"Whatever we may think of when we use that word [accessible], texts in general should be just the opposite. They should be less accessible, not more. Why? Because texts that make us work, texts that make us think and feel in unusual ways, texts that attempt to wake us in the midst of our dreaming, are more valuable epistemologically, ontologically, and sociopolitically than texts that make us feel warm, fuzzy, and forgetful.
"When I speak of renewing the writing of the Difficult Imagination, I am referring to the renewal of a narratological possibility space in which we are asked continuously to envision the text of the text, the text of our lives, and the text of the world other than they are. This interzone of impeded accessibility is an essential one for human freedom. In it, everything can and should be considered, attempted, troubled. What is important about its products is not whether they ultimately succeed or fail (whatever we may mean when we say those words). What is important is that they come into being often and widely, because in them we discover the perpetual manifestation of Nietzsche's notion of the unconditional, Derrida's of a privileged instability, Viktor Shklovsky's ambition for art, and Martin Heidegger's for philosophy: the return, through complexity and challenge (not predictability and ease) to perception and contemplation."
—Lance Olsen, Anxious Pleasures
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Reflect
On my most recent trip to Las Vegas. On midsummer's evanescent reach. On delight in my daughter that amplifies daily.
Living in prose if not quite for it. Wrote my first poem since the Ammons verse diary in our room on the twenty-second floor of the Bellagio thinking, as that town inclines me to do, about pleasure and the apocalypse. Vegas as sinking ship, Titanic, flocked to by the thousands who won't admit the party's over. Pleasures of the apocalypse. The poem is called "The Millions" (upper limit of thinkable quantities) and I think I'll write some more.
Looking for innovative fiction. Recommended to me: Lance Olsen, Shelley Jackson, Steve Tomasula. On my own I've found Lynne Tillman and Laird Hunt. More?
As far as the Oulipians go, I'm still midway through Jacques Roubaud's The Great Fire of London and have been meaning to pick up Perec's Life: A User's Manual. Will save A Void for the next void.
When I began with poetry I thought of it as a tool for discovering striking images. I didn't think about music, I just did it. And when I began with fiction (reading fiction) of course like everyone else I wanted to be taken away. The image was secondary to narrative, and music barely registered as a consideration.
Now when I write poetry I want to write what I think of as most fully proper to poetry, what it alone can accomplish. The effects, and poetic cognition, made possible primarily by putting pressure on syntax, appeal strongly to me. White space, line breaks, meter: the devices that shift and transform emphasis, that make an other(-ed)(-ing) syntax possible: for me that's what poetry is for.
But this is my Platonic ideal of poetry. My actual poems are fallen things, trapped in the slow-moving amber of a residual romanticism, and as such they often turn on images and micro-narrative (bits of local narrative that can function in the way proper to a poem, that is, as syntax) and macro-narrative (the transcendent electrical arc from the world I write about to the void variously filled by God, nature, capital, Spirit, the proletariat, history, etc., etc.).
If I feel a compulsion now toward fiction it may depend on a rebellion against my own powerful sense of decorum, expressed above as the sense of art's needing to focus on the territory proper to it. What's proper to the novel is heteroglossia and the mixing of genres: there is no form of textuality alien to it. I still remember the shock of pleasure from first reading Ulysses and discovering the Nighttown playscript and the newsroom headlines and the syntaxe féminine of Molly Bloom. And the songs, of course, which I was already accustomed to thanks to Tolkien.
Plus I may as well admit rediscovering the sheer pleasures of storytelling. I create a character and he or she begins to talk, or I talk about him or her, and a world unfurls. It's no different than a poem in that sense except that the characters exist together in a different way than poems do (but I remember Jack Spicer's claim that "poems cannot live alone any more than we can," his argument for writing in terms of books rather than individual lyrics, one-night stands). I think Bakhtin was essentially right when he argued that the poem is monoglossic and tends toward purity. You can do a lot of interesting things poetically by trying to subvert that—by insisting on a heteroglossic lyric, for instance—but in novel-writing I feel there's less resistance and one can just go.
I want to write the novel only a poet could write.
I want to transgress my sense of decorum through radical fidelity to it.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Return to Prose
The verse diary experiment is over, for now. I intended to write every day that I was in Ithaca, and I more or less succeeded. The diary did not quite coincide with the entire month of June because the last two days were devoted to travel: those days then, by definition, are in excess of, are binding upon, the project as an Ithaca project.
It is interesting and unsurprising, or perhaps surprising but uninteresting, that overall readership was down while I was posting only verse. I am not unsympathetic: I have trouble reading poetry on the Web, especially the kind of poetry I was doing (uninterrupted verse blocks in rough tetrameter that require the reader to scroll downward seemingly interminably). Web poems are optimally viewed complete on a single screen. To my knowledge an intuitive technology replicating that crucial bit of kinetic-sensory information provided by the paper book or magazine—the fingertips' knowledge of how much longer a poem or section or chapter or book is—has yet to be discovered.
As far as the novel goes (I spoke of it in verse, but to speak of it here in prose feels finally and ultimately disclosive) I seem to have entered a new phase in its composition. The first 50,000 words were written on my computer, but for the past week I've been writing in longhand in a notebook. The sensory pleasure of this is muted but persistent. I recently switched notebooks, as well: the roughly 4 x 8 Moleskine with ruled pages that I've been slowly filling for the past two years (since well before Sadie was born) has been replaced with a much larger and thinner notebook, also a Moleskine, without lines, so that to open it up is to behold a vast clean field (but not too clean: the paper is less white than the old notebook, it has a buff sort of tone that provides a bit of pleasing resistance or texture for the eye to catch hold of). Writing without lines, on broad pages, with a black fine point Pilot roller ball pen, I feel the prose moving ineffably toward the condition of poetry, not so much in its content (for there are still characters, actions, voices, and all the other trappings of narrative) but in process, its dreamlike unfolding, one word or sentence suggesting the next.
Intoxicated mornings like this morning, sitting in mixed sunshine outside the Bros. K coffeehouse, my hand swimming across and down the page, a nearly pure experience. Just to write, to go on writing, is enough. The project, the product, seems incidental to that experience.
When I can't write any more I read Badiou (or, strictly speaking, about Badiou: I had to retreat from Being and Event to Peter Hallward's introduction, Badiou: A Subject to Truth. But I've ordered two books I'm told I'll find more congenial to my purposes: The Century and Handbook of Inasethetics). Through the fantasia of mathematics as ontology he promises to deliver us from postmodernism and theory and endless heuristics toward Truth. I am skeptical but compelled. The chapter on Badiou's aesthetics (or inaesthetics) is very suggestive, and I've been musing over the polarity he sets up between Mallarmé (the poet of pure subtraction, whose objects become pure language and form, and whose subject, the speaker, disappears) and Rimbaud or more intriguingly Pessoa (the poet of substitution [I am tempted in Pessoa's case to say multiplication]), who proliferates objects but subjects them to a rigorous syntax (such as, I think, procedural poetry, Oulipian games) and of course multiplies and so disperses the subject (Je est en autre, or Senhores Caeiro, Reis and de Campos).
It is tempting to analogize or homologize this polarity to the conceptualism/baroque (flarf) polarity set up by Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place in Notes on Conceptualisms. The goal of both poetics, as articulated by Place-Fitterman, is the defeat of mastery, which I take to be very similar to Badiou's desire to defeat the count-as-one. "Subtracted from all habitual familiarity, a poem leaves everyone equally confounded. Without concern for the conventional requirement of language users, poetry affirms the pure 'sovereignty of language' [Petit manuel d'inésthétique 161]" (Hallward 198). This is not a new idea—it is fundamentally a Mallarméan idea. And I see a direct line from the "pure 'sovereignty of language'" of Mallarmé to the austerities of conceptual writing, in which the object is diminished in the name of the word, and the word-object is diminished in the name of the concept. But I'm more interested, and more temperamentally suited (as a writer, though perhaps not as a thinker), to the possibilities of the baroque, and what seems to be Badiou's way of thinking about the possibilities of substitution and the plural as means of pushing the poem toward its necessary and heroic failures (its escapes, its lines of flight from conventional, prepackaged, commodified experience). This also veers a bit from Badiou's emphasis on purity, which I find, quite frankly, to be creepy.
The summer will go very fast, but it is necessary to me to treat at least the next several weeks—before August—as though I had all the time in the world.
Monday, July 06, 2009
6/28
No view: full dark: so this
is goodbye, Ithaca, a month
made shorter in retrospect
in the killing of visible time
in the watches of the night
and the gone-by reckoned up
in pictures taken on camera phones
but mostly in the words—between me and Emily,
between me and you, and the books
I’ve read or managed to dip into:
Ammiel Alcalay, A.R. Ammons,
Badiou, Bernadette Mayer,
Codrescu, Andre,
Donna Stonecipher,
Fanny Howe, Allen
Grossman (chose not to review),
Jacques Roubaud, Juliana Spahr,
Lynne Tillman, Jonathan
Monroe, Fitterman &
Place, Jacques
Roubaud, Monique
Truong (all of three pages), one
month’s constellation to color
my memory of an inward time
in a place that demands little formal attention
except perhaps to the weather, which careful
readers will have noted to be unseasonably
cool and rainy with only the last couple
of days at all summerlike: rain
this evening, but hot and bright this morning
so that the three of could sit
at the flat rocky knees of Cascadilla Falls
and put our feet in the water: indescribable material
happiness of watching Sadie at first
in doubt, bending her knees
to keep out of cold water, then touching
with fingers, then sitting in only a shirt
at the water’s edge dangling both feet
with a grin reflecting the sunlight
in lemon slivers on the surface of
live water. Meantime the world
wobbles on: tense quiet in Iran, we
may not know for years what to do
with the pictures we’ve seen and words
we’ve read, yet I feel sure that someday
that regime will fall and however long that takes
they’ll look back on June 2009 and say
the revolution started here: we are called
to revolution again and again, to fulfill
what may have been empty or cynical promises,
to take words literally that if taken as words
do nothing to hold back a sea of troubles:
in short, be the sea, be part of your time
and if impoverished be impoverished
with it: rich or poor, like Croesus unable
to know if you’re lucky until after
you’re dead: rich as Croesus I’ll rise
tomorrow with my little family and get into
the car, stop for one last cup of really
excellent coffee, and drive to Cleveland:
an old friend, Sarah Gridley, visionary
poet, awaits us there, and the next day
will take us home, set us down
on the fringes of an enormous local history
that we’ll try to be a part of, suffer
and grow, don’t take it too big, don’t
expect to be small. The only weather
is Sadie’s sound machine plus the whizz
of a fan, but let me try before sleep
to interpret the dark: dim window
through leaves at an angle down the street
to accompany night air soft with car sounds
moist as breath but cool, even,
and the faintest sense, brought by that window
of movement out there, motion made coherent
by its invisibility, and now as I lean forward
a streetlamp slides its light down powerlines
into the cloudlike bank of a leaf cluster
each leaf with a surface one visible one
invisible, neither more real than the other
or less. Night’s calling. Farewell
to an idea of myself as out of time
and out of place: I’m ready, brink
of leaving, to be here.
