Inducing Reverie

Steven Heighton uses the pretext of taking aim at screen devices to call for a renewed interest in the creative aspects of boredom.

Whatever. The issue here is screen media. The issue is that staring into space—in that musing, semi-bored state that can precede or help produce creative activity—is impossible when you keep interposing a screen between your seeing mind and the space beyond. The idea is to stare at nothing—to let nothingness permeate your field of vision, so that externally unstimulated mind revs down, begins to brood and muse and dream.

Steven Heighton. Work Book: memos & dispatches on writing.

Eyes closed and there are screen memories to contend with. Eyes open and they still alight on details of our environment. It is very very difficult to focus on nothing. Easier to stare and to gaze. And tune out and let the mind wander at will.

One wonders if the flicker of screens cannot in some circumstances invoke a hypnotic state and lead to the nothingness that helps the mind rev down. Would it be any different from watching waves?

And so for day 1134
20.01.2010

Landscape Translations

Canadian sketch after Lachlan MacKinnon

Deep as forever
Great river of stars
Above cabin in the woods

Inspired by MacKinnon's opening to "A Suffolk Sketchbook" in Small Hours

Deep as forever
the great field of stars
over the cottage garden.

This all started as a thinking through of how close to (and how far from) a compressed haiku do the lines of MacKinnon resemble. And from there we thought about forms of transplantation.

And so for day 1133
19.01.2010

Realigning Evoba

I have been particularly struck by squares in Steve McCaffery's Evoba. These emerge out of lists and give rise to operations of -sculpting- or -dropping- and here are three given new arrangement by decontextualization and quoting — two other forms of dropping and sculpting.

Page 82 (our program)

to map
to a law
to a drop

Page 38 (our snapshot)

s			u		t	u	r	e
	t	r		c
s			u		t	u	r	e

Page 68 (our narrative)

a gun
begins


a shout
a sh
a sho t

"U" is gone in the shoot out. And so our shooting match concludes in bagging the structure by means of suture and a mapping of law onto dropping "out".

And so for day 1132
18.01.2010

New Lines On Aging

Lines from a new Sappho poem - 2004 Cologne - 2005 Britain -

Martin West's translation appearing in the Times Literary Supplement

[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair’s turned [white] instead of dark;

Lachlan MacKinnon's version acknowledging West's rendering and appearing under the title "Sappho to Her Pupils" in Small Hours ...

Old age freezes my body, once so lithe,
rinses the darkness from my hair, now white.

I like the particularity of the verb "rinse". It gives a sense of time passing and washing away. Startling also is the agency of old age.

And so for day 1131
17.01.2010

Through Stonyground

In Slow Curve Out, Maureen Scott Harris has as one of the opening poems an elegy to Alex Wilson, landscape restorer and author. She concludes the poem with the recollection of first hearing of Alex's illness at Stonyground. The location is over-determined. Stonyground was a ferme ornée, the locale of horticultural splendour and fanciful follies created by Douglas Chambers. This is more than name dropping, this is an attempt to record in literature projects about shaping our relation to environment and each other. Fragile but necessary projects. She concludes her tribute to Wilson thus

When I heard again of his illness
I sat on a green Adirondack chair
in the yard at Stonyground
staring at the page in front of me
while the light dissolved in colours.
It was summer, soft air, birdsong,
a small breeze in the trees.
I could think of nothing to do.
I'm talking about being in love
with the same things, the way the world
will speak us together. And apart.

This figure of unity via some form of shared mentality combined with an acknowledgement of our existential aloneness ends "Epistemology: The World Speaks". Later, like a volunteer one finds transplanted, many poems into the book, another poem with the same figure. "She dreams / the young everywhere are lucid in their beauty, and safe / walking or sitting or dreaming, alone or together." concludes "A Woman Dreaming." One can only imagine that the two pretext fuse in the writer's crucible, the poet remembering of being at Stonyground learning of Alex's illness (AIDS) and the woman dreaming of a future of youth alone and together. Like a great chiasmus sketched over the course of the book, the figure bends in a different way: in one instance we are left with the apartness; in the other, the togetherness; both mediated by the flow of words.

Alexander Wilson The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (1991).

Douglas Chambers Stonyground: The Making of a Canadian Garden (1996).

And so for day 1130
16.01.2010

Lief To Be Alive

Charles Bernstein in the introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word in a description come injunction invites the reader to enter into a site of openness.

The most resonant possibilities for poetry as a medium can be realized only when the performance of language moves from human speech to animate, but transhuman, sound: that is, when we stop listening and begin to hear; which is to say, stop decoding and begin to get a nose of the sheer noise of language.

This getting of a nose for noise leads me to quote three lines from Barbara Carey ("flawed by belief" in Undressing the Dark) where the task of pronouncing "live" with long or short vowel almost causes the reader to stumble and in turn tumble in a new-found appreciation for the folds of the semantic field.

because to believe
is to be live

is to out live

This yoking of faith to being alive through minute shifts in sounds can be imagined as a constant refreshment. See "Pips in a Watermelon" The Jupiter Collisions Lachlan Mackinnon.

