the number of times I've generated a Sentence to that point; for example, the 4th sentence (in paragraph 1 of 'Introduction' to primary text) corresponds to the 05 January 2011, (4) citation, reading on the 5th of January, 2011, the 4th day of my blognoscenti exercise, I generated the following Sentence for my blog poetics text:

"If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music."

As I've said, in future updates citations will be given by individual (parenthesized) entry only.

In this way I am not restricted to a strict chronological timetable so much as led by a judicious estimation of the number of actual times Sentences ought to be generated in order to keep my primary document going. If I should stop for a few days or slacken the pace a bit, the text resumes at exactly the point where it was left off without any messiness surrounding dates.Both purists and readers with an archival bent should be happy. Since I regard each blognoscenti source as a bibliographical entry, I acknowledge author and textual source, & regard them both as materials to be used in my growing exposition on blog poetics, hoping to avoid any 'intellectual property' or copyright issues.

At some future point (when at least the Introduction has been satisfactorily completed) I can see myself converting my blog text into a PDF file or something or perhaps even a "Blogger" Blog2Print book as advertised here.

It is to be remembered the text as is comprises of only citations-generated Sentences, still awaiting a certain degree of final authorial judgement & control. Determinations as to format, meaning and direction will be determined by a kind of intuitive reading of the materials that've already accumulated through blognoscenti sources. Recommendations and suggestions for improvement are always welcome.

With the addition of Sentences extending from the 13th to 28th of January the primary Towards a blog poetics text ('Introduction') appears below:

__________________________


A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a retrievable and complex one. A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books. If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

We alone can be grateful that genre, subject and individual poems are just a means of presentation, as if we're first witnessing the successful artist, poet and writer from several inconceivable points of view.The poet's arable couplet, minimalist and at bottom a mash-up, can still be entertaining. Perhaps the best known poem there is (or isn't) is, yes, a confession & if it'd wanted to try to get it right could follow the whole poem closely as an "End of the World" or the "Goddammit" type & continue to do so. Free to clear the tone or style of the intelligibles, you can go to the fields & birds, like a deadbeat poet. Like faces on a canvas, stories and words that mean too many things & don't emanate from the village hearth, lie dead, even in early spring. More a contest for the best minds than a poem, a peep show of perpetual sequences and good only for fools, the experimental may be the most gorgeous jellyfish I've seen.

How often does the act of getting something down, and poetry in general, like an elf clutching at a book in a bookstore, depend on the Judge's ruling—Gad!—, even setting rules to muddle things a bit? What emerges, of course, is the first true finished or rather author-made language that the reader rather than the author consciously (or unconsciously) determines through choice of contents. Learning about the days formed out of classical shapes (a poetics ready to remix & rush ahead!) is a new knowledge of poetry where what's left out is still something of value.An excellent place, my heart, a god or demon that carries out my Poetry.The book, giving away free poetry, may have the attributes of a single poem.To some translations mean a celebration and mourning, the Soul found in collections & adopted by artists as an introductory defense of the uneasiness of art that reflects upon the paradoxes of masters.

Only a film by the poet will be apt to find the once-fruitful visual presentation decorative and sensual. Instead of dying out here's a beautiful little haiku & book presented (two sides of the same coin); Pound's masterful Cantos, helping people understand the great poets, copresented with a constraining taxonomy. In all seriousness, an indecorously veiled poetics, filed under poetry specimen, is a sort of spruced up anthology appearing from around the web. Look, I write today a series of  grand poems on the premature death of the anthology.The title of a poem will be a lyric gift encountered often.This is a recurring refrain, the divine breath that solicits any and all types of poetry. The characteristics of 'visual poetry' convey multiple meanings and (say it) blank faces: a complete range of poetry.

Paradise Lost, a science-fiction piece, in another Pulitzer prize-winning book of poems, is any New-Poetry.The ancient theatre in a single poem, all this waiting for inspiration, catches us sometimes going to a ransacked seventeenth century." After a brief break I think of literary conversations, works, poets, & schools, compelling videopoems or new trends or Mayakovsky and Mathematical Poetry.Having just fallen in the forests, the least equipped to search for large understandings, I marked, as is my custom, four of the stars of many talented poets.

Some reflections on the 'Sentence': or why Virginia Woolf would have made a great poet.

Nothing produces greater culture shock, one felt straight to the literary innards, than reading a good Victorian or even modern classic novel. Wilkie Collins & Virginia Woolf both happen to be authors I've lately read and, frankly, they couldn't have come at a better time. Just when I thought Berger and Pynchon had killed it Collins reinstates my belief in expert narrative skill, &Woolf, well, nobody's been able to match the great Virginia Woolf for phrasal brilliance and control (Here's a Youtube sample, the only recording of her available). But I'm not interested in the novel genre so much as the benefits for poetry to be found in language expertly executed by the masters. Joseph Hutchison has recently commented on Stanley Fish's latest book How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, inspiring some good 'comments' discussion about the state of the sentence today. The idea's occurred to me since that perhaps poets owe a great debt of gratitude to the novelist: perhaps more than they'd care to admit.

