ON MAJUSCULES

The poetry of Roberto Juarroz have been translated into English by W.S. Merwin among others. In Merwin's Selected Translations: 1968-1978 there is a poem by Juarroz wherein is depicted a man and his strange encounter with capital letters. They are described as follows:

They weigh more on the tongue.
They weigh more but they get away
faster and hardly
can they be spoken.

In 1988 another version of the poem appears in Vertical Poetry. Same translator, same poem, different time and therefore slightly different rendering.

They weigh more on the tongue.
They weigh more but they get away
faster and he can hardly
pronounce them.

Vertical Poetry put out by North Point Press provides us with the source text in the beautiful design by David Bullen (where the Spanish is given at the bottom of the page instead of the more often encountered facing page layout).

Pesan más en la lengua.
Pesan más pero escapan
con más prisa y apenas
si puede pronunciarlas.

Merwin in his second version brings back the man facing capitals as an agent of the pronunciation. This removes the somewhat awkward passive but in giving up that construction, the clunk (due to the enjambement and the repeated K sounds: "hardly / can they be spoken") is lost. The clunk I would suggest is part of the difficulty in pronouncing the fleeting letters.

A translation of the translation can offer a typographic trick: "hardly / can they be SPOKEN". And further, poking at the spooks ... "hardly / can they be S P O K E N".

And so for day 1124
10.01.2010

One Pig Two Animals

Henri Cole. Touch.

Two poems stand out for me by their connected theme of the insufficiency of body to achieve transcendental states. Take "Pig" in which the speaker is driving behind a flatbed truck and contemplates the "poor patient pig" trying to keep his balance. The speaker imagines the animal "enjoying the wind, maybe, against the tufts of hair / on the tops of his ears" and then via an acknowledgement of the viewer-speaker having heavy eyes "glazed / from caffeine and driving" the animal becomes a figure for the man "in his middle years struggling to remain / vital and honest while we are just floating / around accidental-like on a breeze." The speaker pulls back slightly from the "we" to conclude with a muted exclamation.

What funny thoughts slide into the head,
alone on the interstate with no place to be.

The conversational tone belies the enjeu raised earlier when the speaker last invokes the pig "its flesh probably bacon now tipping into split / pea soup". The concessive adverbs pile up: maybe the pig enjoys the breeze, possibly ends up in pea soup and we are just floating. It is a remarkable tour de force to so intently focalize the perspective and to imply a universal aspect to the funny thoughts.

This wry voice seems to be at work in another poem later in the book called "One Animal" — the echo with "Pig" is marked for me by the insistence on failure of a sort and the triumph of a kind of animality. "One Animal" consists almost entirely of relationship advice phrased in the "do not" mode. Some of it is hopeless. For example, how can one not woof woof when told "Do not utter the monosyllable twice that is / the signature of dogdom." The set of do not statements culminates in an ending that again stresses our aloneness (but not our loneliness).

And do not think — touching his hair,
licking, sucking, and being sucked in the same
instant, no longer lonely — that you
are two animals perfect as one.

Quite some time ago (in the last century) I worked through a critique of dyads and would have welcomed lines from Henri Cole to serve as an epigraph and keen reminder that the couple is not a fusion into one single entity unmarked by dialectics. But Cole's poems deserve to be further relished not only in part for his naughty celebration of the homoerotic allied to a severe reckoning with romance but also in part for their pure craft.

And so for day 1123
09.01.2010

House Less Home

1984. Daphne Marlatt. Touch to My Tongue. "houseless".

what is at stake here is an epistemology of the erotic — how ways of knowing include ways of being together

i can only be, no vessel but a movement running, out in the open, out in the dark and rising tide, in risk, knowing who i am with you —

creatures of ecstasy, we have risen drenched from our own wet grasses, reeds, sea. turned out, turned inside out, beside ourselves, we are the tide swelling, we are the continent draining, deep and forever into each other.