is goodbye, Ithaca, a month
made shorter in retrospect
in the killing of visible time
in the watches of the night
and the gone-by reckoned up
in pictures taken on camera phones
but mostly in the words—between me and Emily,
between me and you, and the books
I’ve read or managed to dip into:
Ammiel Alcalay, A.R. Ammons,
Badiou, Bernadette Mayer,
Codrescu, Andre,
Donna Stonecipher,
Fanny Howe, Allen
Grossman (chose not to review),
Jacques Roubaud, Juliana Spahr,
Lynne Tillman, Jonathan
Monroe, Fitterman &
Place, Jacques
Roubaud, Monique
Truong (all of three pages), one
month’s constellation to color
my memory of an inward time
in a place that demands little formal attention
except perhaps to the weather, which careful
readers will have noted to be unseasonably
cool and rainy with only the last couple
of days at all summerlike: rain
this evening, but hot and bright this morning
so that the three of could sit
at the flat rocky knees of Cascadilla Falls
and put our feet in the water: indescribable material
happiness of watching Sadie at first
in doubt, bending her knees
to keep out of cold water, then touching
with fingers, then sitting in only a shirt
at the water’s edge dangling both feet
with a grin reflecting the sunlight
in lemon slivers on the surface of
live water. Meantime the world
wobbles on: tense quiet in Iran, we
may not know for years what to do
with the pictures we’ve seen and words
we’ve read, yet I feel sure that someday
that regime will fall and however long that takes
they’ll look back on June 2009 and say
the revolution started here: we are called
to revolution again and again, to fulfill
what may have been empty or cynical promises,
to take words literally that if taken as words
do nothing to hold back a sea of troubles:
in short, be the sea, be part of your time
and if impoverished be impoverished
with it: rich or poor, like Croesus unable
to know if you’re lucky until after
you’re dead: rich as Croesus I’ll rise
tomorrow with my little family and get into
the car, stop for one last cup of really
excellent coffee, and drive to Cleveland:
an old friend, Sarah Gridley, visionary
poet, awaits us there, and the next day
will take us home, set us down
on the fringes of an enormous local history
that we’ll try to be a part of, suffer
and grow, don’t take it too big, don’t
expect to be small. The only weather
is Sadie’s sound machine plus the whizz
of a fan, but let me try before sleep
to interpret the dark: dim window
through leaves at an angle down the street
to accompany night air soft with car sounds
moist as breath but cool, even,
and the faintest sense, brought by that window
of movement out there, motion made coherent
by its invisibility, and now as I lean forward
a streetlamp slides its light down powerlines
into the cloudlike bank of a leaf cluster
each leaf with a surface one visible one
invisible, neither more real than the other
or less. Night’s calling. Farewell
to an idea of myself as out of time
and out of place: I’m ready, brink
of leaving, to be here.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Thursday, July 02, 2009
6/26
In the margins of Sadie’s nap
on a humid day with some sun
raising the ante after thunderstorms
this morning and to judge from the cloud
cover in the northwest we may not be out
of the woods yet (yes, this be the verse
supple enough for cliches, as it encompasses
dailiness on the level of toenail clippings
and the umbrella I forgot, then recovered
from the bagel place this morning—not
to mention world events that I have as small
a chance of hammering to the scaffold
of words as I do the ephemeral and all else
of a nature to be missed, lived). More time
in the archives today in strange intimacy
with the dead, Ammons, A.R., his papers
neatly ordered in boxes and folders such
as only the most neurotic person organizes
in life: reading letters, unpublished prose
autobiographies written on yellow
pads, and—but the baby’s awake, I’ll
resume without break here but impalpable
hours shall pass in the meantime:
well! the weather has made a complete
cycle: we went for a walk under
lowering skies with thunder trundling overhead
and made it home just in time to watch the rain
from the porch rather than get drenched:
cats and dogs (uh-huh) and strong winds
took precedence but as the afternoon wore
into evening the clouds broke up
and now with Sadie down for the night
sunlight is spreading long wings
over the back porch and the roofs
of my neighbors to the immediate east:
also had dinner already with my daughter
(we both had spaghetti but I wasn’t the one
who rubbed it all over my mouth and
cheeks) and in a bit Brad will be over,
the mathematician-cum-Blake scholar
and we’ll talk about our work and drink
beers: it’s a good life in the present
tense though you’ll notice I’m actually
either living in the immediate past or else
anticipating: so it goes, we’ve already seen
what happens if I describe each line
by line, though I will mention a steady dripping
somewhere to my left, residue of rainwater
that very occasionally syncopates itself
with a double drop, so if that particular branch
or eave isn’t living in the past, what is:
what I’ve come to like about this kind of writing
is the forward progression or I should say digression:
it’s not exactly narrative but writing every day
enforces a certain order while permitting a certain
freedom to predominate: the illusion
that anything can and will go into the poem:
very different from my novel in which plot
to my surprise is suddenly strongly
asserting itself: that’s fine but let it be
just one piece of the puzzle, not a master
that claims language for its slave: I want
as I’ve said elsewhere always to be writing poetry
by which I don’t mean poetry but that freedom
that discovers its law. Play with paradoxes means
it’s time for another natural observation
but I can’t identify the birdsong only register
that it’s binaural, play for each of my ears
short chirps on the one side long pitches
on the other and the summer evening
just goes on, persists in making felt
the internal tensions of its name.
on a humid day with some sun
raising the ante after thunderstorms
this morning and to judge from the cloud
cover in the northwest we may not be out
of the woods yet (yes, this be the verse
supple enough for cliches, as it encompasses
dailiness on the level of toenail clippings
and the umbrella I forgot, then recovered
from the bagel place this morning—not
to mention world events that I have as small
a chance of hammering to the scaffold
of words as I do the ephemeral and all else
of a nature to be missed, lived). More time
in the archives today in strange intimacy
with the dead, Ammons, A.R., his papers
neatly ordered in boxes and folders such
as only the most neurotic person organizes
in life: reading letters, unpublished prose
autobiographies written on yellow
pads, and—but the baby’s awake, I’ll
resume without break here but impalpable
hours shall pass in the meantime:
well! the weather has made a complete
cycle: we went for a walk under
lowering skies with thunder trundling overhead
and made it home just in time to watch the rain
from the porch rather than get drenched:
cats and dogs (uh-huh) and strong winds
took precedence but as the afternoon wore
into evening the clouds broke up
and now with Sadie down for the night
sunlight is spreading long wings
over the back porch and the roofs
of my neighbors to the immediate east:
also had dinner already with my daughter
(we both had spaghetti but I wasn’t the one
who rubbed it all over my mouth and
cheeks) and in a bit Brad will be over,
the mathematician-cum-Blake scholar
and we’ll talk about our work and drink
beers: it’s a good life in the present
tense though you’ll notice I’m actually
either living in the immediate past or else
anticipating: so it goes, we’ve already seen
what happens if I describe each line
by line, though I will mention a steady dripping
somewhere to my left, residue of rainwater
that very occasionally syncopates itself
with a double drop, so if that particular branch
or eave isn’t living in the past, what is:
what I’ve come to like about this kind of writing
is the forward progression or I should say digression:
it’s not exactly narrative but writing every day
enforces a certain order while permitting a certain
freedom to predominate: the illusion
that anything can and will go into the poem:
very different from my novel in which plot
to my surprise is suddenly strongly
asserting itself: that’s fine but let it be
just one piece of the puzzle, not a master
that claims language for its slave: I want
as I’ve said elsewhere always to be writing poetry
by which I don’t mean poetry but that freedom
that discovers its law. Play with paradoxes means
it’s time for another natural observation
but I can’t identify the birdsong only register
that it’s binaural, play for each of my ears
short chirps on the one side long pitches
on the other and the summer evening
just goes on, persists in making felt
the internal tensions of its name.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
6/25
Sometimes it’s as if a little
of the universal chaos or chora,
force of making and unmaking, makes
itself felt locally: I’m talking
about the thunderstorm that ripped through
the area a couple of hours ago
while we were at Erica and Joey’s place
out in Newfield, splitting trees
and raining whole branches down on the roads
and lawns. And the mischief
goes further than that, reaching out
with malevolent hand
to touch a pair of icons: Farrah
Fawcett’s gone as of this morning
and I just looked on the Times website
and Michael Jackson, the so-called
King of Pop, has died in Los Angeles
at age 50 from unknown causes (read:
his whole sad twisted and talented
life did him in). Which is stranger:
I’m just a little too old to have imprinted sexually
on Farrah’s red swimsuit poster and missed
for the most part the original Charlie’s Angels
so all I know of her is an iconicity
that outlasted her career and will likely
outlast her. MJ on the other hand
has always been there, his big little voice
ringing out ABC 123 when I was a kid
(I remember the Jackson 5 cartoon)
never listened much to Off the Wall but
one of the first CDs my family owned
alongside a Men at Work and a Donald
Fagen was Thriller, which I listened to
over and over on the brink of puberty
till I became convinced for a while that
real musicians played guitars whereas Michael
only had his voice and whippet body
so I pushed away from that music and missed out
for too long on the greatness of Prince
taking him for MJ redux: all moot now,
like that face consumed by its white noselessness
a fate worse than Elvis
has cast a pall on the innocent day.
Not so innocent: the clerics in Iran
tighten their grip so that I remember
that Bulgarian girl from Casablanca
telling Rick “the devil has the people
by the throat.” My day’s only prosaic
down deep in Kroch Library with Ammons’
papers, reading letters people wrote
to him and looking at the typescript drafts
for The Snow Poems and Glare:
he did very little revision
on the tape poems, which have no margins at all
and sometimes lose parts of letters
to the black roll of the typewriter
whereas The Snow Poems are heavily inscribed
with handwritten marginalia some of which
made it into the final book. It
was poorly reviewed and represents
for Ammons perhaps a road not further taken
into linguistic experiment: what I take away
from it and from the drafts and some
of the other writings is a real sense
of his loneliness: it’s as if
he wagered all he had on poetry, like a
Rimbaud who never quit, and
the results, for his life at least, disappoint:
he lets a lot hang out in The
Snow Poems, obsessive chat
about cunnilingus and cornholing,
his lack of need for neighbors, most
of all his ability to stare at snow, a tolerance
for the void in which he felt certain
freedoms for which he willingly paid
everything. I seem to need something
to look at even if it’s just a few a trees
and bushes, the simple palette
of this window: green, reddish black, white
side of a house, sky mixing
blue and white as in a paintcan.
Sadie resplendent in two different dresses
one for the morning, one for the afternoon
but what illuminates my heart is her face
that seems to float and bobble on that
fast-growing body, all legs and little belly:
the eyes making a slow but permanent transition
from blue to hazel, eyes that seem to see more
for all her necessarily diminished understanding.
This poem most of all is for her,
that center that hurtles me away.
of the universal chaos or chora,
force of making and unmaking, makes
itself felt locally: I’m talking
about the thunderstorm that ripped through
the area a couple of hours ago
while we were at Erica and Joey’s place
out in Newfield, splitting trees
and raining whole branches down on the roads
and lawns. And the mischief
goes further than that, reaching out
with malevolent hand
to touch a pair of icons: Farrah
Fawcett’s gone as of this morning
and I just looked on the Times website
and Michael Jackson, the so-called
King of Pop, has died in Los Angeles
at age 50 from unknown causes (read:
his whole sad twisted and talented
life did him in). Which is stranger:
I’m just a little too old to have imprinted sexually
on Farrah’s red swimsuit poster and missed
for the most part the original Charlie’s Angels
so all I know of her is an iconicity
that outlasted her career and will likely
outlast her. MJ on the other hand
has always been there, his big little voice
ringing out ABC 123 when I was a kid
(I remember the Jackson 5 cartoon)
never listened much to Off the Wall but
one of the first CDs my family owned
alongside a Men at Work and a Donald
Fagen was Thriller, which I listened to
over and over on the brink of puberty
till I became convinced for a while that
real musicians played guitars whereas Michael
only had his voice and whippet body
so I pushed away from that music and missed out
for too long on the greatness of Prince
taking him for MJ redux: all moot now,
like that face consumed by its white noselessness
a fate worse than Elvis
has cast a pall on the innocent day.
Not so innocent: the clerics in Iran
tighten their grip so that I remember
that Bulgarian girl from Casablanca
telling Rick “the devil has the people
by the throat.” My day’s only prosaic
down deep in Kroch Library with Ammons’
papers, reading letters people wrote
to him and looking at the typescript drafts
for The Snow Poems and Glare:
he did very little revision
on the tape poems, which have no margins at all
and sometimes lose parts of letters
to the black roll of the typewriter
whereas The Snow Poems are heavily inscribed
with handwritten marginalia some of which
made it into the final book. It
was poorly reviewed and represents
for Ammons perhaps a road not further taken
into linguistic experiment: what I take away
from it and from the drafts and some
of the other writings is a real sense
of his loneliness: it’s as if
he wagered all he had on poetry, like a
Rimbaud who never quit, and
the results, for his life at least, disappoint:
he lets a lot hang out in The
Snow Poems, obsessive chat
about cunnilingus and cornholing,
his lack of need for neighbors, most
of all his ability to stare at snow, a tolerance
for the void in which he felt certain
freedoms for which he willingly paid
everything. I seem to need something
to look at even if it’s just a few a trees
and bushes, the simple palette
of this window: green, reddish black, white
side of a house, sky mixing
blue and white as in a paintcan.
Sadie resplendent in two different dresses
one for the morning, one for the afternoon
but what illuminates my heart is her face
that seems to float and bobble on that
fast-growing body, all legs and little belly:
the eyes making a slow but permanent transition
from blue to hazel, eyes that seem to see more
for all her necessarily diminished understanding.
