Some of the poems have a shape, some don't.
I chickened out and let other people read them. Immediately I felt this was a mistake. I wanted to take over and perform them, because I can perform them the way they should be performed. I'm surprised how strongly I feel that these poems are performance pieces. Hard admission for a shy person.
I feel more motivated to perform than to publish.
Maybe I need to live with one page at a time. It's easy to skim over them without paying close attention when I'm editing the whole mess.
I have problems with plot and narrative anyway.
I still wish for a teacher. I accept that I'm not ready for a teacher.
I accept the task of learning to write by writing, learning to edit by editing, learning to perform by performing.
And my routine is changing so I don't know where I'll go from here.
A silly idea: Create a poem entitled Treesome which is Ashbery's Some Trees in reverse. It reads very well backwards.
I made some more quick edits to Untitled Poetry Manuscript. I'm taking it out on a date tonight. I'll be interested to hear people's reactions.
I'm painstakingly reading through Some Trees with the guidance of Shapiro. I have to read everything at least twice. To my delight, on second and third reading, the odd turns of phrase seem downright familiar, even friendly. Oh, there you are again.
Birkerts doesn't like Ashbery's poems. He says they're nihilist.
He says "I can only report on the defensive reflexes that their insistent refusal of meaning triggers in me." (SB, p235)
And, linking JA with the deconstructionists: "Deconstruction itself offers no signposts for this evolution, only a method for taking things apart. In this, deconstructionists are like members of a terrorist sect." (SB, p236)
I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm like the idea of taking things apart. Taking things apart is its own reward. It's one way (the only way?) to see how things work. And sometimes you break things in the process. There can be a lot of damage.
Therefore, am I sympathetic to terrorists? No, I would say instead that I accept terrorism as real, as part of this picture. The system is a whole system. The hidden violence in our human structures holds hands with terrorism. Just like selfconscious literature holds hands with deconstruction.
More commentary on JA: "The whole is a slap--and to my mind a not too friendly slap--at the reader. Nor is there any point in invoking the surrealist example. This has nothing to do with surrealism. The latter is based upon the transcription of spontaneously recovered, alogical unconscious materials' this is a calibrated verbal contraption." (SB, p240)
And it's not a "dream" either. But don't they all lead to the same place?
It's valuable to take things apart. Especially rigid mental systems (where the critic lives).
Take a long soak in lack of meaning and see what things look like when you come back. Don't worry, these systems are not fragile.
I have more to say, but not today.
Sven Birkerts, The Electric Life
when I want writing to be like weaving, regular, with a pattern, over and over, front and back, side to side
when I want writing to be like knitting, taking a thread, working it through the fingers, elaborately looping, around and around, attached to those sticks that are rhythmically clacking
when I want writing to be like First Holy Communion, wearing a frilly white dress and veil, taking the Man into your mouth, reaching after ecstasy with all young hope amongst your classmates
when I want writing to be textured, gritty like sand, or cold as a snow fort, the texture of shelter, the texture of sun
when I want writing to be electronic, beeping in response to commands, structured and styled, fuzzy only in the intersections, embedded in the overlapping rules of each domain
I don't know what I want
seagull wing smashed onto the highway
feathers lift in the wind of passing cars
not much time to write
interpersonal existence
a lot going on
I like the ice and snow scape outside my window
A weighty topic. I'm reading John Ashbery, An Introduction to the Poetry, by David Shapiro. It's a thrill. It's just difficult enough that it's hard to read more than a few pages at a sitting. But the writing makes it totally worthwhile, irresistible. I feel the stretching of my brain reading it. Today I was having a fantasy that I would suddenly become vastly intellectual, magically able to understand much more than I ever had before. I could swallow this book in one quick hour, just because I was tantalized by the initial taste of it.
What is this drive to understand? I'm not sure it's ethically worth anything.
What is this concern with ethics?
What's it all about?
Funny how questioning gets you nowhere, as questions lead to ever bigger questions and then suddenly, you're left with:
I just like it (desire at the root).
. . .
Shapiro says things like this:
Ashbery has a very full palette, and one must distinguish between grammatical anomaly, unexpected dream imagery, and the nonsensical. Ashbery is one of the poets who senses an epoch's rule system for sense itself and revolts against it with wit.
Ashbery tries successfully to reinstate the poetic qualities of all possible sources--journalism, degraded ditties, bad poetry--by implying that there is no such thing as the poetic.