The great literary stylists, in fact, seem preeminently qualified to reveal the more egregious language difficulties in which poets find themselves today, & which John Latta in a recent "Isola di Rifiuti post has likened to a comically absurd sort of self-display. The novelist's control of language materials, one almost always amounting to a pure poetic utterance, can be seen as a kind of generic Sentence representing the best literary qualities of the novelist and her sources. In contradistinction to Ron Silliman's 'new sentence' whose "interior poetic structures" are expected to lead to desirable "ambiguity and polysemy" (Silliman, The New Sentence, 90), as if verses were pulled out of the rarefied air of poetry alone, I maintain the great novelists can write exquisitely well-crafted prose & offer it as an exemplar for all types of writing, including poetry. Literary language and the Sentence become practically interchangeable. Using a Flaubertian insight, I'll say that there's no inherent distinction to be made between the poetic & prosaic in the very finest writings.

And they do that always through the most insightful juxtapositions & contrasts (never just connections) between the human condition and a readily available language of passion & death. In short, the more feelingly they write, the greater the need for an almost 'revelatory' medium, a style always sensitively attuned to the life-narrative's most difficult moments and always expertly composed to render them to the imagination in as vivid a way as possible. Woolf never forgets this. The refined medium of language that results in the hands of the great novelist is, in my view, what almost makes it inseparable from poetry, and that type of poetry has a real stake in the way things are. I'll take two examples from Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

The intensity of an early lesbian love and the very conditions for its emergence in the reminiscences of the aging Clarissa Dalloway (through whose limited omniscient viewpoint a significant part of the story of a single sultry day in London, 1942 is told) couldn't have merged more perfectly. Only Woolf's novelistic talents could have brought together withering reality and the passion associated with the remarkable Sally Seton. Only the perfect Sentence could have achieved it. In expertly (and sensitively) cadenced & sharply registered sentiments the unhappy 52-year old wife of a London MP, who normally passes through wave after wave (almost surrealistic) of faux nostalgia, regret and a heightened sense of the absurdity of lamenting lost possibilities with a former lover, can relocate rapture in the gathering ennui of her life in London. Prose turns into Sapphic verses almost in an instant:

The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one's feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women, between women just grown up. It was protective, on her side; sprang from a sense of being in league together, a presentiment of something that was bound to part them (they spoke of marriage always as a catastrophe), which led to this chivalry, this protective feeling which was much more on her side than Sally's...Absurd, she was—very absurd. But the charm was overpowering, to her at least, so that she could remember standing in her bedroom at the top of the house holding the hot-water can in her hands and saying aloud, 'She is beneath this roof... She is beneath this roof!' (28 in the Oxford edition)

The reader doesn't need to impart to this passage any sort of narrative impetus that isn't already there, its lyrical force somehow to be released from the cage of classical prose through the imposition of literary theory. None of Language's wooden exercises here and the detached sentences they produce. Woolf's passage, wonderfully stylized and lived as a literary event on its own, could happily make the switch from prose to poetry with the aid of diction, rhythms and even perhaps the nascent Modernist insights it already bears. I could try rearranging the lines to make strophes out of sentences & still leave intact the original purity. Nothing would be easier:

On looking back, the purity, the integrity of Sally,
like one's feelings for a man:
disinterested & existing between women only,
between women grown up,
protective,
sprung from a sense of being in league together,
& a presentiment of something that was bound
to part them

Absurd,
but the charm was so overpowering
she could say,
in her bedroom, at the top of the house—
'She is beneath this roof
 She is beneath this roof'

Similarly in the case of Septimus's worsening condition (and Woolf purposely pairs Septimus and Clarissa as types of the same neurasthenic, a condition equally attributable to suppressed passion) only a poet's language of dark idiom and rhythms could soften its most insidious aspects, & make it even seem whimsical and charmingly eccentric. The War memories of Septimus Warren Smith, unlike Clarissa's own, don't revitalize depressed spirits even if they sometimes hover round his beloved Evans: they seem, despite his physician's cheery prognoses, to hurry more inexorably both patient and post-traumatic distresses to the inevitable suicide. The novelist leaves the verdict of death hanging by a thread (a favourite image of Woolf's), a verdict liable to go one way or the other, as if something else not tied to a simple inquiry into causes were ultimately responsible. The almost Dickensian quality of physician-patient interaction is ghoulishly set against the fact of human savagery in the world, and the patient is certainly lucid enough to attribute a good deal of his own misery to some despicable wartime conduct:  

So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel. He had not cared when Evans was killed; that was worst; but all the other crimes raised their heads and shook their fingers and jeered and sneered over the rail of the bed in the early hours of the morning at the prostrate body which lay realizing its degradation; how he had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her; outraged Miss Isabel Pole, and was so pocked and marked with vice that women shuddered when they saw him in the street. The verdict of human nature on such a wretch was death. (77)

The poetry that ensues is necessarily dark and yet the verse, because of the flawless Sentence it comes from ,wouldn't cast an entirely gloomy, bodiless light, retaining the moral and existential ambivalence of the original. Again, the transition to poetry is perfectly natural:

Whatever the excuse, the sin for which he's condemned,
& that he didn't feel,
like Evans who'd been killed,
his crimes raised their heads, shook their fingers,
jeering, snorting,
at his prostrate body: the verdict was death

Even how he'd married
without love,
and seduced and even outraged Miss Isabel Pole
and was so pocked & marked with vice
all the women shuddered-
whatever the excuse, the verdict was death. 

For Hieronymous Anonymous: my most loyal monster critic

Hieronymous Anonymous is a personified figure who is all too real: the nasty critic whose comments, though appearing in my inbox every so often, never make it past the moderation screen. Of course, he appears always as "Anonymous", afraid to affix a name to the monster. So I'll give it one. The name "Hieronymous" (not to be confused with "Hieronymus") is suitable because of the way it shakes deep in the jawbone, when pronounced.

