"The Dolphins": a personal mourning

Sometimes I grieve more for the friends of the dead than the dead themselves: especially when friendship had sustained a vital need for communication. And in the case of the friend who needs desperately to hear the voice when vision has been all but taken away, & the accustomed call remains the only route to human contact there is, the sadness of her loss is all the greater.

Poet Betty Kaplan has recently passed away: a kind gracious individual with with whom I'd had the privilege of conversing in my Eastern days. A poet's death is always the occasion of irremediable loss. But what saddens me now is the thought that one person in particular, perhaps Betty's dearest confidante, can no longer feel, in her darkness, the link to a live poetic heart.

Fred Neil's song speaks the absence better than I ever can. I grieve for friendship's end.

Faces: Federico García Lorca

As I recently travelled through Spain (especially Andalusia) I kept wondering if we'd passed the unknown grave of the great poet who'd been assassinated for any one of a number of 'crimes' against the state: homosexuality, support of the Popular Front, a privileged upbringing. I also wondered if clues could be whispered even to the tourist.

If Lorca despised the tourist, it didn't seem obvious to me.

________________________________

"As Lorca lay dying"

Write 'storm' on the towers, and don't choose

  clear pools over rain ah camioneros,

never, never!

   Mine's a ruined casa low in the highway,

          a yard's wild overgrowth;

 tiles after the heat spill over me at times like ivy.

   Language betrays

  If you sequester groves under the netting

(Sant Déu!), make space deep for Moroccan suns,

                                                             at least

     Palms look rusty this side of white-graped mountains

  where I'm led, & the farmers mean

of course, to make lusty parcelas feel the jagged teeth, too. Again,

  gardens on the coast—all a mirage

                                                                         Sultan

  of god recedes from where I lean

Between steppes and mounds, steadying to the passes or

                                                white-washed tombs

          I can be found

Storm! storm! Olivo of desire or

  piscinas: take paradise as it comes, real or not

Or if not, bust the dams and shoot at the devil yourself—

  Sierras thru the heat is

nearer to me!, with clouds the odd relief.        Three

  shades, greenest of the date, one ficus green, & that

of dry villages, and then the hills, again—again, all illusion!

  But take each as it comes

One churchtower, two separate at the bridge to find me

  but learn to doubt them, too

  enlarge their hate beyond words

I know the mists will enclose, & the white coast

  in a dream                                                  Look,

  African winds make an olympus of almost nothing,

   and springs between boulders

   trickling to my feet  

Faces: a poem for my wife on this our twenty-fifth



Maria's smile is

like pearls dangled from a darning needle,

like the harlequin of smiles, sweetly
like a pearly tulip spun on its stem;

or a trim face over a languid doll neck,
or all of a lilac in a wide panting field;

a smile from all of these:—pearl, needle
and stars spun on bright. A smile,

near-astral, on which to gorge awhile,
with the lips' gauche tilt, a sweeping front;

a champagne of a smile, in pixy groves,
each cheek a rose on a mud-sated vine.

Like all the soft-stroked, bird or leaf,
a smile set to a dusky, scented moon.

In ruby trim, sprightly and warm a smile
to vanish into the heart-gladdening eye—

the eye mostly!—pettish days try sparking
and bob-tailed nieces wear like a charm.

Out of all these: candy floss or puppet soft
rising light on the wings of a damselfly.

Faces: Gilles Deleuze

A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst's couch (Deleuze & Guattari)

Schizophrenia is disaster in life and success in poetry (Harold Bloom)

I can say without exaggeration that were it not for Gilles Deleuze I wouldn't be writing this now. Not that he's meant a life or death difference to me personally: or perhaps it's the case that (to realign indebtedness more clearly to the man & some uniquely collaborative origins) the writing vocation would've been lost entirely on me. The crease in the picture is a little telling: perhaps even emblematic. It's probably why I've kept it.

Actually, 'liberatory' is the word I ought to use to show the pure (& thrilling) aleatoriness of my first dove flight after reading Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Nothing seemed beyond reproach afterwards and everything that was to me erstwhile literarily dull, by which I mean weighted down with spotty academicisms, was subject to exciting new laws of intensities, new refractions & the vital regroupings that go with them. Poetries and genres seemed to dissolve into slipstreams. The language of poetry came— after the fall (so to speak)— soaring to the lyrically accessible spheres where composition developed by "lawns of excluded middles" (Waldrop) & singularities, averse to 'molar' crowds, that could be skimmed off the poet's perceptual field almost with Alice-in-Wonderland ease. In the words of Deleuze commentator Constantin V. Boundas (in "Gilles deleuze and the Problem of Freedom"), it's "the excess of the virtual over the actual" that releases free creativity. It's what I needed.