His poetry starts with the feeling of cliché, the banal, the given, but ends with something complex and strange: disastrous relations.
I could quote the whole chapter. I guess I better stop. I am sighing for something. I'm having an attack of intellect. That quality that is stunted, stymied, and not useful in my life.
. . .
And then there are issues: Hero worship. Harvard. Privilege. Parody, lack of compassion in. Preciousness. France. Influence and tradition. The ultimate value of inaccessible writing. Have we gone too far with thinking, have we come to a dead end. Pluto. The Third World. Rhythm. Story. Emotion. As in whatever happened to. The ends of self-consciousness, meta, writing about writing. IMAGINATION.
Imagination is the only thing that makes sense. Imagination is fun, and a problem-solver. I can see the point of that. And compassion is a good thing too.
OK, so much for that. Over and out for today.
I bought a copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery. I've been carrying it around with me like a secret.
It might be a perverse attraction. His writing is just so impossible. He is way beyond me. But it satisfies something inside me to dip into writing that's so elegant and imaginative and vibrant, but doesn't make any sense.
I study it, trying to see how he does it. I had to cut my poems down into shards of one or two sentences. I had to cut out a lot of random noise. Until I did that, they just didn't seem like poems. And most of them still need work.
Ashbery puts together a relatively longer poem that doesn't make any sense, and contains a lot of random noise, and it still seems to be a "poem." Is it the language, the grammar, the sound-sense, some interrelationship between ideas, or is it just that he had the guts to do it?
Something interesting - certain of his lines and phrases jumped out at me because they seem like responses to some of the questions in my poems. I'd like to juxtapose these phrases with my poems, like postscripts. It would certainly seem eerie to me to see the interplay on the page. It would make me happy.
He does come up with some astonishing phrases. The title of this entry, "pink dew of afterthoughts," is from Suite.
I'm collecting words to describe Ashbery's work:
her·met·ic
Etymology: Medieval Latin hermeticus, from Hermet-, Hermes Trismegistus
1 a : of or relating to the Gnostic writings or teachings arising in the first three centuries A.D. and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus
b : relating to or characterized by occultism or abstruseness : RECONDITE
2 [from the belief that Hermes Trismegistus invented a magic seal to keep vessels airtight] a : AIRTIGHT
b : impervious to external influence
c : RECLUSE, SOLITARY
re·con·dite
Etymology: Latin reconditus, past participle of recondere to conceal, from re- + condere to store up, from com- + -dere to put -- more at COM-, DO
1 : hidden from sight : CONCEALED
2 : difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend : DEEP
id·i·o·lect
Etymology: idio- + -lect (as in dialect)
: the language or speech pattern of one individual at a particular period of life
(Also - sociolect; not in the MW online dictionary; probably means the speech pattern of a group.)
This sense of being in a place--mythic, geographical, or emotional--of creativity is what she calls 'The Land of the Shí,' the title of a new sequence of poems in Cornucopia, her most recent book.... Peacock says that she encountered The Land of the Shí some years ago in her reading of James Stephens' Irish Fairy Tales, 'not as a place you actually go to but as a place you get to suddenly, standing in one place, when your perceptions heighten. That is the very state I feel you must write a poem from, and it cannot be entered by trying but simply by being available to it.'
'The shimmering verge' is another way Peacock describes this state of creativity. 'For me, it's the place where you don't know whether to laugh or cry, to leave or stay,' she says. 'It's a 21st-century woman's idea of The Land of the Shí, the place we don't have words for, so we must write them. For me, it's The Land of the She.'
from Women in the Arts magazine, "Woman on the Shimmering Verge," by Renée H. Shea
This piece about Molly Peacock generated a number of thoughts.
Empty time, empty time, silence, a thousand tiny lights.
All I really have to do is try to keep warm. Cuddle vest, chenille sweater, soft jacket, down jacket. Long johns, corduroys, socks one, socks two. And still my feet are cold.
I retrieved my poetry manuscript from the shuffle of late December. It was intolerably wordy.
I made radical cuts. Now it's something completely different. I don't even know what it is. Or whether I like it.
Shards of light or ice or glass. Careful handling, may extinguish, melt or pierce.
I've been considering the subject of Failure.