Anonymous, you've just been invented.

Then just now, more fluxed
  than I'd ever been,
  more appalled,
I wrote, dropped it, wrote
(as if there were some smug space left,
                                  still)
  and suffered:
why do we do it, then?

A whole semi-blank word may absolutely
  pain me as it falls,
  constricting the heart,
  wringing the flesh

Why pausing here between the glyph
  and the page,
  sitting here ready
  in my cage,
  do I go on?

                    No!
Beside you who wouldn't look good!

And beside everything else—
  my chair,
  mounted keyboard,
  detestable guts lying at
                                  my feet!—
who wouldn't want to write write write

As I stoop to read you, in the space left
  gripping the keys,
                          again,
  and now
  feeling glad-hearted,
                          again,
  I hear you stiffen

Sir Paul

The coolest guy in the world...

"Art this time"

They who love, sitting in fern,
   to live
and speak ‘cause they can,
  do the Art;

they who rise at the sign of light
  may die,
succumbing to the Tree's slow
  regrettable leaf—

Look, there's heart & (always last
  to the comfy lakes)
the davidic and faithful deer,
  living low

and then the sky fuming over you,
  full of geese
who know it, too & will die
  doing the Art 

Karl Kempton's essay: a brief history of visual poetry that goes a long, long way

Nothing delights the reading eye more than information that comes from enlightened & impassioned sources. When Ed Baker introduced me to Karl Kempton's essay entitled "Visual Poetry: A Brief History of Ancestral Roots and Modern Traditions" ["VP"], & especially when I saw the detail and academic richness, the historical breadth and faithfulness to Vispo aesthetics, I knew it was going to be a significant read. And whether the poet is sympathetic to this particular style, and tradition, or not, there is no reason whatsoever for ignoring it. As in law so in poetry: ignorance is no defense.

Serving as a primer and guidebook, I've found myself dipping into it if only to acquire a vocabulary (or a feel, at least) for the technique & ancestry of a poetics that's becoming increasingly popular (especially in online communities). In my opinion, the best, and most interesting, and also the most controversial work being done today is in visual poetry, and Kempton is right to characterize it in general as a product of a "lineage of recognized influences." ("VP" 2)  One gathers from his survey distinct focal points, attached to recognizable practices and names, but also a fluidity ("borderblur") that marks visual (concrete) poetry in any one epoch as a living witness to what's gone before. Kempton himself is both visual poet and historian: distinguished member of a historical project begun by Bob Cobbing, Peter Mayer and Dick Higgins.

Whether Ed Baker's STONE GIRL rock art, Geof Huth's pwoermd and asemic writing & Bob Grumman's mathemaku, contemporary visual poetry would be inconceivable without a common ancestry, a clearly delineated continuum from  rock to stele to illuminated manuscripts from which it draws inspiration & materials. In Kempton's own words, "it is probably safe to say that all approaches to the visual poem after 1900 can be found somewhere in the past from rock art to proto-writing and ideogrammatic, hieroglyphic and alphabetical writing on fixed and portable objects" ("VP" 1). All the types of visual (concrete) poetry in both pre-1900 and contemporary forms (such as Cubism, Collage, Italian Futurism, Fluxus, Minimalism, Orphism etc) are traceable to these "ancestral roots". This is the work's major premise from which everything else falls into remarkably neat classifications according to historical lineage, types & modes of artistic production.

"from rock art to proto-writing"

What seemed to guide the post-1900 visual poetries was a desire to free the word from standard syntax and especially the usual left-to-right horizontal, & up-down vertical, page arrangements, a sort of literary revolution in which avant-gardists strove for a radical reworking of the very materials and space of artistic work, even going so far as to espouse principles of "nihilism, materialization and violence" (16). Nowhere was this radically new textual configuration more intensely developed than in Italy, Brasil, Russia, England, Canada and America: where the best efforts were associated with a "collective by consensus" (20) ideal that brooked no destructive egoism. Visual poetry is by essence community & the freest expression of artistic principles consonant with literary & typographical experimentation done for its own pleasurable sake.

Kempton privileges the names of Apollinaire, Mallarmé, & especially E. E. Cummings ("the father figure of American English Visual Poetry"), considering them rightly as founders of visual poetry's most characteristic forms, certainly the standard-bearers for the artistic developments in the 50s and 60s, such as Fluxus, Concrete Poetry & Visual Poetry, with which we're much more familiar. Avant-garde poetry at this period was nothing if not fluid, adaptive & transnational: as Kempton whimsically says,

American English Concrete believed its cement bag with printed directions came from a moderate measure of Mallarmé mayonnaise & cubic centimeters of calligrammes and cummings crumbs & dishes of dada dashes & Rhine River Valley cement dust bundled and barged Brasil bound after stopping for a handful of England syllable grids and Scotland stone scribed syllables & shipped back north to the East Coast with rain forest Brasilian nut wood frames and Amazon River water & to be fanned dry by Japanese ideogram links and winks.(23)

Among other early American visual & concrete poets, almost as significant as Cummings and who would most likely have gone unnoticed were it not for strong publishers, were Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen. It's regrettable that even in egalitarian America Concrete poetry was somewhat institutionalized and roughly separated from an emerging Visual Poetry movement (26-28), the concrete anthologies of the day (such as Klaus Peter Dencker's Text-Builder: Visuelle Poesie international and Robert Altman's TECKEN: Lettres, Signes, Ecritures ) showcasing the works of only a favoured few.


