Monday, March 15, 2004

I like Aaron's little dog grid quite a bit, though I can't quite "read" it. I can see it as an index of the image, with the different dogs suggesting different emphases: the lower right dog seems to represent allegiance to the experience of representation (with the flash preserved); the upper left dog is a version of pointillism; the lower left dog is cubist or perhaps simply the will toward abstraction; and so on. But how these little dogs speak to "the mind's ear" is unclear to me; I can't hear them barking. Gary's version is more of a black hole (remember that Disney movie from the early eighties, The Black Hole? With the faceless robots? Scary!) representing perhaps poetry's infinite ability to lightlessly absorb grids. Which can hardly be gainsaid.

Flipping through Clayton Eshleman's new book Juniper Fuse, enraptured by his use of this Hart Crane quote. It's from a prose poem, "Havana Rose":
And during the wait over dinner at La Diana, the Doctor had saiid—who was American also—"You cannot heed the negative—, so might go on to underserved doom . . . must therefore loose yourself within a pattern's mastery that you can conceive, that you can yield to—by which also you win and gain that mastery and happiness which is your own from birth."
A beautiful dialectic of mastery and surrender; a twentieth century updating of Wyatt's "Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind."

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