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January 27, 2012
photo - mw
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Winter
H. L. Hix
from "The God of Window Screens and Honeysuckle"
Stubble rows, four matte, four shiny in morning sun,
show the combine’s direction. What can be preserved
must be preserved as some self other than its own.
Bent cattails mimic stubble in the frozen pond.
Suet nearly gone, chickadees cling upside down
to the feeder. Above it, a hedgeapple wedged
between branches since fall. Past that, changing direction
at once, fast as mackerel, a thousand blackbirds.
Skaters on a pond, we fall into what we know,
drown in disorienting light before we freeze.
In angled afternoon sun, the fence’s shadow
caresses the snow’s contours like tight-fitting clothes.
Even when grass greens to re-enact spring, the snow
will linger, longest in the shadows of houses.
H. L. Hix at the Poetry Foundation and the PIP
H. L. Hix - four poemsdrunken boat.....................................................
“Checking One Belief Against Another”:
A Conversation with H. L. Hix
Karen Schubert
agni
(....)
Maybe I would sit and wait for inspiration if I thought I were a divine emissary or the darling of the muses, but all evidence points to the contrary, so I think of poetry in fairly blue-collar terms. Part of what the obsession implies is that I “keep at it.” Poetry feels to me much more like old-fashioned hard work than it does like a visitation from above. There’s plenty of ambient material, but like soil it needs to be worked if it’s going to produce what you want it to produce, or at least that’s been my experience.
(....)
KS: Recently, I admitted to a philosopher, a poetry-loving philosopher, that I had a long-standing desire to study philosophy, and he steered me away on the premise that it would ruin my ability to write poetry. Do you think there’s anything to the warning?
HLH: I have to hope not, since my graduate degrees are in philosophy, not in writing or in literature! But I think some better grounds than my desperate hope could be offered for regarding with some skepticism your friend’s advice.
I’d want to contest that idea by posing an alternative to the conception of poetry and the poet on which it appears to me to depend. Studying philosophy could ruin one’s ability to write poetry if the poet were an idiot savant, and poetry the result of some version of “inspiration” or “genius” susceptible to corruption by rationality. Or it could ruin poetry if poetry were essentially decorative, if it were just prettified language, and if philosophy by imposing dry reason shoved beauty out. But I doubt that either of those views, or any similar view, is true. I doubt that reason and beauty are mutually exclusive (and in support of my doubt would cite such conjunctions of reason and beauty as our counting “elegance” as one criterion for a mathematical proof). I myself believe that poetry arises from depth of knowledge or intensity of experience or acuity of attention, not from some isolated inner wellspring that would be poisoned by contact with the world. Consequently, I suspect that, all else being equal, the more a poet knows about anything (philosophy, nuclear physics, farming, geology, music, appliance repair, SpongeBob, medical imaging, differential calculus, whatever) the better for her or his poetry. I can’t think of any knowledge that would corrupt a person’s ability to write poetry; to put this in the opposite way, I doubt that the ability to write poetry is so fragile that it can be harmed by learning.
That advice also echoes something I’ve heard each time I’ve taught an introductory-level poetry writing course: “I don’t read other people’s poetry because I don’t want to corrupt my own style.” But that takes for granted both that style is the single most crucial element of poetry and that one’s style is innate. I doubt both premises. My own experience, and what I can infer from any evidence I can gather, suggests that style (or voice, another term sometimes used in the same beware-of-corruption approach) is a composite, something that one constructs rather than something that one receives. I want to say that poetry has to do more fundamentally with how one listens than with how one speaks or writes, and that philosophy (like any number of other inquiries — math, geology, etc.) can help one listen more acutely.
All that said, it’s worth remembering that Wittgenstein reportedly warned his students away from philosophy, period, not only if they were concerned for their poetic abilities. So whether or not you take your friend’s advice, he’s got good company in offering it!...(more)
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The Valley Thick with Corn
Samuel Palmer
b. Jan.27, 1805
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Babel No More
The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Peter Constantine
reviews The Art of Mastering Many Tongues by Michael Erard
How is it, Erard asks, that certain people are able to accumulate what for the average person is a daunting number of languages? What are the secrets of polyglots who can master 6, 26, 96 languages? What are their quirks and attitudes? Are their brains wired differently from ours?