This poem most of all is for her,
that center that hurtles me away.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
6/24
Breeze from the sun on Ho
Plaza high above Ithaca on the Cornell
campus: I think eastward ho:
there’s something vaguely Maoist
about that name, a gathering place
hardly revolutionary, a concrete
climb past chapel and student center
to the two big libraries
and beyond them the Arts and Sciences
quad: strangely unstrange
to be back here where I was a student
for the last time—now I’m a prof
(E. Bishop: you are one of them) and life
has moved more or less smoothly
along a gentle arc whose fierceness
is mine to discover probably too late
the first time my back goes out or
my daughter screams she hates me
or I come to feel, as now I could never feel,
that I’ve read all the books. Youth
yet obtains perched here on a rock wall
watching people in their early to mid twenties
pass by on the way to summer classes
or to study or otherwise to maintain fidelity
to some idea of themselves as exceptional
in this little city on a hill
above the other little city
in the raked declivities of these lakes
where the collective gravity seems to flow
ineluctably southeast toward the Hudson
and New York, where history or at least fashion
work hard at being visible. Birds
call to each other and whole branches
of trees disclose a sense of idyllic
height, above earthly concerns and yet
so clearly of the earth, the worked harmony
of ivy and stone, lawns left a little ragged,
clear isolate shadows cast by a sun
that makes itself scarce in the winter months
when the real grind happens and the mental
and actual bodies pause
before hurling or not hurling themselves over bridges
into the famous gorges. A few days
remain, we won’t quite outlast the month
before packing into the car
and returning to Chicago. What
will I miss but this moment
if I go on thinking about moments
to come, split from the seeming unity
of being and typing without looking
so I can see how still the Victorian
lamppost there is against the motile
background of shrubbery: BAM
the chime just sounded from the clock tower
to my right: it’s suffocatingly loud, always
vexed me as a student how a supposed shrine
to learning insists on disrupting your concentration
with hellish peals on the quarter-hour
and that’s not even to mention
the childish songs played childishly every day
which go on for endless minutes, one
off key note at a time:
“Here Comes the Sun” and the alma mater
busting open your book of theory
till there’s nothing left to do
but start the long downhill home.
In a bit I’ll disappear into the archives
to get a taste of Archie’s materialism:
they’ve got the tape for the turn of the year
down there and innumerable other documents
typed and handwritten and crisping
under the effects of oxygen in spite
of the archivists’ efforts: I’ll behold
one of the last generations
to leave an authentic paper trail: if
someone ever wants to study my work
they’ll have to somehow simulate conditions
of digitality no doubt more ephemeral
than the letters and manuscripts that await me:
I envision powerful simulators
of different decades in digital evolution
to render environments of information
as they appeared to the ancients, us.
Will the sky I feel above me
or the view I know’s behind that tower
of the lake be any more durable?
Both feet falling asleep
and the morning has passed me by.
Plaza high above Ithaca on the Cornell
campus: I think eastward ho:
there’s something vaguely Maoist
about that name, a gathering place
hardly revolutionary, a concrete
climb past chapel and student center
to the two big libraries
and beyond them the Arts and Sciences
quad: strangely unstrange
to be back here where I was a student
for the last time—now I’m a prof
(E. Bishop: you are one of them) and life
has moved more or less smoothly
along a gentle arc whose fierceness
is mine to discover probably too late
the first time my back goes out or
my daughter screams she hates me
or I come to feel, as now I could never feel,
that I’ve read all the books. Youth
yet obtains perched here on a rock wall
watching people in their early to mid twenties
pass by on the way to summer classes
or to study or otherwise to maintain fidelity
to some idea of themselves as exceptional
in this little city on a hill
above the other little city
in the raked declivities of these lakes
where the collective gravity seems to flow
ineluctably southeast toward the Hudson
and New York, where history or at least fashion
work hard at being visible. Birds
call to each other and whole branches
of trees disclose a sense of idyllic
height, above earthly concerns and yet
so clearly of the earth, the worked harmony
of ivy and stone, lawns left a little ragged,
clear isolate shadows cast by a sun
that makes itself scarce in the winter months
when the real grind happens and the mental
and actual bodies pause
before hurling or not hurling themselves over bridges
into the famous gorges. A few days
remain, we won’t quite outlast the month
before packing into the car
and returning to Chicago. What
will I miss but this moment
if I go on thinking about moments
to come, split from the seeming unity
of being and typing without looking
so I can see how still the Victorian
lamppost there is against the motile
background of shrubbery: BAM
the chime just sounded from the clock tower
to my right: it’s suffocatingly loud, always
vexed me as a student how a supposed shrine
to learning insists on disrupting your concentration
with hellish peals on the quarter-hour
and that’s not even to mention
the childish songs played childishly every day
which go on for endless minutes, one
off key note at a time:
“Here Comes the Sun” and the alma mater
busting open your book of theory
till there’s nothing left to do
but start the long downhill home.
In a bit I’ll disappear into the archives
to get a taste of Archie’s materialism:
they’ve got the tape for the turn of the year
down there and innumerable other documents
typed and handwritten and crisping
under the effects of oxygen in spite
of the archivists’ efforts: I’ll behold
one of the last generations
to leave an authentic paper trail: if
someone ever wants to study my work
they’ll have to somehow simulate conditions
of digitality no doubt more ephemeral
than the letters and manuscripts that await me:
I envision powerful simulators
of different decades in digital evolution
to render environments of information
as they appeared to the ancients, us.
Will the sky I feel above me
or the view I know’s behind that tower
of the lake be any more durable?
Both feet falling asleep
and the morning has passed me by.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
6/23
Sunset: red eye peering
through the maple branches that blinks
and winks with the subtle movements
of my own eyes, the air weighing
on the leaves. Another shining morning
spent with Sadie walking up and down
the streets of Fall Creek, marred only
by intense allergies that made my eyes
itch and my nose drip. They itch, drip
still. Lunch at Chilis, of all places—it’s
the secret getaway of Jonathan Monroe,
comp lit prof and prose poet, author of
the just released Demosthenes’ Legacy
from Ahadada Books in Canada: his first
book of poems, he’s pleased as punch.
(Or is that Punch, as in Punch and
Judy? My mother’s name was Judy
but if anyone had a punch in that house,
it was her. End of digression.) We
talked about teaching, Cornell’s
financial troubles, and such: it’s
strange to see how completely we’ve shifted
out from the mentor-mentee relationship
into something like simple friendship
and respect. Still shocked
at times to discover myself a grown-up
with gray hairs sneaking in like silver
tendrils. Up to campus afterward
to spend a fortuitous gift card
at the bookstore I received
for purchasing ten books during my time there:
a new book of poems by Roubaud, Exchanges
on Light, translated by Eleni
Sikelianos; a novel I’ve long wanted to read,
especially because my own is partly set
in Trieste, Zeno’s Conscience; and a vade
mecum to swim in and object to, James
Wood’s How Fiction Works. Isn’t he
a Brit after all, isn’t he going fundamentally
to have a conservative if not theologically
possessive take on a genre his countrymen
pretend they invented (c.f. Cervantes,
fella): still I glanced into it and fell
a bit in love with his prose and
his own honesty about his two favorite critics,
Jakobson and Barthes, whose work cuts
entirely against his own grain as he joyfully
admits: so I can do him the same favor
and maybe learn something. But when
I’m going to read all that when I’m
still slogging through The Great Fire
of London and half-a-dozen other books,
plus my review of The Cosmopolitan,
and only a few days left to dig
whatever I can of Ammons on Ammons’
own turf, I just don’t know. A little
time’s left to me tonight before sleep:
for a change I already did my half-
an-hour’s labor on the novel instead of
procrastinating it like usual: it’s
such a pleasure to write and yet every day
feels like raw beginning with all the pain
of breaking new: speaking of beginnings
I was charmed by Susan Stewart’s lecture
which touched on the question of beginning
and on the relationship of creation
to the two freedoms, negative (freedom from)
and positive (freedom to): making
the point that so often when we create
we begin with negation: if we aren’t captured whole
by some tradition we look at tradition
and say that’s not what I shall do
and like Hegel’s slave we empty ourselves out
laboring in someone else’s rebellious vineyard:
positive freedom from the artist is easily mistaken
for ignorance, as in the case of certain students
who say they don’t want to read other poets
for fear of being influenced: they’re dumb
like foxes crazy to preserve
their sense of liberty, so they’re not wrong
but what’s right is to know, to lose your innocence
of what’s come before in art and what’s expected
and yet somehow to begin anywhere as Stewart said
so that the new must be a wager, an act
of faith based on imperfect information, or rather
on the setting aside of such information,
not the same as rejecting information and wallowing
in ignorance. I think Badiou
would agree, but I didn’t ask her
about it: the Q&A was dragging on
and I had to get home to give a bath to my little girl
and sit on the bed with her and Emily
and sing about the mighty jungle
and be here alone now while Emily’s out with a friend
having made spaghetti for dinner having written
what I need to write to feel free
to read or stare out the window or even
to be. Write some more.
through the maple branches that blinks
and winks with the subtle movements
of my own eyes, the air weighing
on the leaves. Another shining morning
spent with Sadie walking up and down
the streets of Fall Creek, marred only
by intense allergies that made my eyes
itch and my nose drip. They itch, drip
still. Lunch at Chilis, of all places—it’s
the secret getaway of Jonathan Monroe,
comp lit prof and prose poet, author of
the just released Demosthenes’ Legacy
from Ahadada Books in Canada: his first
book of poems, he’s pleased as punch.
(Or is that Punch, as in Punch and
Judy? My mother’s name was Judy
but if anyone had a punch in that house,
it was her. End of digression.) We
talked about teaching, Cornell’s
financial troubles, and such: it’s
strange to see how completely we’ve shifted
out from the mentor-mentee relationship
into something like simple friendship
and respect. Still shocked
at times to discover myself a grown-up
with gray hairs sneaking in like silver
tendrils. Up to campus afterward
to spend a fortuitous gift card
at the bookstore I received
for purchasing ten books during my time there:
a new book of poems by Roubaud, Exchanges
on Light, translated by Eleni
Sikelianos; a novel I’ve long wanted to read,
especially because my own is partly set
in Trieste, Zeno’s Conscience; and a vade
mecum to swim in and object to, James
Wood’s How Fiction Works. Isn’t he
a Brit after all, isn’t he going fundamentally
to have a conservative if not theologically
possessive take on a genre his countrymen
pretend they invented (c.f. Cervantes,
fella): still I glanced into it and fell
a bit in love with his prose and
his own honesty about his two favorite critics,
Jakobson and Barthes, whose work cuts
entirely against his own grain as he joyfully
admits: so I can do him the same favor
and maybe learn something. But when
I’m going to read all that when I’m
still slogging through The Great Fire
of London and half-a-dozen other books,
plus my review of The Cosmopolitan,
and only a few days left to dig
whatever I can of Ammons on Ammons’
own turf, I just don’t know. A little
time’s left to me tonight before sleep:
for a change I already did my half-
an-hour’s labor on the novel instead of
procrastinating it like usual: it’s
such a pleasure to write and yet every day
feels like raw beginning with all the pain
of breaking new: speaking of beginnings
I was charmed by Susan Stewart’s lecture
which touched on the question of beginning
and on the relationship of creation
to the two freedoms, negative (freedom from)
and positive (freedom to): making
the point that so often when we create
we begin with negation: if we aren’t captured whole
by some tradition we look at tradition
and say that’s not what I shall do
and like Hegel’s slave we empty ourselves out
laboring in someone else’s rebellious vineyard:
positive freedom from the artist is easily mistaken
for ignorance, as in the case of certain students
who say they don’t want to read other poets
for fear of being influenced: they’re dumb
like foxes crazy to preserve
their sense of liberty, so they’re not wrong
but what’s right is to know, to lose your innocence
of what’s come before in art and what’s expected
and yet somehow to begin anywhere as Stewart said
so that the new must be a wager, an act
of faith based on imperfect information, or rather
on the setting aside of such information,
not the same as rejecting information and wallowing
in ignorance. I think Badiou
would agree, but I didn’t ask her
about it: the Q&A was dragging on
and I had to get home to give a bath to my little girl
and sit on the bed with her and Emily
and sing about the mighty jungle
and be here alone now while Emily’s out with a friend
having made spaghetti for dinner having written
what I need to write to feel free
to read or stare out the window or even
to be. Write some more.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
6/22
A pink cloud lent dignity by purple shadows
rises serenely behind the red maple, turned black,
that I can see from this window, and that maple
I now realize has a brother: two fine wine-
colored trees that dignify the facade
of the crumpled white firetrap of a house
they stand in front of. Spent the morning
with Sadie, trundling down the hill after breakfast
to get me a coffee and her some time
in the park, getting the cuffs and butt
of her pants wet with yesterday’s rain:
then to visit my old employer, Buffalo
Street Books née Bookery II, where Sadie
was hoping to see Gary’s old white Lab Harry
but Harry, it seems, though ever docile
and sleepy to my remembrance has
a record of snapping at smaller dogs
and so he’s been banned from the store and needs
a new home: anyone in the area who can love
a generous old dog with some quirks
can call the store and ask about it
during business hours. Sadie had herself a poop
so I changed her diaper and then we looked in
at Pastimes the antique store/junk shop
where she was properly ravished by a box of seashells
and an even bigger box of buttons of all descriptions:
blue plastic, brass, pewter, black with rhinestones:
the physical world is more than enough for her
and me too while I’m with her, all that appears
seems to withhold nothing of being
worth grasping, and yet there are basic things
available only to reason, like the sun
as source of all light, not just the light in the sky
but the light from fossil fuels and from wood burning
and of course the eye itself as Ronald Johnson
so beautifully puts it in BEAM 4 of ARK “may
be said to be the sun in other form”:
Sadie just looks, standing in DeWitt Park
as the tree shadows appear and disappear
as the sun makes itself felt and fades again
behind slowly dispersing cloud cover
and she says simply Sun, Sun. So the sun
I see insists on present tense, but it was later
that we got a truly beautiful day going
with high fleets of clouds parading without interrupting
the strong light that warmed everything
and made a kind of invisible steam come up
that made me want to change into shorts, which I did.
