what I set up for myself comes together and then it falls apart
together and apart
together and apart
like mini stages set for these small plays
haphazard shrines
or gestures at the altar
first empty
then cluttered
then empty
then cluttered
rhythmically irregular
not at all like waves
or seasons
or music
nor intentional
I'm not that interested in most of it
finding it all too difficult
difficile
and useless
inutile
and lonesome
partaking neither of movements
nor manifestos
nor main streams
for
I'm not what I am
and I am what I
am not
Drifts of snowdrops, moist gray of approaching rainstorm, dust blowing across the highway, the shy bridge flashing its green strands of light ...
I need the company of a poet in the office. And a book. And a table in the pavilion, in a sunny spot. And a few moments to myself. Coffee. Scraps of accomplishment. A fantasy wind of brief scope in a minor key.
Approaching everything from the side. Merging, with a blind spot in my rear view mirror. Observing the chain link fence, woven with two separate handmade shrines of permanent flowers and leaves. Swerving.
Approaching nothingness when what I want is a grand moral vision.
Approaching sleep.
The writing is thin and sheer, scraps of worn cloth fluttering over the days of the week. They can't be assembled into anything, they are too weak to weave a needle through without disintegration into threads.
I want to trust it, where it goes, when how and where it goes.
It's taken a long time to realize that I have something to say.
Inside there was like a bare room, or an alphabet, an alphabet of clemency. Now at last you knew what you were supposed to know. The words formed from it and the sentences formed from them were dry and clear, as though made of wood. There wasn't too much of any one thing. The feelings never wandered off into a private song or tried to present the procession of straightforward facts as something like a pageant: the gorgeous was still unknown.
J.A., "The System," p342
It reminds me of writing here, all the decisions that have to be made.
Your knotted hair
Around your shoulders
A shawl the color of the spectrum
Like that marvelous thing you haven't learned yet.
J.A., "The Skaters," p223
Today I was reading from The Double Dream of Spring while
watching the snow fall and missing a meeting I was supposed to be at, but had forgotten about.
A lot of the poems mention learning. Thinking about learning, I remembered the above lines, my favorite lines from "The Skaters."
I felt like the poems were instructions for my life. Undecipherable at times, but when have I demanded that something be decipherable?
Learning as a symbol. I don't think J.A. really puts much stock in learning-learning. See "And You Know" where the last line is "And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school."
But there is some kind of learning to be done. I can barely sense the learning, it's in the poetry, I see it in the repetition of symbols (words), working with the same words in different settings.
There's a theme of repetition here, the "vicus of recirculation" just like in Finnegan's Wake. Why am I continually surprised to realize that artists are so repetitive? I always seem to think artworks were supposed to be "original," meaning never to repeat themselves. In Ashbery, words recur recur recur.
One of those words is "learning." Another is "night." I could list quite of a few of them. I develop a private meaning for myself and feel comfortable whenever I see the word again, like a signpost.
It's a happy learning. "Evening in the Country" - "I am still completely happy."
The encounter is strong and fresh as climbing into the boughs of a cherry tree in bloom one chilly April day in Washington DC.
Susan's Shultz's intro to The Tribe of John; Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. She calls Shapiro's book "quirky." I was discouraged by this article's engagement in some kind of aggressive literary war I didn't even know was going on.
There needs to be a book, something like Simic's book about Joseph Cornell, which responds to Ashbery in terms of the art.
Sadly, the books are due back at the library March 18th. And this is the Final Renewal, as stamped in red on the renewal slip. I know, this is not a big problem, I could check them out again in a week or even purchase them. But I choose to look at it romantically, like I'm being torn from the arms of the poetry I love.
Look up Ann Lauterbach, discussed in the link above:
Lauterbach herself, who remarked in an interview, "My affinities to Ashbery are certainly there, although I think of myself as more psychological in tone and perhaps more intent and intense; I do not have his laconic, insouciant, inclusive temperament. As I think Ashbery is our great poet, it would be odd not to have learned from him, but as with all great presences, the question is: what part to learn?"
I might also have to dip into Wallace Stevens again, maybe I'll find him more congenial this time.
We had reached that stage in our perennial evolution where holy thoughts no longer exist and one can speak one's mind freely, and the night shot back an answering fragrance: too far to the stars, but it was here in its intimacy that wraps you in permissiveness, leaving you free as it wanes to learn more about your special thoughts or any ideas you might have.
J.A., "The New Spirit," p333
Dismantling holy thoughts, leveling, deconstructing, smashing, making fun of with multiplicities, and competing divine imagerie.
Left with very little, as far as I can see. Little specks of light, too far.
Writing during the day, not at night. Absorbed in the business, the business of believing.
Longing for that permissiveness, that intimate ear of air, that listens to me, like the Ideal Adult that wanes, that wants to hear my special thoughts and any ideas I might have.
Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.
J.A., "The Instruction Manual," p10
Risky risky risky risky. Commentary, I mean.