E. E. Cummings, "father figure"

Kempton's essay is a good beginning as well as a perennially welcome resource for readers & critics (of which I am certainly one). And as the author's indicated in many places, there are many opportunities still for exploring the papers, influences & research materials of scores of untold stories. I'm particularly struck by the presence of so many artists who've been all but ignored or forgotten. The footnotes, works cited, & timelines here are an excellent starting-point for any future studies in the origin & development of visual poetry. Computer technologies, and all the multimedia creations they produce, can only be an even greater spur to more sustained & creative advancement of experimentalist poetries.

"Towards a blog poetics": cont'd

The January 6 to 12 blognoscenti posts generated the following sentences, ready to be added to our "Towards a blog poetics" text (see below). I'm beginning to see the sort of tongue-in-cheek reception of experimental poetry everywhere the primary document is turning into, with perhaps a further discussion in the works of the blog as the only hospitable place for it.

Again, I'm aiming for a standard 10-page long 'Intoduction', with about 12-13 sentences per page (or an Introduction of roughly 130 sentences or so).
___________________________

January 6 "I [We] alone can be grateful that genre, subject and individual poems are just a means of presentation, as if we're first witnessing the successful artist, poet and writer from several inconceivable points of view."

7 "The poet's arable couplet, minimalist and at bottom a mash-up, can still be entertaining."

8 "Perhaps the best known poem there is (or isn't) is, yes, a confession & if it'd wanted to try to get it right could follow the whole poem closely as an "End of the World" or the "Goddammit" type & continue to do so."

9 "Free to clear the tone or style of the intelligibles, you can go to the fields, the birds, like a deadbeat poet."

10 "Like faces on a canvas, stories and words that mean too many things & don't emanate from the village hearth, lie dead, even in early spring."

11 "More a contest for the best minds than a poem, a peep show of perpetual sequences and good only for fools, the experimental may be the most gorgeous jellyfish I've seen. "

12  "How often does the act of getting something down, and poetry in general, like an elf clutching at a book in a bookstore, depend on the Judge's ruling—Gad!—, even setting rules to muddle things a bit."


                                        Towards a blog poetics: Introduction
                                                     

A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a retrievable and complex one. A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books.If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted  between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

We alone can be grateful that genre, subject and individual poems are just a means of presentation, as if we're first witnessing the successful artist, poet and writer from several inconceivable points of view.The poet's arable couplet, minimalist and at bottom a mash-up, can still be entertaining. Perhaps the best known poem there is (or isn't) is, yes, a confession & if it'd wanted to try to get it right could follow the whole poem closely as an "End of the World" or the "Goddammit" type & continue to do so. Free to clear the tone or style of the intelligibles, you can go to the fields & birds, like a deadbeat poet. Like faces on a canvas, stories and words that mean too many things & don't emanate from the village hearth, lie dead, even in early spring. More a contest for the best minds than a poem, a peep show of perpetual sequences and good only for fools, the experimental may be the most gorgeous jellyfish I've seen.

How often does the act of getting something down, and poetry in general, like an elf clutching at a book in a bookstore, depend on the Judge's ruling—Gad!—, even setting rules to muddle things a bit?

Thank you, John, again. Poetry when I needed it.

lighting
a candle

& blowing
it out

lighting
a candle

& blowing
it out

lighting
a candle

& blowing
it out

trying
to

under
stand

                      (thinking of robert lax)

Just when I'm about to get caught up again in the gnawing irritations of politics and people, & feeling more creative energies wasted on chimeras, a poet, and a poetry, suddenly comes my way & tries to set things right (or so it seemed). Today I received a gift of poetry from John Martone, in the form of a lovely 7.5" X 11.5" papier-mâché, delicately leaf-inlaid & stapled work entitled a lamp. The title's a little wisp of a label that, unless roughly handled, will just barely hang on. A work that oughtn't be read at a sitting but opened at random, as required, the eye always resting on the first piece it sees, the hand never to keep a page open longer than necessary. How else to see through to it?

here - there -
straw - caught
in ice -

Almost too entirely self-enclosed to be treated casually in this way yet that's just what it needs to work (for me anyways): a kind of restive sweep of the eye and hand. The drawings that outnumber the kanji lie scattered or they seem to mingle too quietly with the text. An eye that can stand to be jostled and halted in its search for patterns (of politics, art and argument, and of everything that's sorrowful) will stay here. Sometimes foreign script and hand-drawings, wishing to appear altogether unforeign, merge to create appropriately random meanings. I can be grateful for the way the imagination looking for release can move here into more than one language (as in a visual poem), more than one world. I do need an alternate world to step into at times.

legs wanting to walk - the late hour

I am thankful to John, too, for the gift of the scamp-guru who teaches not as he walks but by walking: a walking meditation. I'd like to try walking with him a few pages at a time. It's actually a quality of the text that appeals to my own current fidgetiness & yet one that also makes my nervous energies odious. Ed Baker's recently alerted me to Cid Corman's "The Tortoise" where we find: "Always//the feeling is of/terrible slowness/overtaking haste." Mine's the motion of one who can't sit still (of whom it cannot said that "rocking/his chair/doesnt"). If sitting is a problem, what about the rest? And the trailer parks, dumpsters, & sleeping bags, never good enough for my landscape, lie just as scattered over and between the pages as script and drawings do, & entice with their own connect-the-dots unfolding.

blizzard outside
   but even this
      glue is white

As I write and read this (& Geof Huth is right: writing is "a version of reading"), it is snowing outside, & its sorrowfulness is keenly felt. The poetry could not have been timed more perfectly! The storm outside (as I didn't understand til now) isn't really separable from the glue whiteness in which I'm really seeing it on the page. The interminable drudgery of snow, and icy stars and even the passing of another year: none of it could be tolerable were it not for the 'pure land' that's one moment "grass stems", the next "snow falling/quieter/than yr pulse." From "group homes" thru trailers to snow (as along so many other paths in John's remarkable text) is a type of interior journeying I've been too fidgety too long for.