Home for lunch and a good bit of tickling
(not too soon after eating) before it was time
for a nap for both of us: funny how kids show they’re tired
by manifesting more energy than ever, like the sun
will at the moment it exhausts its hydrogen fuel
and expand into a red giant that obliterates
everything we’ve thought possible up to now
except for a few science fiction writers, hack
conservators of ultimate hope beyond theology:
Sadie doesn’t explode but she does become uncontainable
by anything except sleep, which comes swiftly
after reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar
and being laid down in the crib with the sound machine going:
me by contrast being what’s called a grown-up
moving slower and more heavily as I run out of gas
and yet when I’m horizontal with eyes closed
that’s when my own giant comes to visit
and thoughts big or just persistent
fend sleep off for a while: but I got a few Zs
and some time in the afternoon to read
a book I’m reviewing that I like quite a bit,
Donna Stonecipher’s The Cosmopolitan:
won’t do that here but I’d love to review her name
which seems made up practically and I’ve even
appropriated it for my D&D character: practically
synonymous with lithograph, but with a secret
grafted, and the all-American Donna in front
is just too much: plus her bio says she grew up
“in Seattle and Teheran,” so talk about
cosmopolitan: does she have friends in Teheran
where today there was an enforced calm
that’s likely to bust wide open later in the week:
they’re carrying photos of murdered Neda
where they can and dodging Basiji (sounds
just like the English besieger)
but the regular cops are hesitant and even the
Revolutionary Guard seems split in spite of threats:
I’ll keep watching and hoping from my helpless
distance. Just got an e-mail from Roger
telling me Susan Stewart’s scheduled to speak
tomorrow: I’ll check that out: as a poet-scholar
she interests me though her verse
is a bit too laboriously beautifu:
the lecture’s called “The Freedom of the Poet”
which is the title of a book of John Berryman’s
essays: I certainly like the idea of my freedom
like my freedom to write or to not write
which is the freedom to not be a poet and
the freedom to be confusingly intermixed:
maybe she can clarify that for me
and it will be interesting too to be a student again
however briefly in good old Goldwin Smith.
Also having lunch with Jonathan
Monroe tomorrow, the most rigorous
of my old poetry profs and a prose poet to boot:
we have a long chat maybe once a year
and it always gives me something to think about
that subtly or even drastically
realigns the place I give to poetry and its opposites.
What those are I’ll leave for you
to imagine: it’s getting dark and there’s still a novel
to tap at and my wife I’d like to talk to
before the red sun grows
and sleep arrests us at last.
rises serenely behind the red maple, turned black,
that I can see from this window, and that maple
I now realize has a brother: two fine wine-
colored trees that dignify the facade
of the crumpled white firetrap of a house
they stand in front of. Spent the morning
with Sadie, trundling down the hill after breakfast
to get me a coffee and her some time
in the park, getting the cuffs and butt
of her pants wet with yesterday’s rain:
then to visit my old employer, Buffalo
Street Books née Bookery II, where Sadie
was hoping to see Gary’s old white Lab Harry
but Harry, it seems, though ever docile
and sleepy to my remembrance has
a record of snapping at smaller dogs
and so he’s been banned from the store and needs
a new home: anyone in the area who can love
a generous old dog with some quirks
can call the store and ask about it
during business hours. Sadie had herself a poop
so I changed her diaper and then we looked in
at Pastimes the antique store/junk shop
where she was properly ravished by a box of seashells
and an even bigger box of buttons of all descriptions:
blue plastic, brass, pewter, black with rhinestones:
the physical world is more than enough for her
and me too while I’m with her, all that appears
seems to withhold nothing of being
worth grasping, and yet there are basic things
available only to reason, like the sun
as source of all light, not just the light in the sky
but the light from fossil fuels and from wood burning
and of course the eye itself as Ronald Johnson
so beautifully puts it in BEAM 4 of ARK “may
be said to be the sun in other form”:
Sadie just looks, standing in DeWitt Park
as the tree shadows appear and disappear
as the sun makes itself felt and fades again
behind slowly dispersing cloud cover
and she says simply Sun, Sun. So the sun
I see insists on present tense, but it was later
that we got a truly beautiful day going
with high fleets of clouds parading without interrupting
the strong light that warmed everything
and made a kind of invisible steam come up
that made me want to change into shorts, which I did.
Home for lunch and a good bit of tickling
(not too soon after eating) before it was time
for a nap for both of us: funny how kids show they’re tired
by manifesting more energy than ever, like the sun
will at the moment it exhausts its hydrogen fuel
and expand into a red giant that obliterates
everything we’ve thought possible up to now
except for a few science fiction writers, hack
conservators of ultimate hope beyond theology:
Sadie doesn’t explode but she does become uncontainable
by anything except sleep, which comes swiftly
after reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar
and being laid down in the crib with the sound machine going:
me by contrast being what’s called a grown-up
moving slower and more heavily as I run out of gas
and yet when I’m horizontal with eyes closed
that’s when my own giant comes to visit
and thoughts big or just persistent
fend sleep off for a while: but I got a few Zs
and some time in the afternoon to read
a book I’m reviewing that I like quite a bit,
Donna Stonecipher’s The Cosmopolitan:
won’t do that here but I’d love to review her name
which seems made up practically and I’ve even
appropriated it for my D&D character: practically
synonymous with lithograph, but with a secret
grafted, and the all-American Donna in front
is just too much: plus her bio says she grew up
“in Seattle and Teheran,” so talk about
cosmopolitan: does she have friends in Teheran
where today there was an enforced calm
that’s likely to bust wide open later in the week:
they’re carrying photos of murdered Neda
where they can and dodging Basiji (sounds
just like the English besieger)
but the regular cops are hesitant and even the
Revolutionary Guard seems split in spite of threats:
I’ll keep watching and hoping from my helpless
distance. Just got an e-mail from Roger
telling me Susan Stewart’s scheduled to speak
tomorrow: I’ll check that out: as a poet-scholar
she interests me though her verse
is a bit too laboriously beautifu:
the lecture’s called “The Freedom of the Poet”
which is the title of a book of John Berryman’s
essays: I certainly like the idea of my freedom
like my freedom to write or to not write
which is the freedom to not be a poet and
the freedom to be confusingly intermixed:
maybe she can clarify that for me
and it will be interesting too to be a student again
however briefly in good old Goldwin Smith.
Also having lunch with Jonathan
Monroe tomorrow, the most rigorous
of my old poetry profs and a prose poet to boot:
we have a long chat maybe once a year
and it always gives me something to think about
that subtly or even drastically
realigns the place I give to poetry and its opposites.
What those are I’ll leave for you
to imagine: it’s getting dark and there’s still a novel
to tap at and my wife I’d like to talk to
before the red sun grows
and sleep arrests us at last.
Friday, June 26, 2009
6/21
for Neda
“I will
participate in the demonstrations
tomorrow. Maybe they
will turn violent. Maybe I will be one
of the people who
is going
to get killed. I’m listening
to all my favorite music. I even
want to dance to a few songs. I
always wanted to have very narrow
eyebrows. Yes, maybe
I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow!
There are a few great movie scenes
that I also have to see. I should
drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read
the poems of Forough and Shamloo
again. All family pictures
have to be reviewed, too. I have
to call my friends as well
to say goodbye.
All I have are two bookshelves
which I told my family who should
receive them. I’m two units away
from getting my bachelors degree
but who cares about that. My mind
is very chaotic. I wrote
these random sentences
for
the next generation
so they know
we were not just emotional
and under peer pressure. So they know
that we did everything we could
to create a better future for them.
So they know that our ancestors surrendered
to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender
to despotism. This note
is dedicated
to tomorrow’s children.”
“I will
participate in the demonstrations
tomorrow. Maybe they
will turn violent. Maybe I will be one
of the people who
is going
to get killed. I’m listening
to all my favorite music. I even
want to dance to a few songs. I
always wanted to have very narrow
eyebrows. Yes, maybe
I will go to the salon before I go tomorrow!
There are a few great movie scenes
that I also have to see. I should
drop by the library, too. It’s worth to read
the poems of Forough and Shamloo
again. All family pictures
have to be reviewed, too. I have
to call my friends as well
to say goodbye.
All I have are two bookshelves
which I told my family who should
receive them. I’m two units away
from getting my bachelors degree
but who cares about that. My mind
is very chaotic. I wrote
these random sentences
for
the next generation
so they know
we were not just emotional
and under peer pressure. So they know
that we did everything we could
to create a better future for them.
So they know that our ancestors surrendered
to Arabs and Mongols but did not surrender
to despotism. This note
is dedicated
to tomorrow’s children.”
Thursday, June 25, 2009
6/20
Rain today, from morning’s drizzle
to downpour on the tin roof over the stalls
at the farmers market to mist and damp
all afternoon long to the steady trickle
I see now out the downstairs living
room window. Kids are asleep
while Emily and her friends Jen and
Rachel go out to dinner, try
to reconnect across time, space:
friends from her New York City days,
when I didn’t know her, when I scarcely
knew myself: those fog-sopped years, the
Nineties—can barely resist the urge
to quote Auden on the Thirties, let
it go, low in the sense of ignoble for sure
and innocent in that word’s darkest sense
of willful blindness to what’s real.
Bad day in Tehran, with security forces
in huge numbers preventing protestors
from massing, yet all those ordinary people
are still afire, a green fire
that just might yet consume
an unjust regime: here’s hoping
and here’s to the e-mail
of one brave young woman that
I read this morning
who was preparing for today, possibly
the last day of her life, by
watching scenes from favorite movies
and reading Persian poetry: how young
she must be and I hope still is
but they’re shooting people now:
I saw a photo of another young woman in her chador
bleeding to death on the street: what
does it mean to give your life
for what you believe: Badiou
might say at that moment, not the moment of death
but of decision, you are a person for the first time
in the fullest and only truthful sense:
in politics art science and love
for Badiou those are the conditions of truth
and the only realms in which the novum
can happen: well, French philosophers
like to say things like that but it’s compelling
all the same to sit for a while
with a rigorous schema
that proposes access to the real
via thought and form: in that sense
my rediscovery here of content
is untimely: I should go back
to language happening for its own sake
and pursue the naked forms
through which contact is made (contact!
wrote Thoreau: what are we? Where are we?)
with something appearances no matter how beautiful
only serve to conceal. I don’t understand
yet what this has to do with Ammons
or the set theory I’m painfully teaching myself
but I’m starting to glimpse sublimities
like those of the power set: take a set
of anything, prime numbers say
and then propose the power set, which includes
all possible subsets of the main set S
and therefore is necessarily larger than S
though as you’ve perhaps noticed, S,
the set of all prime numbers, is infinite: that’s
how we end up pluralizing infinity
and can say with confidence and wonder
that one infinity, called S, can be larger than
another: p(S). No doubt I’m learning just
enough to make a fool of myself, but
I’m still stunned by the elegance
of what I think I understand: I think
for example that there’s a set, call it W
that includes everything in the world
that we humans call the world (nations,
bees, sex, ideologies, cockroaches,
elms and birches and snow and vacancy): what
would the power set of W be then
if not the earth itself, ultimate horizon
of any human order or disorder
and of the rocks and animals and plants too:
so E = p(W) and adds unthought combinations
to already infinite possibilities
of life larger than life as it’s lived.