The book also conveys the image work of Cheryl Sourkes and these words from Marlatt apply equally to the photographs from Memory Room; they inhabit the similar space. Before a photograph from Sourkes, the book ends with an essay "musing with mothertongue" from Marlatt (first given as a talk at the 1983 Women and Words conference) in which is conjured the figure of the woman writer (and by extension, artist):

inhabitant of language, not master, not even mistress, this new woman writer (Alma, say) is having is had, is held by it, what she is given to say. in giving it away is given herself, on that double edge where she has always lived, between the already spoken and the unspeakable, sense and non-sense. only now she writes it, risking nonsense, chaotic language leafings, unspeakable breaches of usage, intuitive leaps. inside language she leaps for joy, shoving out the walls of taboo and propriety, kicking syntax, discovering life in old roots.

Note the related work of exploring the breath of language via experiments with syntax and the etymological excavations to inspire further ruminations. When same touches same ... more wildly more unmoored.

And so for day 1122
08.01.2010

From Catalyst

Sitting in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library is a treat. It is like sitting in a restaurant waiting for the dish to be served up. One delicious item is Autumnal by Thomas Meyer published by Catalyst in 1975. The poem is laid out in a four-folded sheet. The cover is a photo of the poet we assume. The back contains a simple colophon "published 1975 by catalyst" following the bottom border of the page. Inside the left page is blank, the right page has the poem set in two columns and the signature "Tom Meyer". We appear to have in our hands a pastiche of a greeting card.

And the poetry? Exquisite.

Meyer is the master of the short line as evidenced in his books such as Uranian roses or Staves calends legends. Here at the heart of this one-pager is an image of a detail familiar to anyone who has prepared leeks. Startling however is the leap to an image of rain and wet hair (unless one is alert to an unstated suggestion of homophones: leek/leak).

What is remarkable is how the scene unfolds from the mention of detail. Note how the poet begins with the grit and comes to name the vegetable last. Likewise we are led from rain to hair via the position of the hand. The "news" item is always last and lingering.

[...]
& grit
deep in white
rings of a fat
new leek
	a gentle rain has begun
	to remind me of him
	[...]

The poem ends with the image of the speaker's hand in the beloved's "wet August hair". Or at least tone and style set this in the erotic mode and we believe we are presented with an image of the beloved.

And so for day 1121
07.01.2010

Orchestrating Closure

April 24, 2003.
Excerpt from online chat re paper Of Drugs, Messages and Time

Pia: Our Staff Development program offered a workshop for the faculty on How to Say Hello and Goodbye in the semester.

CaroleM: A debrief can enable students to see the ROI in their sharing and alternative methods of reusing them [i.e. work on file or work in progress]

CaroleM: sounds interesting Pia

Beverley: Pia, can you elaborate a bit?

Pia: The faculty agreed that we are good at getting started and acquainted in the class

lachance: When do you begin to say goodbye?

Pia: But at the end of the semester we faculty are mostly concerned with grading the finals

Pia: Rather than creating an environment to reflect on what was learned throughout the semester.

lachance: Portable & shareable creations worthy of commentary spring from recognizing we must say goodbye

lachance: a good learning situation creates memories.

This interaction led to another online contribution in the form of "Infrastructure and Transactions: students as custodian-enablers" for the Online In Higher Education, School of Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Purdue/University Fort Wayne, November 2003. That paper has a feisty conclusion:

I do know that characterizing the online learning experience as a perpetual field trip, a magical show and tell, means that we can do a lot more with less. And someone someday will tell some dean that online learning is all about an encounter: pedagogy of the oppressed meets the theatre of poverty.

And so for day 1120
06.01.2010

To Behold To Become

There is a fine book by Elizabeth Ladenson called Proust's Lesbianism which is of course about the depiction and positioning of lesbianism in La Recherche but it is also subtly an argument about a devenir lesbien. In short, the protagonist-narrator requires a "departure from a phallic economy" in order to launch his own development. Here is Ladenson's argument neatly summarized towards the end of the book. It is very elegant and thought provoking.

The narrator's subsequent quest to penetrate the mystery of erotic relations between women has its origin in this familial triangle involving the mother, the grandmother, and the son who would be a daughter. One of the most salient characteristics of Gomorrah is the evident narcissism of relations between women: each desires her like, and they all resemble one another. When he first encounters the "petite bande" of "jeunes filles en fleurs," the narrator cannot settle on a single object of desire because they are indistinguishable to him. What he really desires is their interdependence on one another, as well as their independence from him: like the mother and grandmother, they form a seamless whole. Thus Proust's narrator desires women who desire other women not despite the fact but precisely because they evidently do not need him. It is in imitation of this resemblance between subject and object that the project of recherche finally comes to fruition: turning away from the doomed attempt to insert himself between women, the narrator decides to reproduce himself.