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Oxford Scholarly Editions Online
“The text that scholars read matters everything to them because all their interpretations are based on what’s in the text. And so if the text is defective, the interpretations are going to be affected.”
In a new series of videos from Oxford University Press, Michael F. Suarez, S.J. talks about the importance of the scholarly edition and its evolution from print to digital.
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photo - mw
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Helping Transport Me There Today
Robert Gibbons
Time Capsule
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Talk about one observation following another in rapid succession Rimbaud Olson Davenport. In the middle of one letter he says he just got off the phone with Hallam Movius, expert on Acheulean stone tool making culture reaching back to the Lower Paleolithic, the subject Guy takes up toward the end of his essay “Olson.” Guy was never afraid to make one wild conjecture after another. Kept things moving, as he & Olson believed all things do, including stone. Their molecules & meaning. This is where Guy sends me today: to Olson’s Volume Three, where Guy says, “Throughout these last Maximus poems Olson keeps gazing at the offshore rocks, especially Ten Pound Island.” It’s a volume made heavier over the years strewn with bookmarks & jottings. Look, open it anywhere, ha, a dried elm leaf from Cape Ann marks the page where Olson underlines “necessary woman” addressing the geography & spirit of Gloucester herself, begging her “not go away”. Now, the NYC DJ resorts to Dvorak’s My Home, Op. 62, Overture, helping transport me there today
...(more)
January 26, 2012
photo - mw
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The Scholar’s Art
Ange Mlinko, reviewing Susan Stewart's The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making
la review
scroll down
(....)
... there is something about poetry — about language use itself — that sits uneasily with “freedom.” Maybe it’s the terror of babble (the verbal mode of insanity, dementia, and catastrophe). Maybe it’s that for tens of centuries, scribes and grammarians have been mainstays against the cultural losses — and dysphasias — incurred by history: losses of manuscripts, of entire languages. They have also been the ones to sniff at an improperly used meter, a “shapeless” ode, or a qasida that seemed just “a string of pearls,” all rhyme and no reason. Grammar is hard to master. Meaning is easily lost. To mess with it, to mess with language, to play with it (much less play with it without a net) drives pious types bonkers. And on the other side are the ones who have played with language relentlessly, also for thousands of years, the rhymers, punners, riddlers, and innuendo-peddlers who have simultaneously performed the shamanistic duties of the bard: keeper of the culture’s stories, its knowledge, its word-hoard. Frivolous and serious, mischievous and magisterial, poets play both sides of the coin of freedom — heads they study (“the scholar’s art,” Wallace Stevens called poetry), tails they frisk. If freedom and poetry seem paradoxical, freedom and poets are all but identical.
...(more)
via the page_______________________
Hendrik Avercamp
January 27, 1585 (bapt.)
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Boredom in the Charnel House
Theses on ‘Post-industrial’ Ruins
John Cunningham
variant
“Our capital of misery remains intact down through the ages; yet we have one advantage over our ancestors; that of having invested our capital better, since our disaster is better organised.”
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E.M Cioran, A Short History of Decay
1/ Suggestive Boredom
A friend recently sent me a poem that explained his dissatisfaction and boredom with urban decay and industrial ruins. He wrote much of the poem via one of the automatic text generators that often give the best lines:
“Sick of ruins/ sick of meaning of ruins/ ruined/ decay/ blight/ derelict/ poetry/ heavy bricks/ getting heavy/ sick of work/ getting sick/ labour history/ dead city/ history dead/ city labour/ dead city/ invading ruins/ my apologies/ my theft/ sick of poverty/ sick of ruins...”
(....)
For something as ephemeral as the ruin – the slow decomposition of spatial form in time – the best approach is a fragmentary one. The following is a series of provisional theses upon the decomposition of the contemporary ruin grasped through image and text. In line with this ephemerality and the over determination of everything in spectacular capitalism the following should be viewed as theoretical fictions, transitory attempts to formulate concepts of what is falling apart. This is the first thesis: ‘ruins boredom’ is a suggestive affect in that it is constituted by and through the contemporary metropolis. Walter Benjamin, connoisseur of the arcades – the ruins of 19th century commodity capitalism – wrote that, “Boredom is a warm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silks.” How might boredom with ruins be turned inside out and industrial ruin capital re-invested as anti-capitalist critique?