The theme is creative and has vista,
as Whitman said. So I’ll plunge ahead:
a tripper, an asker, searching unsolvable X
and when I find that X and make it my own
some new thing may arise. The
green tree at night makes a negative
image of itself against the enameling
sky, and my room that was a place to look from
becomes a theater for the passerby.
to downpour on the tin roof over the stalls
at the farmers market to mist and damp
all afternoon long to the steady trickle
I see now out the downstairs living
room window. Kids are asleep
while Emily and her friends Jen and
Rachel go out to dinner, try
to reconnect across time, space:
friends from her New York City days,
when I didn’t know her, when I scarcely
knew myself: those fog-sopped years, the
Nineties—can barely resist the urge
to quote Auden on the Thirties, let
it go, low in the sense of ignoble for sure
and innocent in that word’s darkest sense
of willful blindness to what’s real.
Bad day in Tehran, with security forces
in huge numbers preventing protestors
from massing, yet all those ordinary people
are still afire, a green fire
that just might yet consume
an unjust regime: here’s hoping
and here’s to the e-mail
of one brave young woman that
I read this morning
who was preparing for today, possibly
the last day of her life, by
watching scenes from favorite movies
and reading Persian poetry: how young
she must be and I hope still is
but they’re shooting people now:
I saw a photo of another young woman in her chador
bleeding to death on the street: what
does it mean to give your life
for what you believe: Badiou
might say at that moment, not the moment of death
but of decision, you are a person for the first time
in the fullest and only truthful sense:
in politics art science and love
for Badiou those are the conditions of truth
and the only realms in which the novum
can happen: well, French philosophers
like to say things like that but it’s compelling
all the same to sit for a while
with a rigorous schema
that proposes access to the real
via thought and form: in that sense
my rediscovery here of content
is untimely: I should go back
to language happening for its own sake
and pursue the naked forms
through which contact is made (contact!
wrote Thoreau: what are we? Where are we?)
with something appearances no matter how beautiful
only serve to conceal. I don’t understand
yet what this has to do with Ammons
or the set theory I’m painfully teaching myself
but I’m starting to glimpse sublimities
like those of the power set: take a set
of anything, prime numbers say
and then propose the power set, which includes
all possible subsets of the main set S
and therefore is necessarily larger than S
though as you’ve perhaps noticed, S,
the set of all prime numbers, is infinite: that’s
how we end up pluralizing infinity
and can say with confidence and wonder
that one infinity, called S, can be larger than
another: p(S). No doubt I’m learning just
enough to make a fool of myself, but
I’m still stunned by the elegance
of what I think I understand: I think
for example that there’s a set, call it W
that includes everything in the world
that we humans call the world (nations,
bees, sex, ideologies, cockroaches,
elms and birches and snow and vacancy): what
would the power set of W be then
if not the earth itself, ultimate horizon
of any human order or disorder
and of the rocks and animals and plants too:
so E = p(W) and adds unthought combinations
to already infinite possibilities
of life larger than life as it’s lived.
The theme is creative and has vista,
as Whitman said. So I’ll plunge ahead:
a tripper, an asker, searching unsolvable X
and when I find that X and make it my own
some new thing may arise. The
green tree at night makes a negative
image of itself against the enameling
sky, and my room that was a place to look from
becomes a theater for the passerby.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
6/19
Today Khameni threatened full wrath of
his regime in a Friday prayer service, but
the people will I think come out tomorrow
anyway: everyone’s on point, riding the
inheld breath, wondering which 1989
Tehran 2009 will turn out to be: Berlin
or Tiannenmen. Off to one side
our own incomplete revolution: Obama’s
cautiousness threatens to embitter
the gays and lesbians at the core
of his coalition: time to wipe out
such antediluvian measures
as the Defense of Marriage Act and
don’t-ask-don’t-tell, the leaders are behind
the people on this one, as they are in Iran—
I’m sure Mousavi can’t quite believe
that he’s become the symbol of freedom, his face
limned in green and carried by masses
yearning to breathe free: let them unhuddle,
let them bloom. To my locality: the
Carriage House Cafe on Stewart Ave., across
from ABC Cafe, famed vegetarian joint
virtually synonymous with Ithaca that’s closing
at the end of the month, in the hole
with so much else. Still open but I chose
the more chi-chi joint with the beautiful
stone walls and overpriced scones and
glass tables, which I don’t like, but
they bake good bread here and it’s one
of the several coffee-serving joints
where I whiled away my seven years
writing poems and papers and a big honking
dissertation, an exercise in prolonged and steady
meditation that I very much enjoyed but
don’t quite miss: still when I start writing
my Ammons article I’ll be back in that mode
for a while. Emily’s New York friends Rachel
and Jen and their kids Delilah and Isaac
are here (the husbands stayed home) so they’re
out in the gray shine looking for adventure:
Isaac, who’s five, has a crush on Sadie,
often taking her hand, and she looks up at him
with a face somehow open and mistrustful
at the same time: she’s a pistol, as Emily
says, getting more and more confident
on her feet, starting to run a little, to hurtle
herself toward ledges and curbs in a way
to stop the heart: how put into words
her charm, her spirit of independent
insatiability: don’t try, let her run
through these poems as she runs
across floors and grasses
to her own sweet will yet invisibly
tethered still to us, at some perihelion
she turns, comes running, presses her face
into our knees and says Up, up
and while she’s small enough and I’m
strong enough I’ll swoop her up
to shoulder height and she’ll cling there
with complete naturalness and without shedding
curiosity about street musicians and gravel
and my glasses, which she sometimes commands
me to remove, and I do quite dutifully
and she’s enraptured by this as she is by many
simple acts: I wouldn’t have thought
myself so very far from childhood, I can still
look through eyes near to the ground,
but her elemental being gives me pause:
crossing the bridge over the gorge that separates
South Hill from East Hill this morning I was plodding
with eyes on my phone reading something
on a blog, had to stop myself and go back
to take in the two views, the creek leading out
toward the town, the creek winding into
the forest and out of sight
to where the gorge cuts more deeply and narrowly
vanishing somewhere east of campus.
My time here is vanishing so
better get to it: Ammons’ “Essay on Poetics”
and some more musing on possible intersections
between his one:many obsession and Russell’s
Paradox, which Badiou has put me in mind of:
kids, stay in school, take that calculus
class, I never thought I’d regret not studying
higher mathematics but I’m regretting it now:
an online quiz tells me I use my left and
right brains equally but still I sometimes feel
the left side’s underdeveloped and the pleasures
of truly abstract thought elude me
or come only in flashes, as the ceiling fan
makes the light flash on this table, unsteady
illumination of a solid surface. I’ll say
peace be unto the Iranian protestors
and to the rain that’s promising to fall.
his regime in a Friday prayer service, but
the people will I think come out tomorrow
anyway: everyone’s on point, riding the
inheld breath, wondering which 1989
Tehran 2009 will turn out to be: Berlin
or Tiannenmen. Off to one side
our own incomplete revolution: Obama’s
cautiousness threatens to embitter
the gays and lesbians at the core
of his coalition: time to wipe out
such antediluvian measures
as the Defense of Marriage Act and
don’t-ask-don’t-tell, the leaders are behind
the people on this one, as they are in Iran—
I’m sure Mousavi can’t quite believe
that he’s become the symbol of freedom, his face
limned in green and carried by masses
yearning to breathe free: let them unhuddle,
let them bloom. To my locality: the
Carriage House Cafe on Stewart Ave., across
from ABC Cafe, famed vegetarian joint
virtually synonymous with Ithaca that’s closing
at the end of the month, in the hole
with so much else. Still open but I chose
the more chi-chi joint with the beautiful
stone walls and overpriced scones and
glass tables, which I don’t like, but
they bake good bread here and it’s one
of the several coffee-serving joints
where I whiled away my seven years
writing poems and papers and a big honking
dissertation, an exercise in prolonged and steady
meditation that I very much enjoyed but
don’t quite miss: still when I start writing
my Ammons article I’ll be back in that mode
for a while. Emily’s New York friends Rachel
and Jen and their kids Delilah and Isaac
are here (the husbands stayed home) so they’re
out in the gray shine looking for adventure:
Isaac, who’s five, has a crush on Sadie,
often taking her hand, and she looks up at him
with a face somehow open and mistrustful
at the same time: she’s a pistol, as Emily
says, getting more and more confident
on her feet, starting to run a little, to hurtle
herself toward ledges and curbs in a way
to stop the heart: how put into words
her charm, her spirit of independent
insatiability: don’t try, let her run
through these poems as she runs
across floors and grasses
to her own sweet will yet invisibly
tethered still to us, at some perihelion
she turns, comes running, presses her face
into our knees and says Up, up
and while she’s small enough and I’m
strong enough I’ll swoop her up
to shoulder height and she’ll cling there
with complete naturalness and without shedding
curiosity about street musicians and gravel
and my glasses, which she sometimes commands
me to remove, and I do quite dutifully
and she’s enraptured by this as she is by many
simple acts: I wouldn’t have thought
myself so very far from childhood, I can still
look through eyes near to the ground,
but her elemental being gives me pause:
crossing the bridge over the gorge that separates
South Hill from East Hill this morning I was plodding
with eyes on my phone reading something
on a blog, had to stop myself and go back
to take in the two views, the creek leading out
toward the town, the creek winding into
the forest and out of sight
to where the gorge cuts more deeply and narrowly
vanishing somewhere east of campus.
My time here is vanishing so
better get to it: Ammons’ “Essay on Poetics”
and some more musing on possible intersections
between his one:many obsession and Russell’s
Paradox, which Badiou has put me in mind of:
kids, stay in school, take that calculus
class, I never thought I’d regret not studying
higher mathematics but I’m regretting it now:
an online quiz tells me I use my left and
right brains equally but still I sometimes feel
the left side’s underdeveloped and the pleasures
of truly abstract thought elude me
or come only in flashes, as the ceiling fan
makes the light flash on this table, unsteady
illumination of a solid surface. I’ll say
peace be unto the Iranian protestors
and to the rain that’s promising to fall.
Monday, June 22, 2009
6/18
Rain and more rain last night and into
the morning: it’s early afternoon, Sadie’s
napping, gray skies promise nothing
except more grayness. Back to Ammons
this morning, formulating some ideas
about his relationship to space, his
desire to think through classic philosophical
problems such as one:many or transience:
permanence can perhaps be subordinated
to a desire to get oriented, to think the world
without abstracting it to nothingness
or getting lost in the details: it is a
mark, I think, of his postmodernity, though
that’s not a buzzword we tend to associate
with old Archie and his backwoods
persona: what I’m driving at is that
there’s a trend in American poetry
from romanticism toward materialism,
a materialism that in the living mode tends
to take social if not socialistic form, viz
the Language poets in the 1980s: younger
poets now often straddle or work a seam
between some notion of identity confronting a
real world (residual romance or a romance
of the residual) and the social materialism that
preoccupies itself with an indefinite multiple
of discourses political, economic, advertorial,
pop cultural, scatological, ecological, etc.: the
wriggly line that Ashbery’s career has inscribed
on the American language which we ignore
or follow at our peril. Ammons challenges the
romantic (and the self) without quite leaving
its bounds, but it’s not Marx or Debord
that renders his materialism but birds, beasts
and flowers: yet his strategy
can seem surprisingly similar to Ashbery’s
given that he too can interweave interpolating
voices: it’s just that he’s outside (Ashbery
always seems to be writing from a Victorian parlor
filled with post-1945 art and a TV set permanently
at 4 in the morning, screening old movies or
ads or Warner Bros. cartoons—there’s a window
but it never has the same view twice) or
looking into his backyard and involving
the languages of physics and biology and
mathematics with dirty old man talk and
the naive speech of mountains and academic
meeting-speak: social materialism for Ammons
is one not particularly important (but not
discarded either) strand in the warp
and woof of materialism writ large, the
perspective, rare in academia, of a man
who really believes the world of seasons
and plants and animals contains and compels
the more worldly world most poets (including
this one) say signifies most. Yet his language
can be as playful, as slippery, as excessive
as Ashbery’s, so that I wouldn’t be too
surprised to encounter Daffy Duck
as well as living mallards paddling
through one of Ammons’ longer poems.
So as usual I find however hard
I pitch the ball from my usual concerns
it falls back into my well: how to write
pretty well believing that my I exists
but that language, that world I never made
(see another Duck, Howard the) is
more labile and connected, hook-and-eye style,
into any world we can construct with our eyes
up to and including the so-called natural world
with which I have a push-pull relationship.
