Skkkkrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! is the sound my bare feet make as they skid Thwiptfwiptfwiptfwiptfwipt! is the sound of the unfastened leash of my vestigial theoryhead guilt whirling like a bolo into the precipice. I listen to it fall and can count to four (one, one thousand . . .) before I hear it hit bottom. Pluppt. Back off, people, this is my vacation!!! [Note: preceding comment not directed at Cathy or Adrian who were, after all, just following directions. As they both pointed out, it’s just too damn hot for a steel cage deathmatch. And to say that I don’t currently want to engage in a debate about the role of theory doesn’t imply that I discount the role of theory, etc., etc.] Ahhh. That’s much better. * * * So I spent last week’s heat wave in NYC and managed not to leave my apartment at all for the three-day duration. Input: butterflied trout, Kirby cucumbers, Korean red pepper paste (gochujang), sweet corn, coffee, milk, shredded wheat, eggs, minimum one pound of cherries per day, friend J’s MS, various mags, Web sites, books, Netflix (I refuse to do a reading list—they always seem like literary arm candy to me), Bryan Kest’s Power Yoga Vol. 3: “Sweat,” mailorder lingerie, Parliaments, Stoli & soda. Output: negligible, unless trashing various poems in MS counts as “output,” —e-mails, disbursed monies, comments on J’s MS, few (moderately sexy) phrases in notebook, effluvia. Here’s what I do with the trout (available from Fresh Direct for $5.99 per pound). Rinse and pat dry, place on baking sheet, skin side down, coat with tamari and sprinkle salt. Leave uncovered in the refrigerator overnight. (The uncovered thing is key because this allows it to dry out a little and develop a sort of cured skin of tamari. Koreans are obsessed with dry salty fish and think that Western fish is revoltingly wet.) Broil with ear of corn, still in husk, for 10 minutes, until trout is darkish caramel & slightly burnt, at which point corn is also done. Serve with Kirby cucumber wedges and gochujang. Cherries for dessert. If you’re me, you can live on this for a while. The preceding recipe was in fact an elaborate parable of the manifestation of theory in poetic syntax. (Much chinstroking ensues.) Bryan Kest says, “You gotta be where you’re at, ‘cause you’re already there.” * * * So the first thing anyone ever said to me about poetry that made any sense was Paul Muldoon, in an undergraduate workshop, saying that if you take two objects, each with its own resonance pattern, and place them in juxtaposition in a backlit tray of water, then the poem can consist simply in the interference pattern between the two. Point being that the poem can, of course, be much more than this, but the poem need not be much more than this. He may not actually have said this—but I think he said something to this effect. In any case, I’ve spent quite a bit of time engaged in various abuses of this passing remark. Here’s one fun variation. Have two objects in the tray, but have one of them be a statement about the narrative status of the other object (a title can accomplish this). Watch the reader’s mind—which has thereby been instructed to function in narrative mode—make lovely ripples in the water as it strives toward linearity and context and ends up telling a sweet little story that it has made up all by itself. Our instinctive yearning for narrative coherence is soooo cute! It’s as if you took the painting of Magritte’s pipe, but instead of saying “This is not a pipe” you instead said, “This is a story about a pigeon.” Rae Armantrout is doing something like this in her amazing poem “Generation” (quoted in its entirety) We know the story.
OK then. I guess I’m doing some variation of this in my current Ignatz manuscript based on the Krazy Kat comic strips (which if you don’t know, you should Google right now). (Sorry to be discussing my own work in this blog, but I’m in heavy-duty revision mode right now, and it’s where my head is. And trust me, after spending two straight months spending a good part of every waking day pondering the love life of a cartoon mouse, your head is in a very weird place. Especially on days when cherry consumption pushes the two-pound barrier.) So in the Ignatz poems, the content of the poem acts as one element, but the reader’s mind is always struggling back to that other vibrating thing in the tray—the modular cat-mouse-brick cycle that is the Krazy Kat mythology. This scenario—a water-filled tray, one constant element, one changing element—works as a model for certain kinds of religious experience as well as for romantic obsession—the ever-presence of the obsession-object working an unceasing interference with perception, the thumb in the camera frame. When I first thought of the Ignatz poems, it was as an unchanging cutpaper silhouette or action figure posed in front of a series of landscapes. (My friend J takes photos like this of his handpuppet sloth in front of various postcard-worthy landmarks. And after the Ignatz MS was well underway, my friend V showed me a heartbreaking series of paintings of different roomscapes each containing a featureless outline of Napoleon in the same stance—bicorn hat, arms crossed behind his back—standing in for V’s fiancé, who had died suddenly the previous summer.) Well, well, this post has taken a turn for the serious, hasn’t it? Better sign off . . . So two days ago, my old PC laptop, which is about 4 years old (that’s 88 in computer years), and whose hard drive has been making piteous asthmatic noises for months, had some sort of final aphasic attack. First the L went, then the apostrophe and shift keys and the number 6, and finally A, S, and E. I was writing this blog, and was trying to limp gamely along, concealing the injury à la Kerri Strug, but when the E went, it was the final straw. Oulipo should always be a matter of choice, not compulsion. So, since I’ve been tempted to make the switch for ages, yesterday I went over to B&H and bought a glossy white MacBook. (Yes I know I could have just gotten the keyboard repaired, but I had done that once already, and the hard drive was on its last legs. OK?) Since you always have to name things in MacUniverse, I intend to name her Heavenly Heavenly Vincentine.