I didn't understand this poem as a parody until I read Shapiro. Then I started to realize the intent behind the flatness of the sentences, the lack of nuance, the crayon box color scheme, and the enervating sensation that nothing is happening.
It's embarrassing to admit I didn't recognize the parody. I knew something was going on, but I didn't know what it was.
I like the poem better now that I see the parody. I prefer parody to that shutter blinded open mouthed earnestness of most poetry. On the other hand, I feel ashamed of that preference. Shouldn't one be open hearted and naive, not scheming and split tongued?
It's hard to decide to write with the true degree of parody that I feel. Isn't it shaming. Isn't it making fun, isn't it saying Your way is bad. I want to write in parody of journal writing. I have written parody of journal writing. But not really.
And the instruction manual bounces back and forth - to Guadalajara, to the manual, back to Guadalajara, in the office tower, down to the street, back up to the bell tower, back to the instruction manual. And isn't "instruction manual" (the title) describing also how not to be, what's past and through the parody? Isn't the parody pointing out something that's very true, teaching you toward a different place?
I'm not being careful in putting my thoughts into words, I'm at my desk, and I'm supposed to be working on the "questionnaire."
I could tell you about some of the things I've discarded but that wouldn't help you because you must choose your own, or rather not choose them but let them be inflicted on and off you. This is the point of the narrowing-down process. And gradually, as the air gets thinner as you climb a mountain, these things will stand forth in a relief all their own--the look of belonging. It is a marvelous job to do, and it is enough just to approximate it. Things will do the rest. Only then will the point of not having everything become apparent, and it will flash on you with such dexterity and terribleness that you will wonder how you lived before--as though a valley hundreds of miles in length and full of orchards and all sorts of benevolent irregularities of landscape were suddenly to open at your feet, just as you told yourself you could not climb a step higher.
J.A., "The New Spirit," p312
It makes me happy about the mild deprivation I'm feeling lately in material goods. No camera, no cell phone, no broadband, no laptop, no new car, no home improvements. I think about getting these things every day, but I'm resisting, infused with a stubborn, almost subversive anti-consumerism.
I love the joy - "marvelous job to do" - and the generosity - "enough just to approximate it."
I like the turning over of effort to things - "Things will do the rest." Yeah, things! I'm tickled by this mysterious agency of things, hard at work, doing their marvelous jobs.
I like the unexpected adjectival nouns describing "flash" - dexterity and terribleness.
I love the sense of perspective offered by using the landscape as the metaphor and the sense of breathlessness and exertion offered by using mountain climbing as a metaphor.
There are so many things to like about this passage. I haven't even scratched the surface. And this prose poem is really long! And there are two more long ones in this book!
How do we explain the harm, feeling
We are always the effortless discoverers of our career,
With each day digging the grave of tomorrow and at the same time
Preparing its own redemption, constantly living and dying?
J. A., "Clouds," p281
Am I in charge of my career?
What is a career?
Barry Stevens wrote that it hasn't been a career, more like a careen.
I always wanted a careen, but I seemed to effortlessly put forth effort toward a career, whether I wanted one or not.
I know that simultaneous living and dying, the old surrounding me and the new coming my way at once. It's in the weather. It's in the cold cup of coffee, sour dank and miserable. The old way is absorbing, fills my mind. I'm barely aware of the seeds of the new. I know the old, what happened, through and through, at least its outline.
I want to give equal time to the new, like the fresh coffee that looks and smells so attractive, before I've even tasted it.
Now who can say WHY I ran across a link to the above website tonight surfing in a completely different vicinity, me who hardly ever randomly surfs the web anyway?
signed,
frustrated by random pointless coincidences
Fantasy - being able to take a poem and identify its form, make some intelligent remarks about its meter, or comment on the use of various
rhetorical devices such as
Zeugma
Anacoluthon
Apostrophe! (this one, maybe)
Anaphora
Homoeoteleuton
or my favorite, the
Chiasmus
I'll define chiasmus - it's a term for the general pattern of crossing of two pairs of elements.
This practice of studying the usage of words seems very archaic to me, almost obsolete. But I like knowing that it exists. Do poets and poetry editors and poetry critics still look out for things like this? "Fine chiasmus in line 10," "stunning use of anaphora in the first stanza..."?
It's charming in an old-fashioned, obsessive, word nerd kind of way. The technical terms of poetry.
It's a very fine book, but my favorite of all sentences in it is at the very end, in the Suggestions for Further Reading:
For transcendent afterthoughts on many of these matters, Justus George Lawler's Celestial Pantomime (New Haven, 1979) is remarkable, but cannot be recommended to beginners.
typos
silence
Tappan Zee into the fog
pavilion style lunch room
eggplant stew with feta and ciabatta
interminable
When I walk down the vaulted hallway back to my desk, I imagine myself filling the space, floor to ceiling, barely able to crawl down the hallway, huge and deformed, hunched over like great Alice with my teeth all broken, dark, and strewn like mountain boulders in my mouth.