Sadie won’t sleep much longer, I’ll
pull the plug here, a parenthesis
between rainstorms and the coming evening,
a break in what my neighbor Brad
calls the delirium of rhetoric.
the morning: it’s early afternoon, Sadie’s
napping, gray skies promise nothing
except more grayness. Back to Ammons
this morning, formulating some ideas
about his relationship to space, his
desire to think through classic philosophical
problems such as one:many or transience:
permanence can perhaps be subordinated
to a desire to get oriented, to think the world
without abstracting it to nothingness
or getting lost in the details: it is a
mark, I think, of his postmodernity, though
that’s not a buzzword we tend to associate
with old Archie and his backwoods
persona: what I’m driving at is that
there’s a trend in American poetry
from romanticism toward materialism,
a materialism that in the living mode tends
to take social if not socialistic form, viz
the Language poets in the 1980s: younger
poets now often straddle or work a seam
between some notion of identity confronting a
real world (residual romance or a romance
of the residual) and the social materialism that
preoccupies itself with an indefinite multiple
of discourses political, economic, advertorial,
pop cultural, scatological, ecological, etc.: the
wriggly line that Ashbery’s career has inscribed
on the American language which we ignore
or follow at our peril. Ammons challenges the
romantic (and the self) without quite leaving
its bounds, but it’s not Marx or Debord
that renders his materialism but birds, beasts
and flowers: yet his strategy
can seem surprisingly similar to Ashbery’s
given that he too can interweave interpolating
voices: it’s just that he’s outside (Ashbery
always seems to be writing from a Victorian parlor
filled with post-1945 art and a TV set permanently
at 4 in the morning, screening old movies or
ads or Warner Bros. cartoons—there’s a window
but it never has the same view twice) or
looking into his backyard and involving
the languages of physics and biology and
mathematics with dirty old man talk and
the naive speech of mountains and academic
meeting-speak: social materialism for Ammons
is one not particularly important (but not
discarded either) strand in the warp
and woof of materialism writ large, the
perspective, rare in academia, of a man
who really believes the world of seasons
and plants and animals contains and compels
the more worldly world most poets (including
this one) say signifies most. Yet his language
can be as playful, as slippery, as excessive
as Ashbery’s, so that I wouldn’t be too
surprised to encounter Daffy Duck
as well as living mallards paddling
through one of Ammons’ longer poems.
So as usual I find however hard
I pitch the ball from my usual concerns
it falls back into my well: how to write
pretty well believing that my I exists
but that language, that world I never made
(see another Duck, Howard the) is
more labile and connected, hook-and-eye style,
into any world we can construct with our eyes
up to and including the so-called natural world
with which I have a push-pull relationship.
Sadie won’t sleep much longer, I’ll
pull the plug here, a parenthesis
between rainstorms and the coming evening,
a break in what my neighbor Brad
calls the delirium of rhetoric.
Friday, June 19, 2009
6/17
An anonymous witness tells Juan Cole
about the silent marchers in Tehran: “the
most elegant scene I had ever witnessed
in my life.” Increasingly feeling
on the margins of history here in Ithaca,
and it’s not a bad feeling: we make
too many things about us, a big and noisy
country with asshole opinions
that turn too quickly into bombs: still
it’s hard not to be a little jealous
of all that revolutionary energy and love.
The closest I’ve ever come to that
experience (not very close) was volunteering
for Kerry in 2004 in Pennsylvania: in the crowd
among others united solely by our desire
for change I felt something like love, pure
agape, a rising feeling that left
a space for despair to rush in
that night when the early polls for Kerry
proved wrong. It’s gray and slightly
humid today, my parents are heading back
to New Jersey: it was a sweet morning
at their B&B with a view of the lake: Diane
the owner, a kooky and generous woman
who scatters New Age books and games
around the place, invited Emily and me
to use the hot tub in the back yard: I
congratulate myself on having the good sense
not to say no, as was my first instinct,
but to follow Emily naked into hot bubbles
in the cool of the morning, a little romance
while Poppy and Mimi (that’s what Sadie
calls them) and the little girl were out
of sight. A look afterward at Ithaca Falls, a
surprisingly impressive tower of white water
behind the high school, then lunch
downtown: now they’re on the road and
we’re home, Sadie’s napping and Emily’s
on the phone, I write this, wind gently whipping
the maple leaves to my right: rain’s predicted
for tonight and for many days after but
the idyll persists into my need to get some work
done: feeling very relaxed, inclined more
toward a run on the trail than to reading
Ammons but maybe both things are possible:
it will be my last chance to run and stay dry
but poetry is only slightly less well suited to rain
than a good thick novel: with poetry
there are more pauses, more moments between
units of meaning during which the eye might be caught
by something else: someone hurrying by
on the street under a broken umbrella, cars
splashing puddles: I’m making this up, visualizing
rain from the living room window
at home in Evanston, the view of Sherman Avenue
that I miss a little, as comfortable as Ithaca,
old home, feels right now. Middle
of the afternoon, slack as a dog’s belly—
a country sort of expression—I’m impelled in mind
back to Diane’s place, the indoor hammock there,
a great place to lie and watch a storm come in
across Cayuga in gray streaked lines: I can
imagine, and do, though the view
here will be less clearly in the eye, a gift
the mind gives to itself.
about the silent marchers in Tehran: “the
most elegant scene I had ever witnessed
in my life.” Increasingly feeling
on the margins of history here in Ithaca,
and it’s not a bad feeling: we make
too many things about us, a big and noisy
country with asshole opinions
that turn too quickly into bombs: still
it’s hard not to be a little jealous
of all that revolutionary energy and love.
The closest I’ve ever come to that
experience (not very close) was volunteering
for Kerry in 2004 in Pennsylvania: in the crowd
among others united solely by our desire
for change I felt something like love, pure
agape, a rising feeling that left
a space for despair to rush in
that night when the early polls for Kerry
proved wrong. It’s gray and slightly
humid today, my parents are heading back
to New Jersey: it was a sweet morning
at their B&B with a view of the lake: Diane
the owner, a kooky and generous woman
who scatters New Age books and games
around the place, invited Emily and me
to use the hot tub in the back yard: I
congratulate myself on having the good sense
not to say no, as was my first instinct,
but to follow Emily naked into hot bubbles
in the cool of the morning, a little romance
while Poppy and Mimi (that’s what Sadie
calls them) and the little girl were out
of sight. A look afterward at Ithaca Falls, a
surprisingly impressive tower of white water
behind the high school, then lunch
downtown: now they’re on the road and
we’re home, Sadie’s napping and Emily’s
on the phone, I write this, wind gently whipping
the maple leaves to my right: rain’s predicted
for tonight and for many days after but
the idyll persists into my need to get some work
done: feeling very relaxed, inclined more
toward a run on the trail than to reading
Ammons but maybe both things are possible:
it will be my last chance to run and stay dry
but poetry is only slightly less well suited to rain
than a good thick novel: with poetry
there are more pauses, more moments between
units of meaning during which the eye might be caught
by something else: someone hurrying by
on the street under a broken umbrella, cars
splashing puddles: I’m making this up, visualizing
rain from the living room window
at home in Evanston, the view of Sherman Avenue
that I miss a little, as comfortable as Ithaca,
old home, feels right now. Middle
of the afternoon, slack as a dog’s belly—
a country sort of expression—I’m impelled in mind
back to Diane’s place, the indoor hammock there,
a great place to lie and watch a storm come in
across Cayuga in gray streaked lines: I can
imagine, and do, though the view
here will be less clearly in the eye, a gift
the mind gives to itself.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
6/16
Another evening, this time
on the back screen porch, where I can see
to my left a neighbor’s garage roof
and just beyond that the red peaked wall
of another neighbor’s house, blue sky,
a couple of trees refracted through
the metal screen so that they have a
textured look: the deciduous leaves look
like pine needles and the pine clusters
are smoothed out like leaves. Further
to the right a more unruly (less ruly)
bunch of leaves from bushes including
a tangle of bare sticks and twigs
that hang down like the armature
of a witch’s head: I can sort of see
the hat, the long nose, the hairs
pointing from her pointy chin. Emily
just left for a walk: she had Sadie
all day while I golfed with my parents
and is feeling burned out: I wish I
could go with her but that would
probably defeat the purpose of regrouping
and regathering her energies: so I
listen to the soughing of Sadie’s sleep machine
(every night of her life she falls asleep to
the poorly simulated sound of waves crashing
against an imaginary shore: it blocks noise
but I have to wonder how it may be altering
the landscape of her dreams) on the monitor
and type this while somewhere a woman
speaks Spanish, cars rough by (I need a verb
that sounds like and almost means that,
rough), birds tweet their evening songs (almost
wrote twitter but that word has been co-opted
by Twitter, currently playing a heroic role
in what I hope we’ll call the Second Iranian
Revolution, lines of brutal hopeful poetry
about the protests and the crackdown
live from the streets of Tehran), the very
old yellow Lab from the house with the garage
(where also live two women in early middle
age and their young son) barks a couple times,
a siren stitches in the backgroud and leaves
simmer in a breath of wind, one of the women
claps for the dog, something with a deep
guttural engine climbs the hill: I could
go on, sound never stops, as John Cage
taught us: there’s a piano downstairs
that Sadie likes to pound on and it’s untuned
so she’s pretty avant-garde and also
in the sense that as yet for her there’s no separation
between art and life, there’s nothing she can do
that doesn’t express being, hers in particular
and the life of myself and the species she re-enacts
(ontogenesis meet phylogenesis, shake hands):
a squirrel just leapt with a considerable thump
on the roof of the studio apartment
attached to our house where until recently
a young black man was living: he’s gone now,
the place is spotless and cold. While I
was typing that the squirrel got away: that’s
the nature of writing, even verse like this
stacking lines atop each other as discrete
moments can’t keep up with actual
moments. In my novel, a Holocaust
survivor is about to say something, based
upon my maternal grandfather: what
will he say, who had so little to say
to me? Scared to find out, would rather
eat an Oreo: maybe compromise
is possible.
on the back screen porch, where I can see
to my left a neighbor’s garage roof
and just beyond that the red peaked wall
of another neighbor’s house, blue sky,
a couple of trees refracted through
the metal screen so that they have a
textured look: the deciduous leaves look
like pine needles and the pine clusters
are smoothed out like leaves. Further
to the right a more unruly (less ruly)
bunch of leaves from bushes including
a tangle of bare sticks and twigs
that hang down like the armature
of a witch’s head: I can sort of see
the hat, the long nose, the hairs
pointing from her pointy chin. Emily
just left for a walk: she had Sadie
all day while I golfed with my parents
and is feeling burned out: I wish I
could go with her but that would
probably defeat the purpose of regrouping
and regathering her energies: so I
listen to the soughing of Sadie’s sleep machine
(every night of her life she falls asleep to
the poorly simulated sound of waves crashing
against an imaginary shore: it blocks noise
but I have to wonder how it may be altering
the landscape of her dreams) on the monitor
and type this while somewhere a woman
speaks Spanish, cars rough by (I need a verb
that sounds like and almost means that,
rough), birds tweet their evening songs (almost
wrote twitter but that word has been co-opted
by Twitter, currently playing a heroic role
in what I hope we’ll call the Second Iranian
Revolution, lines of brutal hopeful poetry
about the protests and the crackdown
live from the streets of Tehran), the very
old yellow Lab from the house with the garage
(where also live two women in early middle
age and their young son) barks a couple times,
a siren stitches in the backgroud and leaves
simmer in a breath of wind, one of the women
claps for the dog, something with a deep
guttural engine climbs the hill: I could
go on, sound never stops, as John Cage
taught us: there’s a piano downstairs
that Sadie likes to pound on and it’s untuned
so she’s pretty avant-garde and also
in the sense that as yet for her there’s no separation
between art and life, there’s nothing she can do
that doesn’t express being, hers in particular
and the life of myself and the species she re-enacts
(ontogenesis meet phylogenesis, shake hands):
a squirrel just leapt with a considerable thump
on the roof of the studio apartment
attached to our house where until recently
a young black man was living: he’s gone now,
the place is spotless and cold. While I
was typing that the squirrel got away: that’s
the nature of writing, even verse like this
stacking lines atop each other as discrete
moments can’t keep up with actual
moments. In my novel, a Holocaust
survivor is about to say something, based
upon my maternal grandfather: what
will he say, who had so little to say
to me? Scared to find out, would rather
eat an Oreo: maybe compromise
is possible.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
6/15
Sadie’s had her breakfast, Emily’s in
the shower, in a little while we’ll pile
into the car and head up the eastern shore
of Cayuga Lake to the bed and breakfast
where my parents are staying for breakfast.
