Recalculating Read online

  Felix:

  “Nothing to bite

  but my tongue.”

  Free verse is not a type of poetry but an imperative to liberate verse from constraints no longer applicable for a new time and new circumstance.

  The rich do live better and have the narcotic of money to help them forget how it was acquired.

  Be thorough: leave no turn unstoned.

  Poets can be more or less overlooked: known but not well known, like Willy Loman on a pipefitter’s holiday; known in their day but lost to us now; recovered or, if not, recovering. For every emerging poet a couple of others begin to fade; we even begin to fade to ourselves, if the truth be told. We know of the poet’s poet and even hear from time to time of the poet’s poet’s poet, repeating, more in relief than disappointment, John Ashbery’s famous quip that a famous poet is not famous. But poetry’s “disappeared,” as Ron Silliman once called them, haunt us, less from a fear for ourselves than a dread that the context that imparts meaning to our work is so fragile. I is not an other but many others, fellow travelers among the dead, near dead, and just about alive.

  Digital poetry 2003: In 1975, everyone was worried about the idea that language is code; in 2003, everyone is worried that code is language.

  To each his tone.

  The truth of the poem is neither in the representation nor the expression. Its truth dwells in what has never been and what will never be. Where possibility and impossibility collide, here the poem is forged.

  Sometimes a sentence is just a sentence.

  I’ve got difference, you’ve got the same.

  Thought is more resourceful than reality; that is why reality repudiates thought.

  The poem is not finished even when it is completed.

  I embrace a poetics of bewilderment. I don’t know where I am going and never have, just try to grapple as best as I can with where I am. The poetry that most engages me is not theoretically perspicacious, indeed it has a poetics and an aesthetics but not a predetermining theory; it is multiform and chaotic, always reformulating and regrouping. Competence is less important to me than responsiveness, mobility; ingenuity and invention more important than solutions to predefined problems.

  You don’t hear anything unless you first listen, just as you can’t have truth without trust, or thirst without memory.

  The translation of poetry is never more than an extension of the practice of poetry.

  Traditional metrical verse in the twenty-first century is like having sex through a net.

  “You ask me to throw you a bone & I throw you a bone & now you say you don’t want a bone.”

  Everything is relative, and if not relative, it ought to be.

  You can’t get there from here

  But you can pretend

  Sometimes a cigar is just a symbol.

  Clinging to the loss as if it would protect you against the loss.

  A line of zeros totally nothing.

  This is not a sentence.

  Alexandar Becanovic, the editor of Monitor, a Montenegrin journal, asks me: “Can you find, in the massive plurality of recent American poetry, common reference points? Is there, in that ‘cacophony,’ some kind of harmony?”—It is always possible to find points in common just as it is always possible to find differences. As to the points in common, the question for American poetry—and it has been a question for a long time—is what are the terms of the common? Emerson imagines an America that is in process, where the commonness is an aspiration, not something that is a given social fact. Langston Hughes says we are a “people in transition.” The “point” is not to hurry through this going because we never arrive. Get used to it! Perhaps this is what we have in common, the particularities that we cultivate within the same space: our simultaneous presence to, and difference from, one another. I worry that harmony would be too close to homogeneity. I go for a microtonal tuning where the music is discovered in the process of active (maybe activist?) listening, not given to, predetermined by, idealized scales. The sirens screeching in the night to take away the dead or wounded interrupt our quiet, refined mediations. I want a poetry that incorporates those interruptions without losing its own newly foundering rhythms.

  The space between ‘is’ and ‘as,’ ‘sigh’ and ‘sight,’ is the infinity of finitude.

  Morality vs. aesthetics: I don’t want to make poems that tell you what to think but that show a different order of thinking.

  Fragments not as discontinuous but as overlays, pleats, folds: a chordal poetics in which synchronic notes meld into diachronic tones.

  Larry Eigner’s Another Time in Fragments: another time—one that extends and deepens the always present present, created by the algebra of constellated (or multiplied) moments of perception: a kind of hyperperceptual poetry.

  A criticism is responsible to the degree it is able to respond.

  Reforming a famous remark of Rimbaud, I would say “I” is a question, poetry an exploration, poetics a foundering refounding.

  Longing for nothing is often the only way to get anywhere. I suppose I could equally say the foundation of language is empathy, that empathy is what allows us to get the sense of something, and that its absence puts us outside the possibilities for meaning. But I don’t like my empathy solicited. Experience presented is one thing, but being directed toward how to feel about it, well, I’d rather take a walk. Problem is: Is it really possible for a poem not to tip its didactic hat? Poems can’t just be; they always mean more than we might want to say or hear. Even the bracketing of experience leans toward a mode of experience.

  I’m not telling you what you can’t do but what you can do.

  A sigh is the sword of a textual thing.

  Angels are not just literary conceits or supernatural realities. The angelic might be a moment of grace in which the images we use to measure out, contain or shield, our suffering melt away. That would mean not using images to symbolize the real but rather letting the real pour in through the cracks between the words.

  It is not the poets born in America that are native to our poetry, but the ones who came here, in exile, and made America their home; for exile is a native, indeed founding, experience for American poetry.