Ladenson's reading is well supported by the textual evidence and offers a smart and smooth riposte to a quagmire of interpretations that would transpose willy nilly the genders of characters (in a bid to read the novel as autobiographical). Her insistence that Gomorrah not be read as a mirror image of Sodom rewards: it brings to light more of the architectonics. Reading Landenson is like being guided through a complex musical score; the experience lingers delightfully in memory — ever to be savoured anew.

And so for day 1119
05.01.2010

Global View of Canine Feces

W.S. Merwin in Selected Translations 1968-1978 has rendered selections from Asia which he gathers under the rubrics Japanese Figures, Chinese Figures and Korean Figures. The pieces are two-liners (they don't quite function like couplets) without any direct links between them. The impression generated is one of a collection of aphorisms. One of my favourites is found in Korean Figures — there is something outré about its subject matter and something insightful in its treatment.

Even on dog turds
the dew falls

One can appreciate the remarkable syntax which by placing "the dew" last implies a universal fate — the dew covers many many things including the abject. As well, the poet refers to a definite dew — it's "the" dew not simply "dew". The use of the verb "to fall" to describe the dew makes it in someway akin to what has already fallen and of course the shared initial consonant between "dog" and "dew" evokes a certain similitude. And on the pages of Merwin's book there is a bit of white space before the next two-liner — enough space for dew to evaporate and excrement to decompose.

And so for day 1118
04.01.2010

Invitations To A Certain View

One writer encounters another in a series of concentrations.

Gertrude Stein Tender Buttons is available online via Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15396/15396-h/15396-h.htm

From the section on Objects.

A BOX.

Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.

Part of Steve McCaffery's homolinguistic translations from Every Way Oakly (Book Thug, 2008), this suggestive bit from his "A Box."

prick a bubble of milk
try to get excited bursting it
wonder why there's just a bubble of it

As I read more of McCaffery's translation experiment, I notice how Stein's descriptions get transposed into imperatives about how to perceive. And am further convinced that descriptions are just that invitations to a certain view.

This is my long held view based on my reading of Turing on states and instructions.

And so for day 1117
03.01.2010

In Pursuit

We are attracted. We are repulsed. And still we flutter. Puzzled.

Joy Kogawa in the middle of a poem ("Hangnail") has a description of the death of a moth. The poem is found in A Choice of Dreams. The passage lifts the speaker out of concern for the small but painful hangnail. Our speaker with sardonic tone notes that "A hug might help / But I can't feel any cosmic arms / Nor earthly ones —". And then we are thrust into a meditation upon the moth and its demise.

While walking I stepped on a giant moth
And in the long moment of its dying
All the accummulated injustices
Of squashed and battered bugs
Sacrificed on windshields
And sprayed to oblivion
Poured out of its eloquent wings
In one long fluttering —

Yes, our copy text gives us two m's for "accumulated". Almost as if the moth was squashed right into the word.

And Kogawa's poem makes me want to revisit Robin Blaser's Moth Poem. It's a long sequence but this little bit provides a nice pendant to the Kogawa.

the moth in the piano
will play on
frightened wings brush
the wired interior
of that machine

Penn Sound has a recording of Blaser reading The Moth Poem. To listen is to rediscover as the poet writes "the moth-kiss has two languages" and in neither am I fluent. C D E flat G A B flat B D [C D Eb G A Bb B D] (this sequence of notes set out on a vertical axis concludes The Moth Poem as collected in The Holy Forest; the sequence goes unarticulated in the recording). I have no ability in reading music but the mention in The Moth Poem of mirrors evokes for me Ravel's Miroirs of which the first movement is Noctuelles ("Night Moths"). For recordings and score see http://imslp.org/wiki/Miroirs_(Ravel,_Maurice). Neither by sight nor by ear can I make out if Blaser's notation matches Ravel's piece composed for piano solo and dedicated to members of the Apaches. Lacking musical knowledge or a convenient gloss, it is but with a moth's breath that I connect Ravel to Blaser — and the little journey from flame to flame all began with Kogawa's fluttering lines.