Yes, I said 'lyrical'! It's why my favourite modern work (or the one to which I believe a true lyricism is beholden the most these days) is John Berryman's The Dream Songs, and my favourite sonneteer, Ted Berrigan. And because they happen to be deleuzian spirits, they're also both American and not Canadian, coincidentally, and not Canadian because my country's still a place where, again, "skirting the surface" (The Logic of Sense) is seen as unpatriotic. Moralizing tendencies in Art abound everywhere here. After Deleuze, the poem didn't become the fashionable (Language) slyboots but rather an egregiously manifold 'body without organs' (bwo), a living index to any one of life's most intense schizzes: a living palette, installation visible only to the artist, a dream poetry worth dying for. None of which is to say, at the same time, that poetry turns into the unnatural and artificial medium for grotesqueries deleuzians worldwide had originally hoped for.

A world & a heart can, after all, be willed into being as easily as pastiche & readymades: being without organs invites deep tampering. Berryman, again, is not to lyricism what Duchamp is to the avant-garde: for one thing Deleuze & Berryman were jumpers whereas the middle class eagerly ate up Duchamp's artistic creations. I can envisage in them both a suicide pact and make that the lyrical heart. Logically and materially the work's (or the bwo's) still a creature of impetus coralled easily into a 'holey' space of competing forms & materials. It's the handling that matters. In short, Deleuze defines that uniquely defining arrest quality of a work, a quality which only the transplanted heart can give, as the immanent lyric (or avant-garde or Sadean or Mallarméan) in us all. Again and again, Canada's still a landscape for emotional & aesthetic cripples because it's forgotten how to walk like a true poetry body: beset with the tendency to think that Art's never immanent but interchangeable & so can be easily replaced by its francophone neighbour.

The crease in the Deleuze pic is emblematic, after all: & I've saved it since a crease pleases more than a skull fracture, and the figure in it looks like a framed portrait. One for Francis Bacon. A somehow even soft and reassuring granfatherly rest competes with a death mask image, the impish with the ghoulish, as if the man were saying anything, like Art, can be as freely transgressible as this receptacle for spontaneity named a bwo, & all that's needed is a constant infusion of fresh heart before the hardening sets in: something to lure aging spirits into creativity, even long after their prime. Cracked spirits like me.

Helen Vendler on the "writing self": quote of the day

"The writing self does not have to be virtuous in the ordinary sense of the word; but it does have to be extraordinarily virtuous in its aesthetic moves. It must refuse—against the claims of fatigue, charm, popularity, money, and so on—the idée reçue, the imprecise word, the tired rhythm, the replication of past effects, the uninvestigated stanza. It is this heroic virtue in the realm of aesthetic endeavor that courses in great authors exist to teach (as courses in "texts" do not)." (Helen Vendler from Soul Says: On Recent Poetry)

Escher, and another poem

'Relativity'

"Escher, and some lessons"

                                             II
If you see, why axes teem with asphodels  & the one sack-slung
  (real to itself) who likes traversing keystone doors
      to go where no one knows,
        can plant anything,

presumably on the rise! nicely real (& all that are needed are-
  promenade lamps), you'll make it up, rail by rail
    For all its seeming felt and lined
      nothing's abstract

here! as of now but slack with a dangerous sun, niched, too!-
  very interchangeable commerce of urns, satchels
    Shit or get off the pot! or jump-
      or step cloud-light

as a lie from one landing  or small-squared room to the next
  across Space This seeing down's a face (of mine)
    and then There! now made privy
      to the truth of up

-what else!- the back of her head & all there is of Love. Euphoric
    or just an idea But a parenthesis more, please:
      this controvertible (Love, say!)
        is all there is

Escher, and a poem

'Relativity'

"on viewing Escher, closely"

                                        I

who knows what else!  an angle can arc to a point of resting

-'long the sigmoid post- (I'm unsure how to think

    through it)  Tell stairs from the seas?

     There! god cares less

and as if known and felt  the fall enshrined   in me (dizzy

  say by getting up too fast!), hearts that tilt

   from out a preDali world go hard

        for the Tree, too 

Closely un-said til it's viewable or neatly untied  for me &

  the way a repast always  looks, irreversible:

    for Time's not round but in a most

      rampant whorl of all,

          

closed there where you clomb apace Can't tell tiers anymore?

  Make way, lead or just fall in edging it! ( a mov-

    ing V in the boss light of a trick)

      Eye rhymes with sky

and so forces from out of you always the inward you must

   flag a step at a time