  Sticks and stones will break my bones

  But names wound the soul

  Two prosodies diverged in a striated field, and I—, I took the hand of the hired man, I took the hand of the hired man and did the polka in the dark, if polka governs in a thing so marked.

  a world of misplaced desire in the aftermath of feeling’s collusion with happenstance

  Syntax is never what you thought it was; just when you think you’ve got it down, it bolts out of the corral into the high chaparral. The job of poetry is not to get syntax back in the corral but to follow its wild journey into the unclaimed.

  When you’re right you’re right and even when you’re wrong you’re right, just not as right as when you’re right.

  Now you’re cooking with salt pork.

  o, head, get me an ox

  an ox and toad

  to pay the toll

  till I get there

  with nary a care

  In a recent poem, Leonard Schwartz asks, what can drive a nonviolent person to violence? My question would be what can drive a violent person to nonviolence, since that is the only hope when there is too much righteousness on all sides. Who’s right (or who’s been more wronged), who’s got the rights (or who’s got the wrongs), or when you date the right (or wrong) only feeds the fire, since there are so many factors, real and imaginary, that one or the other side chooses, as a matter of principle, to discount. While I am for counting all the factors. But then it’s not poetry but violence that rules.

  Don’t confuse the puzzle for the solution, the poet for the poem.

  If you can’t say something nice it’s better not to say anything at all. Yet being a parent, or teacher, gives a provisional license to be “frank,” to be negative, even to be harsh. Provisional in that the license
is given for good cause—to avert immanent harm or toward some necessary reflection. The license of a critic to be frank comes without provision, unless it be the good of the body politic, our collective aesthetic benefit.

  Injustice in the pursuit of order is oppression.

  Mendacity in the pursuit of security is tyranny.

  From time to time, poets or editors suggest the value of readingpoems anonymously, for example publishing a magazine withoutauthor attributions. It sounds democratic, as if this would allow usto read poems for themselves. But artworks, like people, are notself-sufficient but part of a series, embedded in contexts that givethem not only meaning but also resonance, depth; you might evensay, life. Without some sense of the author, one cannot account forthese other, often determining, factors. Prejudice may be avoided. But (poetic) justice is sorely checked.

  I quote this from Rosmarie Waldrop, who is citing an embedded reference to Susan Howe, who is alluding to a line of Dickinson, who is echoing Emerson in a way that suggests Jabés, who is paraphrasing a remark of Waldrop’s.

  What you see is never what it is, just as what you don’t see may forever remain invisible to you.

  Hope is a thing with claws and a recently shorn mustache.

  I long for a time when the longing will stop. This is the one anxiety that I have the power to overcome. Instead, I nourish it.

  My saliva tastes like ash.

  Régis Bonvicino asks about my remark in With Strings that “art is made not of essences but of husks,” pointing out that this is exactly the contrary of Ezra Pound’s dictum, “Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” “I see your new book as a kind of songbook for ‘sense remote,’” he writes and goes on to wonder about With Strings’ sometimes comic dialogue with popular music.

  —If poetry is a shell game it’s because it’s all about the shells not the peas. The peas have barely touched the spoon and already it’s time to change the tablecloth. Once we got hold of the peas, the game would be over; whereas poetry never gets anywhere, it just makes you more present to where you are, or at least where you were when you were brushing up against it, rubbing closures. A husk is “the outer covering of an ear of maize”; mine was always that, enmazed, or, in other words, the inner lining of our outer aspirations. History is husk and eternity its other shore, its negation or, as they say in thrillers, neutralization. Pound’s technique of collage is more weighted in husks than he believed; this is the secular redemption of The Cantos.

  “Desafinado”—off key—remains my motto. I love the intoxication but it doesn’t trust me, and so I find myself always low and wet, humming another tune to taxi me to the next transit point. It’s also that the tunes that are going through my head are remote; they remind me of being reminded. “Sense remote” is like “husks” in that way. As young Hamlet says early on, “too much in the sun.” We seek the solace of shade. Discretion, indirection, sense remote leave a space for conversation, the gaps we will for one another, one after another. “The nearness of you” is also a measure of distance.

  Reading the poems as about poetry is an inevitable fallout of the speculative nature of these imaginary songs, whose tune is maybe more res cogitans than res extensa, but then who said it was a race anyway? The motif of poetry is just a husk. When it falls away you don’t get to essence but are drifting in time, like always, the strings maybe lifting you up (like a puppet?) or else playing alongside (Charlie Parker’s “Everything Happens to Me” on With Strings: “But now I just can’t fool / This head that thinks for me. / I’ve mortgaged all my castles in the air”). Deep in the middle of the everyday, which as you say is sometimes pretty comical (slipping on a banana peel, not the banana) and sometimes political (getting up).

  The imaginary ride that actually works.

  Bus me, baby, to the telltale tattle of invidious celebration.

  The thought is always anterior to the reflection, even if thereflection averts resemblance.

  Make love not unilateralism.

  The cherry that is not in the garden has fallen under the canopy of the proposition.