...(more)
Variant issue 42
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Boys of the Dumps
South Boston, Massachusetts
October 1909
Lewis W. Hine: Child Scavengers
Tom Clark
Beyond the Pale
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Terrifyingly real: Poulantzas and the capitalist state
Lenin's Tomb
(....)
Before delving into Poulantzas' theoretical innovations, I must make a note on his method. As he said in his critique of Miliband, any historical materialist approach to the capitalist state must clearly state its epistemological criteria in order to properly situate the concrete historical data it works with. Absent this, it becomes an exercise in empiricism. His own works, particularly PPSC (Political Power and Social Classes), are to a very large extent concerned with outlining these protocols. His approach, as such, has been taxed with the stigma of 'formalism' and (pace Miliband) 'hyper-abstractionism'. The burden of this criticism is that Poulantzas spent more time parsing texts from the marxist canon and arguing through their implications, than examining concrete state formations. This is not entirely unfair, and to the extent that it is true, Poulantzas was being typically althusserian: a close, symptomatic scrutiny of texts being the modus operandi of the Althusser Circle. But the point is overstated. The survey of the typologies of the capitalist state in PPSC, for instance, largely draws on current sociological and historical research. The argument about the ambiguous role of state personnel in SPS (State, Power, Socialism) draws from the immediate experience of May 1968 in France. Moreover, there is something praiseworthy in Poulantzas' re-evaluation of first principles, the painstaking clarification of concepts. Though this responded to concrete political problems, usually crises - of Greek communism, of democracy, of marxism, etc - his response was far from intellectually defensive. He took theoretical risks in order to make marxism adequate to the present. Only by doing so is it possible to make any sort of progress....(more)
State, Power, Socialism
Nicos Poulantzas mediafire pdf
The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State
Edited by James Martin
mediafire pdf
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The Dreams of Dr. Plague
Takeo Takei
1924
50 Watts
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Haptics, Mobile Handhelds, and other "Novel" Devices
The Tactile Unconscious of Reading across Old and New Media
Rachel Lee
ctheory
(....)
I wish to frame Taussig's essay (Tactility and Distraction, 1991) as part of a broader theoretical movement to shift the question for academic criticism away from vision and semiotics -- aka the search for fuller meaning, fuller representation by way of exposing the hidden meaning and bringing it to light -- to tactility and affect -- the connecting with the magic or enchantment of a material object's or phenomenon's intensity, the inquiring into the efficacy of an action or event, and the mapping of how such efficacy is enacted and circulated. The "capitalist mimetics" of advertising, and, interestingly, the pedagogies of preschool education, become exemplary of fields already way ahead of the game, so to speak, in mulling over these questions.
...(more)
January 24, 2012
photo - mw
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Forest Of Europe
Derek Walcott
b. Jan. 23, 1930
The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.
The inlaid copper laurel of an oak
shines though the brown-bricked glass above your head
as bright as whisky, while the wintry breath
of lines from Mandelstam, which you recite,
uncoils as visibly as cigarette smoke.
"The rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva."
Under your exile's tongue, crisp under heel,
the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves,
the phrase from Mandelstam circles with light
in a brown room, in barren Oklahoma.
There is a Gulag Archipelago
under this ice, where the salt, mineral spring
of the long Trail of Tears runnels these plains
as hard and open as a herdsman's face
sun-cracked and stubbled with unshaven snow.
(....)
From hand to mouth, across the centuries,
the bread that lasts when systems have decayed,
when, in his forest of barbed-wire branches,
a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase
whose music will last longer than the leaves,
whose condensation is the marble sweat
of angels' foreheads, which will never dry
till Borealis shuts the peacock lights
of its slow fan from L.A. to Archangel,
and memory needs nothing to repeat.
Frightened and starved, with divine fever
Osip Mandelstam shook, and every
metaphor shuddered him with ague,
each vowel heavier than a boundary stone,
"to the rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva,"
but now that fever is a fire whose glow
warms our hands, Joseph, as we grunt like primates
exchanging gutturals in this wintry cave
of a brown cottage, while in drifts outside
mastodons force their systems through the snow.
...(more)
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photo - mw
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"Speech is the fountain..."
John Latta
(....)