ADDENDUM:

In response to an appeal for assistance in elucidating a musical component in Robin Blaser's Moth Poem, a subscriber to Humanist conveyed their daughter's suggestion that I pose the query to the American Musicological Society list. A most fruitful suggestion.

It was with a bit of trepidation I trod on the turf of the experts. But I was curious about what it might be that the poet Robin Blaser in The Moth Poem presents as the penultimate section of his serial poem:

C D Eb G A Bb B D

What I proposed to the AMS-list: What I am trying to determine is whether Blaser is citing an existing piece of music, inventing something, or translating (i.e. modifying something that exists). The musical "quotation" occurrs before the final section of the poem which is devoted to the figure of the translator.

Results:

I was kindly disabused of the notion that the letters represented chords. (Ever so nicely done off list: "Those notes are probably not chords per se, but some fragment of melody. If they were chords it would sound something like smashing your entire hand on the piano, [...]").

The series of pitches is not connected to Ravel (WWW keyword searches had revealed a possible allusion to Ravel's Miroirs of which the first movement is Noctuelles ("Night Moths") but the evidence is negative for a citing of the Ravel)..

Likewise for a direct connection to Pierrot Luniare, a set of poems by Albert Giraud set to music by Arnold Schoenberg.

Eric Grunin (grunin.com) suggested "That poem was set to music by Harrison Birtwistle, in "The Moth Requiem". His publisher's page for the piece states: 'This poem was prompted by Blaser tracing eerie nighttime sounds in his house to a moth caught under the lid of a piano, touching the strings in its efforts to escape.' Those notes are an ascending sequence, so if the story is not apocryphal they may plausibly be the notes Blaser heard." This is a very elegant solution — in an Occam's Razor fashion. Also aligns well with internal evidence. fashion.

Bonus: Harrison Birtwistle set the poem to music in the "The Moth Requiem". Question remains if Birtwistle took up the pitch-row given at the end of the Blaser poem in his "Requiem".

Other searches uncovered a possible intertext for the Blaser poem in the verse of Don Marquis (http://www.donmarquis.org/themoth.htm). Blaser is likely to have known this item of the popular culture. BTW I first encountered Archy and Mehitabel through the music and stories of Rosalie Sorrels (Always A Lady).

An abundance of riches, gratefully acknowledged. And a testament to the ongoing value of discussion lists.

And so for day 1116
02.01.2010

Waves Reverberations Suspensions

Robert Bly in Point Reyes Poems concludes with a piece called "The large starfish" which describes a nine-pointed starfish which slowly wraps itself around the speaker's hand and after a while is returned to the tidal pool. In a small space, the conclusion in its punctuation not only reflects the elaborate description of the animal to which we have been previously a party but also lends an ephemeral note to the passage since it revolves through ellipsis, hyphen and comma (lots of changes) while noting that nothing has changed.

I put him back in ... he unfolds — I had forgotten how purple he was — and slides down into his rock groin, the snail-like feelers waving as if nothing had happened, and nothing has.

The reader is abruptly yanked into the present by the change in tense. In seashore parlance we get wet as we walk along the perimeter between land and water. The syntax here reminds me of the image of an earlier piece "Sea water pouring back over stones" in Point Reyes Poems.

Waves rush up, pause, & drag pebbles back around stones ... pebbles going out ... it is a complicated sound, as of small sticks breaking, or kitchens heard from another house, good bodies turning over .. then the wave comes down to the boulders, & draws out over the stones always wet, it is the gentleness of William Carlos Williams after his strokes ...

The ellipses are Bly's.

The movement from a description of wave action to a named person reminds me of a poem by Joy Kogawa collected in A Choice of Dreams which is entitled simply "Beach Poem". As with Bly, we are immediately there. It begins ...

Walking in warm knee deep water
Watching tiny waves inside of waves

And the speaker deeply absorbed is surprised.

The coming and going water pattern
And not seeing the round bald man

We are then treated to the image of the round bald man splashing, grinning and grunting "startlingly like a pig". Which expression of joy prompts a moment of envy to conclude the poem.

And the water murky around him
And small pearly waters dripping
All around all around and I wish
I had a curly tail but sadly it is only forked.

The tone, to me, is wry. A little devilry in the round all around for the fork-tailed speaker has just produced the little marvel we have read.

And so for day 1115
01.01.2010