  The issue of availability is in many ways external to what I do as a poet (in contrast, for example, to what I do as a teacher). I do what I can, what I want, what I come up with, what appeals to me, what hasn’t been done in this way before, what I don’t understand, what holds my attention, what pushes me a little further than I have gone, what throws me back to ground I thought I knew so well but in which I can no longer find my way. Poetry is difficult in the sense that it is not easily consumed as a mass culture product, but that applies to a wide variety of poems. Writing poems that try to be available, by using familiar styles and subjects, or telling stories, or avoiding complication, doesn’t necessarily make the work any more accessible. The genre of poetry is itself an unpopular one and is rarely (never say never) able to use such traditional principles as effectively (if the goal is accessibility to the greatest numbers) as films, pop music, TV, and the like. At the same time, actually existing readers of poetry will find quite available what would be considered inaccessible by mass culture criteria. So then the question is, available to whom? People who have no sustained engagement with poetry?

  don’t spell out what you can imply

  & never imply what you can’t address

  for it’s later than it once was

  but early all the same

  (earlier than it was once

  but later just the same)

  Let’s just say that one day is completely different than the next, butthey still connect and we call the pattern our lives.

  Or how about: The storage you rent is equal to the mortgage you forgo.

  Just because you think you can’t change the world is not a reason to try any less.

  No man is a peninsula entire unto himself.

  Your desire for independence will ultimately be your slavery.

  THE PEN IS TINIER THAN THE SWORD.

  Not yet? When then?

  The poetry is not in speaking to the dead but listening to the dead.

  Even when it’s over it’s not over.

  [“THERE ONCE WAS A YOUNG WOMAN OF WHITECHAPEL”]

  There once was a Young Woman of Whitechapel

  Who forgot that Eve ate an apple

  She went looking for heaven but found only a haven

  So they buried that Young Woman of Whitechapel

  TRANSEGMENTAL DRIFT

  It’s the mind makes a muck of these Sylvan

  Occlusions and mannered pronouncements.

  “Abominable!” is the word, beastly—

  Sound obtruding into the poem like a

  Pork rind at a Bar Mitzvah. Just give the

  Twist a break, or several. Nailed down to

  24-hour fog duty. The un-

  iforms are soiled and ill fitting. But jeans

  Regularize all that. The stuff of themes:

  Cut and paste, morose, interdenomi-

  nation, laser-sharp lobotomy. The

  Door the door closes. As when a conti-

  nental divide becomes metaphor for

  Swimming laps (summary judgment). Goad the

  Goalie but leave me to fall to pieces

  With my jet skies on. The waves roll, taking

  No toll. How about you?

  INCANTATION BY LAUGHTER

  We laugh with our laughter

  loke laffer un loafer

  sloaf lafker int leffer

  lopp lapter und loofer

  loopse lapper ung lasler

  pleap loper ech lipler

  bloop uffer unk oddurk

  floop flaffer ep flubber

  fult lickles eng tlickers

  ac laushing ag lauffing uk

  luffing ip luppling uc

  lippling ga sprickling

  urp laughter oop laughing

  oop laughing urp laughter

  Velimir Khlebnikov

  GREAT MOMENTS IN TACHES BLANCHES


  “Freedom is never free”

  One July, it was 1997, a small group, convened by Emmanuel Hocquard, met at the Centre de Poésie et Traduction at Fondation Royaumont, near Paris, to play the “blank spots” game (le gam “taches blanches”). If the game of “blank spots” was a betting game, it would go like this: “I’ll see your nothing and raise you nothing.” Parent figure:“I didn’t raise you to say things like that.” Parent figure: “Leave them alone & they’ll come home, wagging their tales behind them.” I present here one of my contributions to the Royaumont meeting.

  1. Jimmy Stewart is Tache Blanc in Blank Check, un film de Jean-Jacques Lecercle.

  2. “I have lost my notes but maybe I will find them during my nap.”

  3. Staedtler “Mars Plastic” Eraser (Cf.: Rauschenberg’s erased DeKooning, c. 1954)

  4. Lascaux sans image.

  5. THE GLARE OF THE BLANK (the tear of the . . . )

  6. Don’t blink.

  7. Blink.

  8. She shot me point blank.

  She shot me at point blank range.

  I got shot at point blank range.

  9. Johnny must have slipped me a Mickey because the next thing I knew everything started to go blank and I found myself on the floor next to the couch and she was saying to me: “[Quote removed by Tom Raworth for further study].”

  10. ( )

  11. (

  12. )

  13. There’s no blank like the present.

  14.

  DRAWING A BLANK

  IT’S NO LONGER BLANK

  15. Blank Stare

  16. The anoriginal space between versions (translation & source, text & performance, cup & lip) is the grace of blankness.

  17. This section intentionally left blank.

  18. “Never give a sucker an even blank.”

  19. “Don’t blank on it.”

  20. “Don’t blank out on me. Not now.”

  20a. Her glance pierced me like blanks firing on an icy precipice.

  21. Goffman’s “disattend track” (Frame Analysis)

  22. In the blank of an eye.

  23. Drawing a blank (II):

  24. “The gap I mean.”

  25. MIND THE GAP