And so I think many more incongruities between text & language, page and sky would've been lost on me but for John's gift, and the sage's ambling gait and the storm that's gathering outside my window, faintly visible through the darkness.

open
the blinds
squinting

A translation of Dante's "Vita Nuova Rime", sections I and II

"There, in the middle of the broad, bright high-road - there, as
if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from
the heaven - stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from
head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on
mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced
her. "( from The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins)

My translation of the opening two sections relies rather extensively on the excellent textual notes found in Fredi Chiappelli's edition of Dante's Vita Nuova Rime (U. Mursia & C., Milano:1965-73). It's sometimes necessary to give the 'sense' (sentenzia) of a passage where the convoluted Italian syntax of the original would make a literal translation look very awkward. For example, the opening line of Part II, Nove fiate già appresso lo mio nascimento era tornato lo cielo de la luce quasi a uno medesimo punto, quanto a la sua propria girazione, can simply be translated as "I was nine years old" without having to equate the narrator's age with the "Nine times the celestial light [of the sun] had made its customary return to the same point" in its yearly journey. The meticulous attention to planetary motion (even going so far as to give the "twelfth part of a degree"of celestial distance) is, of course, Dante's way to introduce Beatrice as a figure of almost heavenly progeny.

 In any event, I tried to maintain a balance between readability and faithfulness to Dante's own poetic conceits. The reader can check my translation against the original text which accompanies it. As I said, I haven't always given a literal translation, trusting instead to a kind of language intuitiveness I guess I enjoy as an Italo-Canadian reader. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

I. In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria, dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova. Sotto la quale rubrica io trovo scritte le parole le quali è mio intendimento d'asemplare in questo libello; e se non tutte, almeno la loro sentenzia.

_____________________________

In my book of memory, the little of it I could decipher, there appears a heading which reads: Incipit vita nova ("A new life begins"). Under it I've found words it will be my task to record in this book: if not all of them, at least a significant sense of the whole.

II. [I] Nove fiate già appresso lo mio nascimento era tornato lo cielo de la luce quasi a uno medesimo punto, quanto a la sua propria girazione, quando a li miei occhi apparve prima la gloriosa donna de la mia mente, la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice, li quali non sapeano che si chiamare. Ella era in questa vita già stata tanto, che ne lo suo tempo lo cielo stellato era mosso verso la parte d'oriente de le dodici parti l'una d'un grado, sì che quasi dal principio del suo anno nono apparve a me, ed io la vidi quasi da la fine del mio nono. Apparve vestita di nobilissimo colore, umile ed onesto, sanguigno, cinta e ornata a la guisa che a la sua giovanissima etade si convenia. In quello punto dico veracemente che lo spirito de la vita, lo quale dimora ne la secretissima camera de lo cuore, cominciò a tremare sigrave; fortemente che apparia ne li menimi polsi orribilmente; e tremando, disse queste parole: "Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi". In quello punto lo spirito animale, lo quale dimora ne l'alta camera ne la quale tutti li spiriti sensitivi portano le loro percezioni, si cominciò a maravigliare molto, e parlando spezialmente a li spiriti del viso, sì disse queste parole: "Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra". In quello punto lo spirito naturale, lo quale dimora in quella parte ove si ministra lo nutrimento nostro, cominciò a piangere, e piangendo, disse queste parole: "Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps!". D'allora innanzi dico che Amore segnoreggiò la mia anima, la quale fu sì tosto a lui disponsata, e cominciò a prendere sopra me tanta sicurtade e tanta signoria per la vertù che li dava la mia imaginazione, che me convenia fare tutti li suoi piaceri compiutamente. Elli mi comandava molte volte che io cercasse per vedere questa angiola giovanissima; onde io ne la mia puerizia molte volte l'andai cercando, e vedeala di sì nobili e laudabili portamenti, che certo di lei si potea dire quella parola del poeta Omero: Ella non parea figliuola d'uomo mortale, ma di Deo. E avegna che la sua imagine, la quale continuamente meco stava, fosse baldanza d'Amore a segnoreggiare me, tuttavia era di sì nobilissima vertù, che nulla volta sofferse che Amore mi reggesse sanza lo fedele consiglio de la ragione in quelle cose là ove cotale consiglio fosse utile a udire. E però che soprastare a le passioni e atti di tanta gioventudine pare alcuno parlare fabuloso, mi partirò da esse; e trapassando molte cose, le quali si potrebbero trarre de l'esemplo onde nascono queste, verrò a quelle parole le quali sono scritte ne la mia memoria sotto maggiori paragrafi.