Monotonous earth I saw become But the keyboard fiasco set me thinking again about a topic I had intended to think about this summer—the relationship between poetic form and poetic constraint. I know that, if you go all slippery slope about it, one collapses into the other—in the most general terms, form is, of course, only a subcategory of constraint. But I also think it’s true that, as poets and as readers of poetry, we experience the two concepts—form and constraint—differently, and the words are never used as synonyms. The two terms have different connotative valences—the former tends to be perceived as skeleton, the latter as scaffolding. Is it just age/prestige that makes, say, the villanelle form seem more “organic” or “internal” than Lee Ann Brown’s post-Oulipo stylings, or Lyn Hejinian’s word counts in The Cell, or Aaron Kunin’s syllabics in Folding Ruler Star, or A.R. Ammons’ adding machine tape? Is a constraint just a young form that has not yet accumulated an interpretive tradition after the manner of the octet/sestet turn in a sonnet? Or is it also that in some of the examples of constraints I listed—I’m thinking of Hejinian and Kunin in particular—one feels the presence of the constraint as a harsh and unnatural imposition—that one feels the struggle of content against form more starkly in these examples, as a cookie-cutter stamping machine rather than as a ballroom dance step, and that these poets take on this struggle as their subject matter? (I’m also thinking of the end of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” in which accomplished form is revealed as unbearable constraint, the final recurrence of the repeton a dreaded blow pain, the last pass of the Penal Colony writing machine.) As someone who was educated Roman Catholic and has a social sciences background, when I see the word “constraint,” I read it as “side constraint”—rule-based morality—and vividly recall my high school Thomist philosophy teacher Mr. Westerman warning us against the temptations of consequentialist/utilitarian thinking and exhorting us to be good deontological citizens. I wonder if others share this association? Maybe it just comes down to this chafing against rules—the simple friction of rebellion—that generates the energy of which Stravinsky speaks in his famous dictum: “Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength.” (Depressingly, this quote seems to have been co-opted by the corporate world, and now appears on MBA Depot—Business Quotations for MBAs and Managers (www.mbadepot.com) as well as on www.marketingplaybook.com in an article called “Why I Love PowerPoint.” Sigh.) But this doesn’t seem like the whole answer. There’s something more here that I can’t put my finger on. Damn I just spilled iced coffee on H.H. Vincentine! Oh Ponyboy, nothing gold can stay. On the train heading upstate now, the Amtrak Albany line—certainly one of the most gorgeous train trips anywhere: gold west-slanting sun ricocheting off the Hudson, sailboats, a backdrop of the Catskills. Bear Mountain looms out of the water, and in the back of my mind, a soundtrack of Elgar’s Enigma Variations (Nimrod) starts up . . . . . . unfortunately drowned out by the bad hair-metal from the headphones of the guy sitting two seats behind me. (When I say “hair-metal” (which I despise), I don’t mean to also denigrate those speed-metal bands (whom I worship and adore) whose members happen to be follicular overachievers, such as Slayer, who in concert do this incredible thing where the guitarists whirl their waist-length hair like helicopters in perfect unison while playing. at least as beautiful as any boy I can’t even get my head to whirl evenly on its axis like that while not playing unbelievably fast polyrhythmic guitar, much less in sync with two other whirling players. Perhaps proficiency in this esoteric art form can be made mandatory for all hair poets. (Personally, I’d pay $100 to see Jorie, Lucie, and Gjertrud even give it one good try. So if you’re feeling a little short of cash, ladies . . .)) * * * Current favorite word: “pleather.” [Note to self: Stop reading mail-order catalogs!] Current favorite quotation: “A sweater of earthworms may provide warmth, but it provides it at the expense of many other feelings.” (Henri Michaux, “Night of Inconveniences”) “Yuck!”: friend S’s response yesterday to most recent Ignatz poem, where I had been aiming for “erotically transgressive.” Sigh. The Ignatz project may be reinforcing one of my habits (not sure whether it’s a bad habit, but from the existentialism-lite perspective I tend to take about poetry, all habits are presumptively bad): displacing extremely personal/sexual subject matter into the third-person voice, or at least into the dramatic first-person, as opposed to the lyric first-person. Unlike a lot of developing poets, until I was in my mid-twenties, I never wrote in the lyric first-person, and I remember certain poems (e.g., an early one called “10 Years Old”) that I started in first-person voice and was actually unable to write until I shifted to the third-person, at which point things started to flow again. The first time I forced myself to stick with the lyric first-person (a poem called “A Parking Lot in West Houston”—perhaps coincidentally my first published poem), it felt like a huge embrace of personal risk, claiming and taking responsibility for the perspective of the speaker. One would like to think that one’s stylistic choices are rooted in artistic convictions, rather than personal neuroses, but I have to admit that this avoidance of the first person wasn’t any conscious stance re: impersonality, but stemmed, I think, from deep-rooted habits of repression and