Williams’s enormous doubt, and doubt’s vacillatory burdensomeness. Hugh Kenner—in 1953, in “A Note on ‘The Great American Novel’”—notes how “the American language, or the part of it that interests Williams, is distinguished by a sort of amnesia:
Though their colloquial vocabularies are restricted, their syntax simple, and their speech-rhythms the reverse of Ciceronian, Americans don’t utter a gelatinous Basic English. They have rhythmic and idiomatic means of concentrating meaning in these counters, shifting the burden of the sentence with a certain laconic grace from word to word, which falsifies the unthinking novelist’s assumption that the way to extract the unuttered meanings of American experience is to assist these pidgin gropings with the fuller cadences of European prose. European prose, when it attempts to grapple with American material, yields nothing but suave cliché.
Kenner quotes the “European voice” at the beginning of Chapter XI:
Eh bien mon vieux coco, this stuff that you have been writing today, do you mean that you are attempting to set down the American background? You will go mad. Why? Because you are trying to do nothing at all. The American background? It is Europe. It can be nothing else . . .
Kenner’s argument: “This mind”—the European one—“thinks in phrases, not in words: the upward lilt between its punctuation marks is the signature of a habit of apprehension shaped by Latin prose. A European would have imparted a more elegant rhythm to the answering sentence, which comes with Williams’ own unmistakable flatness: As far as I have gone it is accurate.”
Small fogs in retreat. “Pretense to integrity an empty shell.” Bah. A cur’s defiant intent (“nothing to say”) to avoid, at least, inaccuracy.
...(more)
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photo - mw
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from Revelator
Ron Silliman
dog barking emerges from barn
but won’t approach, such boundaries
visible to the mind but
not physical at all, swan
with a broken wing adopts
small town pond, adapts, adept
at avoiding all leashed dogs
as they pass, as we
far less permanent than this
giant oak not toppled, atop
wch lone raven stalks, wind
rendered visible by the trees
two cardinals buffeted in flight
red messengers their floating text
peeps by, I spy, eyes
pie, terns skim over water
predusk glare over the Chesapeake
blue heron solitary, standing still
osprey’s nest looks huge, hum
means mosquito right at ear
rubber soles atop hard wood
screech, scratch, itch, each, two
common terns atop a post
implies a pairing, Jack Russell
terriers under foot but Jasmine
sad-eyed black poodle plays fetch
hard rubber chew toy wet
with success iced tea season
is upon us ...
...(more)
shampoo 39
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ln Plato's Cave
1972
Robert Motherwell
b. Jan. 24, 1915
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Tumbril Time!
Alexander Cockburn
A tumbril (n.) a farm cart often used for carrying manure, also to carry prisoners to the guillotine during the French Revolution.
Any headline modeled on “It’s the economy, stupid.” This tedious phrase derives from the Clinton campaign of 1992, and is still echoing on opinion pages 20 years on. To the tumbrils with it!
“Well…” , as in constructs like “His performance was.. well… frankly bad.” Equally awful is “…er”, as in “Is Angeline Jolie a great actor? Er… no.” The British are particularly keen on this piece of stylistic coyness.
“Staunch”, as so often used to describe right-wingers: “a staunch Republican,” “a staunch Conservative”, though not I think, “a staunch fascist.” I see left writers using this phrase freely about Republicans and Conservatives. Don’t they know that “staunch” carries the aroma of unstinting, courageous loyalty. It’s an honorific. How about “fanatic Republican”? “crazed Conservative.” No rightwinger would talk about “staunch liberals” – admittedly an oxymoron, just like “staunch Democrat.” Now, there really are staunch pacifists. Save the word for them.
Michael Donnelly offers “At the end of the day,” which, I need scarcely remind you, is the hour when the fat lady sings, after the rubber has met the road. The fat lady line was first popularized in George H.W. Bush’s run for the Republican nomination in 1980. When he finally threw in the towel, the press corps hired a fat Valkyrie with a horned helmet to rush up to him and sing at the top of her voice, waving a trident.
From Jean-Pierre Duboucheron: “Bad guys.” Spot on, Jean-Pierre.
From Sean Dunne in Ireland: “this ain’t my first rodeo” ; “just sayin’”; “Really.” True, one does see the terse “Really” all too often. Time for the final haircut.