_____________________________________

I was nine when the glorious lady of my mind first appeared to my eyes, called Beatrice by many, even by those who hadn't known the significance of that name. She'd already lived as long as it takes the starry heavens to move a twelfth of a degree towards the East every hundred years so that she was barely nine when she appeared, and I had almost reached the end of my ninth year. She came clothed in the most noble vestments, pure and honest, in red, fully apparelled in a style that suited her very young age. At that very moment the vital spirit, that which resides in the heart's most secret corner, began to shake violently (I felt it in my entire being!), and shaking, it uttered the following words: Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi ( "Behold! a God strong than I am coming to rule over me!"). Then the animal spirit, that which resides in the brain, stood amazed, and addressing especially the spirits of sight, said: Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra ("Now your blessedness appears"). At that moment the vegetative spirit, that which attends to our very sustenance, began to cry, and crying said: Heu miser, quia frequenter impeditus ero deinceps! ("Ah me! since from this moment onwards I will be often assailed!) From that very moment I say Love ruled over my very soul, wed to him at once, and began to acquire over me such certainty and authority, through the power my imagination gave him, that I was obliged to carry out his every wish. He often enjoined me to seek out this youngest of angels so that in my innocence I often went in search of her, and found her to be so noble and praiseworthy that I could easily apply the words of the poet Homer to her: "She was the offspring not of mortal man but of God". And it happened that her image, from which I never strayed, was Love's own self-assured way to control me yet nevertheless it was of such a noble virtue that Love could never sway me without my also following reason's faithful counsel in those things where reason ought most to be heard. And because to treat of youthful passions and acts may seem unbelievable to some, I will leave them; and passing over many things that could also be derived from the same origin as these, I will attend to words inscribed in my memory under more important headings.

The 'blognoscenti' project: a word on methodology and format to be adopted from this point on

I have posted enough 'blognoscenti' citations (over the past 4 days) to indicate both the type of poetical matter my proposed "Blogger poetics" text will require as well as the frequency with which they daily appear or can be accessed. In order not to clutter my "Word-Dreamer: poetics" pages, all future 'blognoscenti' citations will appear now in a separate "Word-Dreamer: blognoscenti sources" blog, where readers are encouraged to examine the daily blognoscenti references & leave comments. Only text as it emerges out of the primary blognoscenti sources will appear here in regular instalments.

To generate a text is a matter of translating a day's worth of citations, no matter the number or degree of individual complexity, into a unit of text: a page, paragraph or a single sentence. I've chosen a basic sentence unit which isn't to be seen as a product of "chance or random" selection but a delineation of an emerging idea identifiable among the individual references. This is a clearly syntagmatic bias that's preferable to working with anything smaller than words, phrases & clauses. Of course, articles, transition words & the most basic connectives can be freely inserted to give an emerging idea some leeway & adaptability to the environing text.

While sources are randomly gathered, composition requires a certain amount of attention to the arrangement of parts. And towards the end of generating a text through sentence-units it will be necessary to join into a unified narrative the syntactical elements present in each individual citation (by selecting, for example, a subject from the first citation, a predicate from the second, phrase from the third, object from the fourth, adjective phrase from the fifth, etc). In the "blognoscenti sources" blog I will write a sentence at the end of every day's citation work.

This is not a pure "appropriation" exercise in the sense of parts of the original being incorporated into text without change: rather an author-directed one, with the scope, limits and direction of the whole suggested  by the primary materials.

The title of the text is provisionally entitled "Towards a blog poetics".

Below are the first four sentences from 02 January 2011 to 05 January 2011 and the first (rough) paragraph of an introduction to our blog-generated text. Any movement from primary blognoscenti references to sentences to paragraphs will always necessarily entail revision. I would like to call "Towards a blog poetics" an open-text to the extent that readers are always welcome here to suggest changes but without being allowed to do so directly. Updated and expanded versions of the primary text will be posted from time to time:

02 January 2011 A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war). 

03 January 2011 The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for an Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a rather retrievable and complex one at that.

04 January 2011 It's rather a refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since poem is be read during the moment and then inventoried in rare books.

05 January 2011 If the traditional poem is a mirror that inserts itself between a straightforward world and itself, it's an evil wind that blows; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

____________________________

                                  Towards a blog poetics: Introduction.

A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a retrievable and complex one. A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books.If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted  between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

From the blognoscenti: 05 January 2011 (4)

(a) Irina Moga, "The Poem in the Mirror" in The Continuous Poem. "This seems pretty straightforward. But what happens when a mirror - or a poem- inserts itself in the equation? How might our vision be altered then?";

(b) Claudia Samperi-Warren, "The Room Is My Refuge From Light" in poetfranksamperi. "I have waited/for the evil wind".

(c) Geof Huth, "write as you - read as you write" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. "It is called the silver book, and it is a book, not more than a chapbook and maybe less than that, by Jen Bervin."

(d) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "David Antin: 11 games for eleanor (previously unpublished)" by Jerome Rothenberg in Poems and Poetics. "It seems to me that for Antin as for others of us, there has been a strong sense that what we do as poets (more simply: as people responsible for keeping language & reality together) is in danger of an inescapable, premature reduction as it’s forced to enter the unique entropy machine of the modern communications nexus."

(e) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "It’s hard not to like John Phillips’ Language Is, from Sardines Press" by Ron Silliman in Silliman's Blog. "Phillips, a British poet who has spent the past decade in Slovenia & now returned home, writes with a precision, balance & grace that calls to mind the very best of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems, or Creeley’s early period, or Lorine Niedecker’s work";

(f) Dave Bonta, "Evidently Chickentown by John Cooper Clarke" in Moving Poems. "A film called Ochlofobie by Belgian artist Swoon, who also supplied the music. British performance poet John Cooper Clarke is responsible for text and voice";

(g) Jerome Rothenberg, "John Martone: Presence of All Colors" in Poems and Poetics. "This is the second set of poems by John Martone to appear in Poems and Poetics."