Then a little hike in Treman State
Park, and my father, a great gourmand and
pretty serious cook, is going to make us
short ribs tonight. Same view as yesterday
evening but no direct sunlight—a lid
of clouds over the red maple and a band of blue
underneath, a quiet combination
of colors—except now as I resume this
many hours later the same colors
nearly preside, joined by an orange-pink band
like a cummerbund at the big tree’s waist.
The day’s slipped past, not exactly orthodox
for this poem, but really its sole constraint
is that I write it each day so I’m still
under the line. We had a lovely breakfast
with my folks and many photos
of Sadie stuffing herself with berries
and bits of pancake, then a drive
to Aurora, spooky made-up town,
the personal property of one Pleasant
Rowland, creator of the American Girls franchise
(for more on this subject see J. Robert
Lennon’s novel Happyland as serialized
in Harper’s in 2006, a true story told
as only fiction can tell it): a professionally
picturesque little burg, headquarters of Mackenzie-
Childs, a freakish little tchotchke franchise
with an Alice-in-Wonderland aesthetic
but lovely grounds: wandered there for a while,
then lunch at the Aurora Inn, rehabbed
within an inch of its life: I kind of miss
the old car that used to be parked out front
with various imprecations against Pleasant
and all she’d done to destroy the town’s character
in her quest for something like unto
Bedford Falls: long screeds that covered every
available glass surface except for the
windshield, a mobile taunt made semi-permanent
that I’m sure accumulated a heroic number
of parking tickets. I don’t know who
might be left to fight the good fight
in Aurora, but anyway we had a very decent lunch
out on the deck overlooking the lake
and then back home where I turned unaccountably
grumpy after a failed nap, but bucked up
enough for take-out Thai with everyone
once again outside on our rental’s deck
surrounded by high green trees made higher
by the low sun and a crystalline sky
that’s deepening now in the west
and I can now see light from a single window
of one of the houses down the street
where some unknowable summer life
goes on: this part of town gets real quiet
when school’s out, a blessing I remember
after all the drunken hooting echoing
up and down South Hill between finals
and IC’s commencement ceremony. Things
are turning ugly in Iran: I’m fascinated,
keep checking Juan Cole and CNN
on my iPhone, looking for hints that the stolen election
might get itself unstolen, there’s a crack
in the facade of the regime there, I’m naive
enough still to be thrilled at the thought
of a people asserting their rights of self-determination
a spectacle that I met with dumbfounded uncomprehension
back in 1989 when I was a failing sophomore
in college, torn through and through
by private griefs: ain’t that always the way.
Tomorrow the grief of golf with my folks
while Emily and Sadie visit friends
and our idyll continues nearly unwavering
in the face of history’s unpredictable momentum.
Full dark now on the ground, but
in the sky degrees of light hold a bit longer
their scattering dominion.
the shower, in a little while we’ll pile
into the car and head up the eastern shore
of Cayuga Lake to the bed and breakfast
where my parents are staying for breakfast.
Then a little hike in Treman State
Park, and my father, a great gourmand and
pretty serious cook, is going to make us
short ribs tonight. Same view as yesterday
evening but no direct sunlight—a lid
of clouds over the red maple and a band of blue
underneath, a quiet combination
of colors—except now as I resume this
many hours later the same colors
nearly preside, joined by an orange-pink band
like a cummerbund at the big tree’s waist.
The day’s slipped past, not exactly orthodox
for this poem, but really its sole constraint
is that I write it each day so I’m still
under the line. We had a lovely breakfast
with my folks and many photos
of Sadie stuffing herself with berries
and bits of pancake, then a drive
to Aurora, spooky made-up town,
the personal property of one Pleasant
Rowland, creator of the American Girls franchise
(for more on this subject see J. Robert
Lennon’s novel Happyland as serialized
in Harper’s in 2006, a true story told
as only fiction can tell it): a professionally
picturesque little burg, headquarters of Mackenzie-
Childs, a freakish little tchotchke franchise
with an Alice-in-Wonderland aesthetic
but lovely grounds: wandered there for a while,
then lunch at the Aurora Inn, rehabbed
within an inch of its life: I kind of miss
the old car that used to be parked out front
with various imprecations against Pleasant
and all she’d done to destroy the town’s character
in her quest for something like unto
Bedford Falls: long screeds that covered every
available glass surface except for the
windshield, a mobile taunt made semi-permanent
that I’m sure accumulated a heroic number
of parking tickets. I don’t know who
might be left to fight the good fight
in Aurora, but anyway we had a very decent lunch
out on the deck overlooking the lake
and then back home where I turned unaccountably
grumpy after a failed nap, but bucked up
enough for take-out Thai with everyone
once again outside on our rental’s deck
surrounded by high green trees made higher
by the low sun and a crystalline sky
that’s deepening now in the west
and I can now see light from a single window
of one of the houses down the street
where some unknowable summer life
goes on: this part of town gets real quiet
when school’s out, a blessing I remember
after all the drunken hooting echoing
up and down South Hill between finals
and IC’s commencement ceremony. Things
are turning ugly in Iran: I’m fascinated,
keep checking Juan Cole and CNN
on my iPhone, looking for hints that the stolen election
might get itself unstolen, there’s a crack
in the facade of the regime there, I’m naive
enough still to be thrilled at the thought
of a people asserting their rights of self-determination
a spectacle that I met with dumbfounded uncomprehension
back in 1989 when I was a failing sophomore
in college, torn through and through
by private griefs: ain’t that always the way.
Tomorrow the grief of golf with my folks
while Emily and Sadie visit friends
and our idyll continues nearly unwavering
in the face of history’s unpredictable momentum.
Full dark now on the ground, but
in the sky degrees of light hold a bit longer
their scattering dominion.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
6/14
Latest start yet: it’s quarter to eight in the PM
and I can see light from the sinking sun
reflecting off of high cumulus
putting my neighbor’s red maple
into chiarascuro, while a single shaft
of sun from somewhere lights a high patch
of green bushes, translucent leaves
making themselves known. Sadie’s down,
Emily’s walking with a friend, my parents
are off to their B&B after a tasty dinner
at Just a Taste, the downtown tapas place
that even Chicago’s wealth of kitchens
has yet to replace in my heart (try the
Thai-style spicy chicken wings, sweet
and sour with basil, yum). Breaking
news: the sun must have been behind
a cloud because the dark leaves
of the maples furthest from the trunk
are suddenly edged with green light
splashing the red, and one white cloud
is fully illuminated through the gaps.
The weather was perfect today, low
seventies, blue skies with just a few clouds
to keep it interesting, warm in the sun
and not too cool in the shade. It’s
different to write like this at night
in anticipation of just a few hours
before sleep rather than a day’s work.
Finding time to write
will be harder while my parents are here:
I don’t expect much progress on the novel:
my best hope is just to stay in touch with it,
to revisit the manuscript and characters
so that when I do have a little more time
there won’t be as much chance of burning
up on re-entry like the astronaut
in that Ray Bradbury story, the one jealous
of everybody else’s good memories, adrift
in the sky, talking on the radio
with his camerados while waiting
for earth’s gravitational pull
to take hold of him and skate his dissolving body
across the troposphere like a smooth flat stone:
it’s a sentimental story but it’s stayed
in my mind for decades now, along with
the really chilling one about the automatic house
in the wake of a nuclear war, carrying on
an idealized bourgeois domestic routine
in the total absence of humans or life
beyond a radiation-burned dog who dies and is removed
by ever-watchful cleaning robots.
That’s a keeper: I’m part of the last generation
to grow up believing that at any moment, at
school or in the park or listening to my parents fight
that the sky could go white
and everything be blown away: is it because
of that memory or in spite of it that we all
went apeshit after 9/11: even the worst scenario
anyone’s ever thought of, a nuclear attack
on a major city, can’t measure up
to the total annihilation of history and life.
A little apocalypse to define the edges
of an idyllic family day, though we got
little sleep last night and were grumpy with each other
until after the afternoon nap we got: Sadie
slept for one hour and then woke up crying
I went into her room and picked her up and lay down
on the mattress there with her on my chest
and she slept and I dozed a little: sweet
but destined to be infinitely sweeter in memory
with just a tang of bitterness: I saw a book
reviewed in the Times that apparently includes
the sentence, “I felt nostalgic for the present”:
if that doesn’t define both happiness and our limited
capacity for being in the moment
(the root of happy, happenstance, which gets at
the luck factor and the temporality as well)
I don’t know what does beyond
actual immersion in the senses, preferably
the ones that drag earthy roots behind them,
taste and smell, the radicals: at this moment
I’ll settle for sight, the overcast curtain
now settling over the top of the tree, the sun
still not down at 8:01 PM but no longer
shooting even blanks, just a diffusion
that captures my tired and somewhat satisfied
state of mind, in spite of the stolen Iranian
election which may yet be a crack
in the wall of the mullahs: I’ll say now
a simple and contradictory prayer
for enlightenment in all its forms
and go down now to my novel or maybe
Jacques Roubaud’s Great Fire of London
a fascinating book about the failure to write
a subject that deserves and demands
the attention paid only by great success.
and I can see light from the sinking sun
reflecting off of high cumulus
putting my neighbor’s red maple
into chiarascuro, while a single shaft
of sun from somewhere lights a high patch
of green bushes, translucent leaves
making themselves known. Sadie’s down,
Emily’s walking with a friend, my parents
are off to their B&B after a tasty dinner
at Just a Taste, the downtown tapas place
that even Chicago’s wealth of kitchens
has yet to replace in my heart (try the
Thai-style spicy chicken wings, sweet
and sour with basil, yum). Breaking
news: the sun must have been behind
a cloud because the dark leaves
of the maples furthest from the trunk
are suddenly edged with green light
splashing the red, and one white cloud
is fully illuminated through the gaps.
The weather was perfect today, low
seventies, blue skies with just a few clouds
to keep it interesting, warm in the sun
and not too cool in the shade. It’s
different to write like this at night
in anticipation of just a few hours
before sleep rather than a day’s work.
Finding time to write
will be harder while my parents are here:
I don’t expect much progress on the novel:
my best hope is just to stay in touch with it,
to revisit the manuscript and characters
so that when I do have a little more time
there won’t be as much chance of burning
up on re-entry like the astronaut
in that Ray Bradbury story, the one jealous
of everybody else’s good memories, adrift
in the sky, talking on the radio
with his camerados while waiting
for earth’s gravitational pull
to take hold of him and skate his dissolving body
across the troposphere like a smooth flat stone:
it’s a sentimental story but it’s stayed
in my mind for decades now, along with
the really chilling one about the automatic house
in the wake of a nuclear war, carrying on
an idealized bourgeois domestic routine
in the total absence of humans or life
beyond a radiation-burned dog who dies and is removed
by ever-watchful cleaning robots.
That’s a keeper: I’m part of the last generation
to grow up believing that at any moment, at
school or in the park or listening to my parents fight
that the sky could go white
and everything be blown away: is it because
of that memory or in spite of it that we all
went apeshit after 9/11: even the worst scenario
anyone’s ever thought of, a nuclear attack
on a major city, can’t measure up
to the total annihilation of history and life.
A little apocalypse to define the edges
of an idyllic family day, though we got
little sleep last night and were grumpy with each other
until after the afternoon nap we got: Sadie
slept for one hour and then woke up crying
I went into her room and picked her up and lay down
on the mattress there with her on my chest
and she slept and I dozed a little: sweet
but destined to be infinitely sweeter in memory
with just a tang of bitterness: I saw a book
reviewed in the Times that apparently includes
the sentence, “I felt nostalgic for the present”:
if that doesn’t define both happiness and our limited
capacity for being in the moment
(the root of happy, happenstance, which gets at
the luck factor and the temporality as well)
I don’t know what does beyond
actual immersion in the senses, preferably
the ones that drag earthy roots behind them,
taste and smell, the radicals: at this moment
I’ll settle for sight, the overcast curtain
now settling over the top of the tree, the sun
still not down at 8:01 PM but no longer
shooting even blanks, just a diffusion
that captures my tired and somewhat satisfied
state of mind, in spite of the stolen Iranian
election which may yet be a crack
in the wall of the mullahs: I’ll say now
a simple and contradictory prayer
for enlightenment in all its forms
and go down now to my novel or maybe
Jacques Roubaud’s Great Fire of London
a fascinating book about the failure to write
a subject that deserves and demands
the attention paid only by great success.