“I would like to request that you consign one more word to the tumbrils. And that word is ‘stakeholder.’” Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga. Happy to oblige, Vukoni.
...(more)
via Owen Paine
January 23, 2012
Folkdance Melancholia
1989
Georg Baselitz
b. Jan. 23 1938
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Only after philosophy will he live. Only when he has brought philosophy to an end.
A little kindness. That's what he looks for.
What he wants: simple, direct communication, he says. To speak of ordinary things.
He is touched by platitudes. The porter says, 'How are you today, sir?', with a friendly wink. The cleaner: 'Am I disturbing you?' There is nothing more moving, he says.
Wittgenstein Jr: Normal people are are a balm. And on another occasion, We must be normal, normal.
Life is very close to us, he says. It is almost here.
- Wittgenstein Jr
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photo - mw
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from
Lanthanum 1 - 8 [pdf]
Henry Gould
3
Each wave curls its own limestone Dover cliff
of snowy foam. Each day a microcosm.
Holds tight its mystery, beneath the chasm
vault of milky sky. My little skiff
with its keen keening keel sings blind
into the wind. . . I ride along her sea-road,
blinded too. Eros, playing with his golden
cobalt ball, unbalances mankind –
love stung me in the eyes, and swelled her sails
(away from home). Memoirs of a Vagabond
(foolish desire). Confessions of a Fond
Frog-Pond (a little touched). The Voice that Fails.
A mute remorse, a comprehending silence.
Foot-pedaling gymnast, pianissimo
satyr (impaired biped, recycling) – O
animale compagnevole – get thee hence.
Ice-boles in the trees are tears, glinting
in low December sun. If there be Life
Renewed (for such as Berryman, Henry) – if
there be Someone in the Whisper (hinting,
glancing) – would be like this sunlight
through the icebound branches – would be
happy ending to a Winter's Tale (of misty
breath – Look there, look there!). . . all right,
all right. Beyond these galaxies of Sorrow,
Shame and Fear. . . a turning wonder, there –
in the beginning – with a childish air. . .
a choir that shanties through the winter snow.
Poetry - Henry Gould
free pdf. versions, linked at the Brown University Library catalog.
HG Poetics
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The Tree
Georg Baselitz
1966
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Bazooka, Night Watering, and Admonition for My Children
Ange Mlinko
nonsite
Bazooka
You hear a song, say, at the Ió-popoi festival
holding that a new addition to the alphabet
has been fashioned by the magus, Epicharmus.
He appeared at court before the tyrant
and his invention glowed, like smaragdus
then leapt off tongues like popoi, dah!
The other one—that Pindar—got his comeuppance
when Korinna laughed at him: "One should sow
with the hand, not the whole sack."
Yet he continued to pour everything into that ototototoi
to which he refused to give a false bottom:
His "circumlocutions, allusive references, metaphors,"
not to mention his sudden curtailments
and digressions, served a "highly artificial idiom."
"Dissonance;" "big, long words;" "grand rhythms;"
these made him famous, and his complex metrics
gave his work the impression, as Horace said,
of a rushing river, "freed from rules."
An aristocratic nature does not like to be constrained
to the fewest syllables. His subjects encompassed
gods and men and horses, all victorious.
As a dog rambles, its nose a coquette granting
equitable attentions to the savory and fetid,
I sift for truth among these airs
much as I define necessary by the yardstick
of my own pleasure: Cold weather sweeps down
from the articulate clouds, thrilling invisible
peacock feathers from goosebumps,
and the dead man's fingers of a poncho
as I stride across fields of live oak, catch samples.
...(more)
Ange Mlinko (Bachelardette) at Poetry International and the Poetry Foundation
Three poemsAnge Mlinko jacket
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Valerie Merians and Dennis Johnson of Melville House:
successful small publishers in a conglomerate world.
Tamara Glenny
The truth is that making it as a small publisher in an era of international conglomerates-who themselves tremble at the name of Amazon-is hard if not impossible. As it turned out, it was probably just as well that Merians and Johnson were clueless when they decided to publish Poetry After 9/11 in 2002. Babes in the tangled wood of modern publishing, they stumbled in and never left.
Melville House at ten years old
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rob mclennan's Top Eleven (Canadian) Poetry Books of 2011!
dusie
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photo - mw
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