Sentence: If the traditional poem is a mirror inserted  between a straightforward world and itself, then it is an ill wind; the contemporary poem, however, is in the mirror, a silver book of danger and music.

From the blognoscenti: 04 January 2011 (3)

(a) Claudia Samperi-Warren, "The Room Is My Refuge From Light" in poetfranksamperi." I don't think this poem was ever published.It is one of a collection of poems that come from The Room Is My Refuge From Light which was then called SONG BOOK, published 1960"; 

(b) Geof Huth, "1,2,3,ing"in dbqp: visualizing poetics. "I'm still counting (in order to give a recap of my last year in the world of poetry), and I've come to the disturbing realization that I created over 3,000 poems (visual and otherwise) last year";

(c) Irina Moga, "The Annotated Bee & Me" in The Continuous Poem. “The Annotated Bee & Me is carefully architected creation, a series of poems that aggregate around “the large themes of our lives –Birth, Death, Time and Memory” (a quote from the volume’s back cover) and an original poetic topic: beekeeping";

(d) Bob Grumman,  "Entry 334 — One Reason I’m Not a Fan of Emily’s" in POETICKS. "A major problem I have with Emily Dickinson’s pieces is that they seem to me much more rhymed opinions than poems";

(e) William Michaelian, "In the Forum: He comes with words sublimely dull, / In garb superbly silly, / To tell us of the Beautiful, / The sunflower and the lily", in Recently Banned Literature;

(f) Dave Bonta, "Vinyl Poesie by Christoph Bruns" in Moving Poems. "This is a stop motion video i created around summer last year. It is a selfwritten poem created out of my vinyl collection. i looked out for interesting words and formed this little passages";

(g) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited  "Clouds Gather and Part: Tanka" by Karma Tenzing Wangchuk (Dennis H. Dutton) in tel let 2004;

(h) William Michaelian, "The Past Recaptured" in Recently Banned Literature. "Some other books I read during that time: Dylan Thomas in America, by John Malcolm Brinnin; Love is a Dog from Hell, by Charles Bukowski; The History of Reading and The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel; Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; John Brown’s Body, by Stephen Vincent Benét; Selected Poems, by Georg Trakl; A Listening Thing, by William Michaelian; parts of three poetry collections by Lawrence Ferlinghetti";

(i) Bob Grumman, "Entry 335 — “Mathemaku in Praise of Taxonomy” in POETICKS. "This is the mathemaku I hoped to finish yesterday evening–and did.   One of my best, it seems to me at the moment (which is around seven, 3 January 2011)";

(j) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "The John Perlman Collection: A Guide and Inventory" by Jeffrey Rudzinski and John M. Bennett in University Libraries: Rare Books and Manuscripts; "Rim: Woodcuts,Stem, Az Two: Words of Travel, Side-Ways and Fist by David Giannini" in amazon.com; "Twelve Poems by John Levy in tel-let 2006.

Sentence: A refuge from the disturbing visuals of Birth, Death, Time & Self: a type of "sublimely dull" beekeeping, or a parting of the clouds, since the world is read during the moment and then inventoried into rare books.

From the blognoscenti: 03 January 2011 (2)

(a) Irina Moga, "Of Love and the Island" in The Continuous Poem. "In modern poetry the Embarkation for Cythera appears to be a theme of equally luxuriant mythologies." [See discussion of Verlaine, Laforgues Théodore de Banville, Baudelaire, Andrew Lang, David Ferry, John Glassco & Francis Poulenc];

(b) Don Wentworth, "Dandy in the Underworld: Issa's Sundary Service, #84 in Issa's Untidy Hut. "If ever there was a patron saint of poetry (as well as music), Orpheus is certainly a leading candidate";

(c) Vassilis Zambaras, "Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City" in vazambam. "No lyric poetry here, just pure Ionian tragedy";

(d) Dan Waber, "this is visual poetry by Jenee Mateer" in this is visual poetry. "Jenee says: 'I see my work as a meditation on issues of gender, desire, identity and the complexities of language (communication)'";

(e) Dave Bonta, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons by John Ashbery" in Moving Poems. "Art student Al Belancourt made this film of Ashbery’s poem as an assignment for a poetry class, he tells me, inspired by viewing Moving Poems in class";

(f) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "Uncollected Poems (18): Found Poems from 'The Emergence Notebooks' (for the New Year 2011)" by Jerome Rothenberg in Poems and Poetics. "This sequence of poems from the early 1960s was recovered, along with numerous others, for Retrievals, a volume of Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2010, to be published early in 2011 by Mark Weiss & Junction Press";

(g) Ed Baker (in email correspondence) cited "On & By Blanchot" by Pierre Joris in Nomadics. "Here is my contribution — a brief remembrance of buying my first Blanchot book in Paris & a reading from The Unavowable Community —to the Maurice Blanchot Celebrations at Bard College in November 2007."

Sentence: The modern poem, however (if ever there was a candidate for Ionian tragedy!), is a meditation on language—a retrievable and complex one.