I realized, long after I wrote about renaming this weblog "F," that F was a grade that stood for Failure. F is not really part of my consciousness as a grade. I haven't been in school for a long time. And I never got F's. Correct that, only once that I remember, did I get an F. In a high school religion class taught by a psychotic priest who demanded that we memorize everything VERBATIM. One day I realized with horror that I'd forgotten we were having a test and failed to memorize everything, thus getting an F, even though I tried to use self-hypnosis to bring back the answers directly from my memory bank. Even at the time, I realized this situation was ridiculous and thought that Failure was pretty Funny.
I like the idea of Failure. I want to embrace it.
I just had a major kitchen failure. I wanted to prevent the top of my lovely eggplant parmesan from crisping too much, and I don't like to use aluminum foil (environmentally insane). Creatively, I decided to place a slightly damp cookie sheet from the dish drainer over the casserole. It was a complicated maneuver, sliding the cookie sheet upside down into the dark oven, trying to avoid burning my arms, and adjusting it to settle over the pyrex pan. I pressed down on it slightly to make sure it was seated on all four sides.
Kaboom.
I have to get a digital camera. I made an indescribably spectacular mess that I'd really like to preserve for posterity.
Squirrels on the run, coon treed, dogs in motion, cold seeping everywhere, everywhere, humpty-dumpty moon waves her white flag as she slides suddenly back behind the hill.
January rhythms, winter alive. I'd like to film it. Squirrels run across the top of the wall, their shadows run down the side of the wall. Sun skates across the sky at top speed in his chariot sleigh.
Rock festooned with ice in the middle of the moving stream. She's pretty and she likes her skirts, laughing out loud in the cold stream. Brown leaves of fall party around her, aged confetti.
I have something to say, I have a thousand things to say, but consciousness seems too sluggish. Leave the turtle to his mud bed in the midst of all this action.
She learned to read when she was four, before kindergarten. Her mother taught her. She remembers sitting down with a beginner's reader, a Dick and Jane book. She was surprising herself by reading, and then the word "Mother" came along. She thought that was much too long a word and that she'd never be able to decipher it.
But she did decipher it, otherwise she would only have the memory of encountering an undecipherable word.
I don't have an art room. I just have an interface. It's electronic, mostly, when it's not paper. This one is a cool gray, blue gray, with a gradient of royal blue at the top like a narrow band of water. It's very wintry. I feel comfortable with it. It's not textured at all, not messy, no fingerprints, nothing to spill or sprawl.
I can still identify with Audrey Flack or Louise Nevelson. Those women that create gigantic huge room-sized sculpture. I imagine myself on a ladder, surveying the work. That's a happy, engaged place to be, isn't it. Involved. In the room.
There's nothing to wish for, nothing to yearn for. Everything is right here, in the room. I enter the room, or I don't enter the room. It's that simple.
The product matters. All the cultural artifacts hanging around the product don't matter.
And - it's a collective enterprise. It may not seem so, but at the heart, it is. I know it is. And here I am, I feel connected, I am swimming in the large room, and using the practical tools, and it's a joy.
Creativity can feel lonely, out there in the farthest orbit, but it only takes the slightest effort to smile at her, ask her a few questions, and lead her in.
"It's crucial that you find ways to creatively and constructively channel your sacred rage at what's wrong in your world."
from freewillastrology
The thing about loudgirl is she's supposed to open her mouth. She's not supposed to care what you hear, what you think you hear, what you used to hear, what you wish to hear again, or what you wish you would have heard the first time. That's not important, neither are cavities, being on key, whether birds are attracted, or the boundary between ending and beginning again.
Politics! Politics, politics, politics. There's a way to do it. Jump in feet first, wholesale into another world, with qualities like this one. Similar lighting, weather conditions, general geographic layout, north is still north, south is south. But different. Subtly. Maybe just a name, a name of a person that stood for one thing here, and something very different elsewhere. That in itself could mean utopia.
And now we find temptation. We're tempted to the tag sentence ending, the punch line, ouch! Ooof, orangutan rendition. It destroys the stanza, the staggering effect, the stalling stiltwalking step step step from the bitter end back to the beginning. The sweetness of beginning, with its aromas of orange. The thing about loudgirl is...
It's not a good idea, is it? Tearing into the globe of grapefruit, breaking the membranes, sending sparkles of juice shooting off over the keys. I rip into the tart pink flesh with my teeth, scraping off the juicy bits. I eat some of the white pith for the bioflavinoids, but I have to pull off most of it, the most bitter parts that I don't want to eat.