Monday, June 15, 2009
6/13
Slowest start yet: not to the day, for
Sadie’s a dread and reliable
alarm clock, but to this writing,
what with the farmers market this
morning, then being in charge
of parenting while Emily has things to do
until around 3, and then we’re going
to dinner with friends in half-an-hour
and tonight’s devoted to D&D—yes,
still pretending to be an elf or a sorcerer
after all these years. But the colonization
of my imagination by Tolkien and Gygax and
their epigones is a meditation for another day.
One false start later, and with no novel-
writing in prospect, I’m here
in what I’m pleased to call my office
in this run-down rental on Pleasant St.
watching rain drip from the gutters
before the high wall of bushes that separates
us from our neighbor, the aforementioned
Elmer, afflicted by his loneliness and crabbed
speech: was it yesterday
passing with Sadie that he stopped us
to tell me that his own daughter had died of cancer
when she was 57? Incalculably old,
with white stubble and thick-framed glasses,
filthy white jeans (memory of white), red
flannel lumberjack shirt in cold weather, white
(memory of) wifebeater when it’s hot.
Before I can round this anecdote off
Sadie comes in to where I’m typing with
a Curious George jack-in-the-box someone
gave us demanding back back by which she means
put George back into his place so she can pop
him out again: she won’t get tired of this and
I’m feeling a little guilty for the moments
I’m typing while she’s crying, just a little,
perfecting entreaty: it’s probably
good for her to know her every whim
won’t be attended to immediately
(a quarter past immediately)
but now she’s lost interest and skated off
to find her mother and her mother’s friend Amy
chatting about knitting in the bedroom.
Emily works hard to protect
my time to write but I haven’t worked
as hard to protect her time
to write, sing, dream, what have you:
I was asked recently what kind of family
I want and said without having to think about it
A family of artists, and that’s true: what
that must mean is that art and life must lose
distinction, in the style of an avant-garde:
more seriously, that making a family is
part of making art, that for me to be an artist
Emily and Sadie must be artists too: I
love this idea though I haven’t thought it through:
the demands upon me could be large
and I’ve had things pretty simple up to now.
Daddy Daddy Sadie says to Amy and Amy says,
Is he typing? Yes he is, but he’s got to stop,
it’s dinnertime and after that
my comrades and I have a dungeon to raid
and liberate from its subterranean evil:
D&D is like any adventure story but void
of allegory, unlike I suppose life as we
know it. It’s not a real rain.
Tomorrow my parents are coming and
it will be even more difficult to find corners
to write in, unoccupied times
in which to hide and confront
my monsters.
Sadie’s a dread and reliable
alarm clock, but to this writing,
what with the farmers market this
morning, then being in charge
of parenting while Emily has things to do
until around 3, and then we’re going
to dinner with friends in half-an-hour
and tonight’s devoted to D&D—yes,
still pretending to be an elf or a sorcerer
after all these years. But the colonization
of my imagination by Tolkien and Gygax and
their epigones is a meditation for another day.
One false start later, and with no novel-
writing in prospect, I’m here
in what I’m pleased to call my office
in this run-down rental on Pleasant St.
watching rain drip from the gutters
before the high wall of bushes that separates
us from our neighbor, the aforementioned
Elmer, afflicted by his loneliness and crabbed
speech: was it yesterday
passing with Sadie that he stopped us
to tell me that his own daughter had died of cancer
when she was 57? Incalculably old,
with white stubble and thick-framed glasses,
filthy white jeans (memory of white), red
flannel lumberjack shirt in cold weather, white
(memory of) wifebeater when it’s hot.
Before I can round this anecdote off
Sadie comes in to where I’m typing with
a Curious George jack-in-the-box someone
gave us demanding back back by which she means
put George back into his place so she can pop
him out again: she won’t get tired of this and
I’m feeling a little guilty for the moments
I’m typing while she’s crying, just a little,
perfecting entreaty: it’s probably
good for her to know her every whim
won’t be attended to immediately
(a quarter past immediately)
but now she’s lost interest and skated off
to find her mother and her mother’s friend Amy
chatting about knitting in the bedroom.
Emily works hard to protect
my time to write but I haven’t worked
as hard to protect her time
to write, sing, dream, what have you:
I was asked recently what kind of family
I want and said without having to think about it
A family of artists, and that’s true: what
that must mean is that art and life must lose
distinction, in the style of an avant-garde:
more seriously, that making a family is
part of making art, that for me to be an artist
Emily and Sadie must be artists too: I
love this idea though I haven’t thought it through:
the demands upon me could be large
and I’ve had things pretty simple up to now.
Daddy Daddy Sadie says to Amy and Amy says,
Is he typing? Yes he is, but he’s got to stop,
it’s dinnertime and after that
my comrades and I have a dungeon to raid
and liberate from its subterranean evil:
D&D is like any adventure story but void
of allegory, unlike I suppose life as we
know it. It’s not a real rain.
Tomorrow my parents are coming and
it will be even more difficult to find corners
to write in, unoccupied times
in which to hide and confront
my monsters.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
6/12
Running on the trail this morning saw
a lone cardinal leveling his or her way
directly across and deep into the woods
from left to right like a spear in flight
then up the hill into fog dissolving verdancy.
Ithaca really does have a kind of rainforest
climate, something to do no doubt
with the deep vertical cut of Cayuga Lake
channeling moisture from the north and
the various creeks and gorges bearing water
down from the hills, but I won’t pretend
to much knowledge or authority
when it comes to the natural world: I realized
talking to Emily last night that my first allegiance
has always been to fantasy, whether Tolkien
or Las Vegas, Arcadia or Disney World or even
the local mall, I’m drawn to evidence
of the human will to create nothing from something,
simulacra the painstaking detail of which
are further evidence of their fakeness:
in that sense the pleasure I derive from nature
running on that trail for instance
is pure Wordsworth: I value such spaces
for the freedom they offer the imagination
different in quantity and not in quality
from the freedom I feel on the streets of New York
or a Chicago neighborhood where lots
is going on: Chicago particularly appeals
thanks to the Burnham Plan, itself a great fantasy
of a city whose shoreline has been preserved
for purely aesthetic purposes, so all that steel
meets green meeting water, the environment
in the ecological sense is at best an afterthought
to that unless we are to trust
that whatever in us turns space into place, terrain
into landscape, is some intuition in tune
with the greater needs of the organismic network
we are part of with microbes and invasive species
of fish and birds like that cardinal arrowing
so unwaveringly through ramifying obstacles
presented by branches, leaves, cobwebs,
and the invisible territorial demarcations
of other birds and animals, not to mention me
huffing and blundering my way through
with NPR on my headphones
listening to news about Iran’s election, taking place
this moment, will Moussavi win and will the clerics
let him win, will we be able to see more clearly
the whole of the Islamic Republic, two words
that repel each other in the whitebread mind
but we’re not terribly good at understanding
how people might vote in their own interests
as opposed to ours, even in this country. So
I’m braced for more insanity, more anti-
Semite bastards breaking loose with guns
even as I hope that the grown-ups finally in charge
have a strategy to meet that insanity.
As usual it all seems far away in Ithaca’s
ten square miles surrounded by reality
upstairs at the cafe of Autumn Leaves on the Commons
a soft-anarchist used bookstore in the biography
section, where on display I see lives of Louis
XIV, Lloyd George, Lytton Strachey, Princess
Di, Cromwell the Lord Protector by Antonia
Fraser, that’s the Brits: behind me it’s Africa-Asia:
the Mandelas, Nelson and Winnie, Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee in the old California
edition, Miyamoto Musashi, Mao, the Gandhis:
the American wall’s in front of me and far away
but I can make out Lyndon Johnson and John Glenn
weirdly in a spacesuit though his face in the photo’s old,
Eisenhower, Lincoln, Thos. Jefferson,
Colin Powell’s autobiography (shame
forever upon him, I haven’t forgiven him
his part in ginning up the war, never mind
his late and probably crucial endorsement
of Obama), Nixon, and Dan Rather (huh).
Tempted to abandon the morning’s (really
the afternoon’s) work for the complete set
of Pepys’ diary I just spied, and I’m even
a bit interested in Maxine Kumin’s memoir
anything’s more attractive than what you’re s’posed
to do, even if you yourself are doing
the supposing. A little more coffee
won’t hurt, then, the next thing.
a lone cardinal leveling his or her way
directly across and deep into the woods
from left to right like a spear in flight
then up the hill into fog dissolving verdancy.
Ithaca really does have a kind of rainforest
climate, something to do no doubt
with the deep vertical cut of Cayuga Lake
channeling moisture from the north and
the various creeks and gorges bearing water
down from the hills, but I won’t pretend
to much knowledge or authority
when it comes to the natural world: I realized
talking to Emily last night that my first allegiance
has always been to fantasy, whether Tolkien
or Las Vegas, Arcadia or Disney World or even
the local mall, I’m drawn to evidence
of the human will to create nothing from something,
simulacra the painstaking detail of which
are further evidence of their fakeness:
in that sense the pleasure I derive from nature
running on that trail for instance
is pure Wordsworth: I value such spaces
for the freedom they offer the imagination
different in quantity and not in quality
from the freedom I feel on the streets of New York
or a Chicago neighborhood where lots
is going on: Chicago particularly appeals
thanks to the Burnham Plan, itself a great fantasy
of a city whose shoreline has been preserved
for purely aesthetic purposes, so all that steel
meets green meeting water, the environment
in the ecological sense is at best an afterthought
to that unless we are to trust
that whatever in us turns space into place, terrain
into landscape, is some intuition in tune
with the greater needs of the organismic network
we are part of with microbes and invasive species
of fish and birds like that cardinal arrowing
so unwaveringly through ramifying obstacles
presented by branches, leaves, cobwebs,
and the invisible territorial demarcations
of other birds and animals, not to mention me
huffing and blundering my way through
with NPR on my headphones
listening to news about Iran’s election, taking place
this moment, will Moussavi win and will the clerics
let him win, will we be able to see more clearly
the whole of the Islamic Republic, two words
that repel each other in the whitebread mind
but we’re not terribly good at understanding
how people might vote in their own interests
as opposed to ours, even in this country. So
I’m braced for more insanity, more anti-
Semite bastards breaking loose with guns
even as I hope that the grown-ups finally in charge
have a strategy to meet that insanity.
As usual it all seems far away in Ithaca’s
ten square miles surrounded by reality
upstairs at the cafe of Autumn Leaves on the Commons
a soft-anarchist used bookstore in the biography
section, where on display I see lives of Louis
XIV, Lloyd George, Lytton Strachey, Princess
Di, Cromwell the Lord Protector by Antonia
Fraser, that’s the Brits: behind me it’s Africa-Asia:
the Mandelas, Nelson and Winnie, Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee in the old California
edition, Miyamoto Musashi, Mao, the Gandhis:
the American wall’s in front of me and far away
but I can make out Lyndon Johnson and John Glenn
weirdly in a spacesuit though his face in the photo’s old,
Eisenhower, Lincoln, Thos. Jefferson,
Colin Powell’s autobiography (shame
forever upon him, I haven’t forgiven him
his part in ginning up the war, never mind
his late and probably crucial endorsement
of Obama), Nixon, and Dan Rather (huh).
Tempted to abandon the morning’s (really
the afternoon’s) work for the complete set
of Pepys’ diary I just spied, and I’m even
a bit interested in Maxine Kumin’s memoir
anything’s more attractive than what you’re s’posed
to do, even if you yourself are doing
the supposing. A little more coffee
won’t hurt, then, the next thing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Popular Posts
-
This is gonna be a loooooong post. What follows is a freely edited transcription of my notes from the Zukofsky/100 conference at Columbia t...
-
Will be blogging more or less permanently now at http://www.joshua-corey.com/blog/ . Or follow me on Twitter: @joshcorey
-
Midway through my life's journey comes a long moment of reflection and redefinition regarding poetics (this comes in place of the conver...
-
My title is taken from the comments stream of an article recently published by The Chronicle of Higher Education , David Alpaugh's ... -
Elif Batuman has amplified her criticism of the discipline of creative writing (which I've written about before ) in a review-essay that...
-
Trained it down to DePaul's Loop campus this morning to take part in a panel, "Why Writers Should Blog," alongside Tony Trigil...
-
Thursday, September 29, 2011 Berlin. Fog of sleep deprivation coloring an otherwise perfect blue autumn day a sort of miasmic yellow i... -
In one week Lake Forest will hold its commencement and I'll take off my professor's hat for the summer. A few weeks later, in June, ...
-
Farewell, Barbara Guest .
-
That's one of my own lines. From an untitled (they're all untitled) severance song: After form fails a furling, reports dying away, ...