The blognoscenti: what I've learned today arranged by date, author and source, with brief excerpts (1)

I was saying to Irina Moga in a recent post-related discussion that a course curriculum could probably be generated from the people, writings, publications & general discussions posted online. Her own discussions of French writings (contemporary and classical), music, opera and Canadian poets are good examples. I think I'd like to try putting this idea to the test here. And I wonder if by purposely 'attending to' poetry-related information that comes my way anything qualitatively like it, say a significant self-evolving work, can arise from it. A textual figure from the ground.

There is no greater, more immediately accessible, source of significant content than the blogosphere (and I draw a purposeful distinction between the blog and Internet in general). I certainly take exception to any characterization of the blogosphere as the source of sloppy, unedited and generally uninteresting writing. No less a literary personage than Jerome Rothenberg has celebrated the blog as the arena "of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus...in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others." My own experiences have borne out Rothenberg's intuitions. I use the term "blognoscenti" to refer to bloggers or blog visitors from whom I've acquired vital (cultural, artistic) information about and/or insight into poetry.

Every item of particular interest I receive from the bloggers with whom I've most often conversed over the past year, and whom I've acknowledged in my recent "year in review" post, will be duly noted. I will acknowledge them as primary authors & sources, to be given pride of place. Information will also be drawn from other sites deemed too good to pass up. Later in the process, either at various points over the next several months or once near the end of 2011, I will try to construct from it (perhaps along the lines of a Jackson Mac Low-type "chance operation" or by other more author-directed methods to be determined) a document of some sort, or the preliminary sketches of one: for example an "Intro to Blog Poetry & Poetics" 101; or perhaps the outline of an evolving theory of cyberlanguage or primer on blogger poetics or literary manifesto, etc etc. I believe the open-endedness of Net technology, though providing a steady stream of content, may even eventually result in a larger, more focused work itself.

I'll give blognoscenti offerings, beginning now at 02 January, 2011 as often as they appear to me—hopefully on a daily basis—either here or at their source site, even citing interesting detail communicated through blog rolls, links or email correspondence. Nothing of a personal or confidential nature will ever be disclosed. I'll continue building my blog data from all the blognoscenti sources (until, of course, any one of them ask that I no longer reference his or her blog).

Any technical or literary terms will be boldfaced (leaving other boldfaced words that appear in the original source untouched).

The words 'poet', 'poetry' or names of poets or names for any type of poetry genre, style, movement or technique or any language suggestive of poetry must appear in each blog citation.

(a) 02 January 2011. Mark Smith, "Review of Contemporary Haibun 11" in Haibun Today: A Quarterly Journal. "One striking example of expanding the haiga genre is Ed Baker’s “butterfly in her garden.” Baker uses a traditional hand-drawn sketch and handwritten haiku, but the image of the nude woman straddling the stringed instrument while holding a flower is an almost illogical compliment to the elegant haiku ('butterfly/in her garden/playing with/a flower')";

(b) Andreas Gripp (in email correspondence) referred to "Recent Reviews of Anathema: Poems Selected and New and Reader Comments on the Poetry of Andreas Gripp [by myself and Katherine L. Gordon]" in andreasgripp.com. "Anathema also addresses the daring of this poet to visit emotional corners that most contemporaries avoid. Andreas Gripp's special signature, as an exciting modern poet, is to lead you trembling into terrible truths: a book of loss exquisitely delineated by the knife of the poet's language";

(c) Irina Moga, "The year in review: what I'm not going to say & do, and people I'd like to mention" in Word-Dreamer: poetics (comments section). The source of the Margaret Atwood quote (“A word after a word/after a word is power”) is "from Ms. Atwood's Spelling poem";

(d) Geof Huth, "The Texts of Your Life" in dbqp: visualizing poetics. A review of 60 Textos [textual poetry] by Sarah Riggs. "For these are books written in and of the world, during the regular process of living, poems written in the same way a breath is taken: naturally, normally, sitting down, standing, walking, while looking and hearing and being. These are all poems texted from Riggs' blue Nokia cellphone to her friend Omar Berrada's silver Samsung cellphone";

(e) Joseph Hutchison, "In a Bleak Year-End Mood, the Poet Tips His Hat to a 16th Century Colleague" in The Perpetual Bird. "A Litany for the Wheeling Year" by Thomas Nashe. "Again a grim old year is turning./Again the fires of war are burning."

Sentence: A butterfly, nude and flower, traditional signatures of the poet's language, do more than say: they live, walk, hear & have being (like fires of war).

Chantal Kreviazuk's "Surrounded": the circle of grief

Chantal Kreviazuk is probably my favourite Canadian singer and, though she's been around since the early 90s, that's a claim I make based on the extraordinary impact of a single song & video. The details of her successful career are fairly well documented, with her recording, song-writing and soundtracks successes known here and internationally.

She is a national treasure (though lately fading). But, again, I doubt I'd be saying any of this were it not for her "Surrounded", a beautifully lyrical and psychologically complex portrayal (the best I've seen) of grief. The YouTube version is, in fact, a poem. Music, movement, and setting are a mantra. A circle (an oft-repeated word) in which she's caught forever. Even when I don't see her, I envisage the singer repeating (and having repeated many times before) this terrible ritual: having to repeat, in fact, in order to live. Antigone is the pattern of Kreviazuk's song.

A young woman's tragedy that neither she nor the consolations of lyrics and dance can name but which is to be seen in the piano's broken rhapsody & the wound of death's first time. The figures in her eyes are hard to watch, and the blind window & amulet, the bomb and toppling libraries. But she knows we can and we do, even 13 years after the song's first appearance. She'll never go through this alone.