[...] But if faith is a way
it's a perpetual beginning, a setting forth
like that of words into the unknown
minutes and years in which they will disclose
their meaning [...]

"A nose for noise" involves being sensitive to the gap between the "unknown" and the "unknown minutes and years". Dilution. Evolution. Concentration.

And so for day 1129
15.01.2010

Metallurgy

On the page it looks like this:

Once a critic described
the craft of a poet
as flawed by belief,
as it it ran like crooked
seam through precious ore

In my mind it reads like this:

Once a critic described
a poet's craft
as crooked
running
as if flawed by belief
through precious ore

There is a universalizing that happens and a joining of elements of the simile into the fusion of metaphor. And now as an exercise we go for more

craft
crooked
run
through belief flaw

Departures from Barbara Carey, Undressing the Dark, "flawed by belief".

And so for day 1128
14.01.2010

Gifts, Graces, & the Greek Anthology

W.S. Merwin translates Antiphilos (1st century A.D.). It's a poem addressed to a lady and transmits three gifts: a tunic, some wool and some perfume. Merwin (in Selected Translations: 1968-1978) concludes this poetic gift giving thus

[...] I want the first to enfold your body.
the wool to draw out the skill of your fingers,
the scent to find its way through your hair.

Merwin's translation first appeared in Peter Jay's The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Epigrams. The library of Victoria College in the University of Toronto has in its special collections Northrop Frye's annotations to Jay's edition. The poem by Antiphilos receives no annotation. But there is all this...

Frye draws a line in the margin near Peter Jay's introduction to Plato's poems on the boy Aster (Star).

Shelly thought the second the most perfect of epigrams and used it as an epigraph for his Adonais.

On page 45, the epigram in question as translated by Peter Jay

You were the morning star among the living:
But now in death your evening lights the dead.

Page 129 Peter Jay on Meleager (no annotation but a line at the beginning of the notice)

Meleager has been accused of being too literary a poet, or too ingenious to be 'sincere'; but the authenticity is in the complete control of his medium, the subtle modulations of style and sureness of touch.

Page 285 — a check mark by 644 by Palladas (translation by Tony Harrison).

Born naked. Buried naked. So why fuss?
All life leads to that first nakedness.

There are an number of other poems by Palladas as translated by Tony Harrison with checks or ticks.

Appendix 2. A set of various translations of a poem by Palladas. Frye draws a bracket besides the version by Adrian White and writes in the margin "this is it". An notation as ambiguous as White's version.

A wife will always anger you, but brings
two gifts: her first love and last gasp.

Most of the other versions rhyme "bed" with "dead" (Tony Harrison's very successful bed-dead number is placed by Peter Jay in the stream of entries and not reproduced in the appendix). Worth a mention is Robin Skelton's version which doesn't quite manage the shading of sexual ecstasy into death throes that White gives but is less crude than some of the other offerings.

A woman is a maddening creature
and gives pleasure twice at most,
once when she gives up her virture,
once when she gives up the ghost.

Of course one wonders if Frye shared his appreciation of the epigram with Helen Kemp, his wife. One wonders if he brought to her tunic, wool and nard.

And so for day 1127
13.01.2010

Middles Could Be Titles

It could be a place to end says Philip Whalen about a line in a poem by Lew Welch "Springtime in the Rockies, Lichen".

These are the stamps on the final envelope.

Whalen says

That's a great piece of news and I think at that point the poem should have stopped (just between you and me; you're not supposed to listen, Lewie, in heaven). But I think that he has delivered his whole message right there. He could have moved that line, maybe [...] In any case, that's the poem almost, in that one line. Like the title.

Philip Whalen. "Commonplace Discoveries: Lew Welch" in Beats at Naropa edited by Anne Waldman and Laura Wright.

As Whalen intimates, middle passages can also be lifted to become poems, complete on their own. My next example is taken from W.S. Merwin's translation of a poem by Roberto Juarroz (No. 6 in Fifth Vertical Poetry).

Each thing makes a tongue for itself
The glass for example
to talk with the wine.

To read these vertical poems is like to experience the work of Jenny Holzer in one of its incarnations in the displays of electronic signage. There is something akin between presentation of fluid fragments and reading with rearrangement in mind.

And so for day 1126
12.01.2010

Twisted Eye and Tongue: Encounters With Third Meaning

Charles Simic "The Gaze We Knew As A Child" in Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell concludes with the following observation:

The images Cornell has in his boxes are, however of the third kind [images we see with eyes closed]. [...] They tempt the viewer in two opposite directions. One is to look and admire the elegance and other visual properties of the composition, and the other is to make up stories about what one sees. In Cornell's art, the eye and the tongue are at cross purposes. Neither one by itself is sufficient. It's that mingling of the two that makes up the third image.

Somehow this sparks a recollection of Roland Barthes "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on some Eisenstein Stills" trans. Stephen Heath in Image, Music, Text.

[obtuse or third meaning] radically recasts the theoretical status of the anecdote: the story (diegesis) is no longer just a strong system (the millennial system of narrative) but also and contradictorily a simple space, a field of permanences and permutations. [p. 64]

Image in one, meaning in the other. Permutations here, sensory modalities there. Simple but complex.

And so for day 1125
11.01.2010