secrecy and from a craving for anonymity that I still feel strongly (why I live in NYC), as well as from a childhood allergy to poetic approaches that privilege “voice,” as in “finding your true poetic voice.” Yuck, indeed. The displacement-to-the-third-person reflex for personal/sexual subject matter, is an especially odd impulse because it’s not as if the coy “I have this friend who has this problem” game of the third-person voice is fooling anyone. But somehow using the third-person seems to cool it down a notch, soothes the outraged privacy, makes it ok. Is the superego censor really this easy to trick? Is there a theory of the lyric third person? (Of course, at root, all art involves displacement of the personal into the formal. But somehow the third-person vs. first-person problem puts a finer point to this displacement.) Aaron Kunin encapsulates this weird solace brilliantly in his poem “The Bloody Revisions,” which I include in its entirety, since it’s hard to excerpt and really good. until the blood dried Great, now this blog is going to come up on Google searches for “masturbate + gochujang.” Because I don’t get enough freaky e-mails already. Current favorite pop-culture expression: a tie between “Rokkin’ like Dokken” and “It’s pronounced . . . ‘biotech.’” (Use the comment space on this blog to cast your vote.) * * * So I desperately need a new notebook. I loved my old one. It was by Carta, thick and chewy at about 200 creamy unruled pages, with a yellow ultrasuedesque cover. Unruled paper is key—“ruled” paper is just that—it makes neutrality impossible—you either have to be with it or against it. When I was younger (and sillier), I had a ruled notebook that I used because of the cover—yellow paper handblocked in the Venice ghetto with a gold geometric print—but . . . get this . . . I only wrote on it sideways. Idiosyncratic, no? At the time I also occasionally used a fountain pen filled with green ink, and wore polka dot silk pajamas as daywear, so you have an idea of my overall pretension factor. I now generally use a ballpoint pen, which is lucky because of a near fatal (for the notebook) kayaking accident, where we tried to load two people onto my 45-pound plastic kayak and the notebook (which was in a supposedly watertight compartment) was soaked, but the writing is still legible. It’s also covered in soot—from my studio fireplace—and it’s hard to tell the soot spots from encroaching mildew. At this point, it looks and kind of smells like an artisanal cheese. I wash my hands after touching it, which is not ideal. But I’m still using and writing in it. Partly because I haven’t decided on a new one. I have four candidates in my apartment (stock up—they make nice gifts).
On the trip to Venice 10 years ago where I bought the hand-blocked notebooks, my friend S. was always plopping down—sometimes in the middle of the sidewalk—whenever he felt a poem coming on. (This was also the trip on which he uttered the sentence with which I still taunt him: “Fuck me if I don’t get a poem out of this!” He has since improved.) Apparently S. went to an alternative school where students were encouraged to sit cross-legged on the ground. Sometimes I’m glad I went to grade and middle schools where students (including me) were beat up regularly. Socialization is like circumcision: if you are going to do it (and I’m not getting drawn into this debate either), it’s probably less traumatic for all concerned to get it out of the way early. I even went to Kate’s Paperie, which was having a sale, but all of the unlined notebooks had flower petals and herbs and shit embedded in the paper. What are people thinking? This isn’t pasta. * * * A confession: I do “jot” down little “phrases” in my notebook, just not on the subway or sidewalk—dribs and drabs of things, separated by horizontal lines I draw across the page. So does everyone always feel like their process isn’t legitimate, like they’re not a real poet? For instance, I’ve always been fond of Michael Hofmann’s description of poetry as trying to tear a piece of wallpaper off the wall with one’s fingernails—one picks and picks until the thing starts, then ideally it’s all just one long smooth pull. But I rarely write that way. And lately I’ve been envious of those poems where syntax has the same structural integrity as image—where the hinges are as strong as the building blocks. Put another way, it would be interesting for me to write something with curves instead of angles and edges, which are my personal comfort zone. But whenever I try, I end up cutting away all of the connective tissue and end up with a text that is all elbows again. * * * And some part of me is sympathetic to S.’s sidewalk plopping and scribbling. (I’m just giving him a hard time for calling my poem yucky.) All of this pulsing, chirping nature around me—the little frog-burps—is giving me what I could refer to as “green guilt,” —the part of me that has always wanted to grow up to be a poet whose work is “rich with virtuously observed detail,” rather than with fictional mouse fantasias. “Idiosyncrasy of language derives from attention,” says Hugh Kenner. “Guilt guilt,” burp the frogs. “The invisible has a mocking tendency to present itself as the visible, as if it might be distinguished from everything else, but only under certain circumstances, such as the clearing away of mist.” – Roberto Calasso, K. (P.S. Those who haven’t read Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony should do so now. Can we get him to blog this site?) * * * So another addictive aspect of the Ignatz MS – why I’m a little terrified to finish it and to move on to the next thing – is what I refer to in my mental shorthand as a lighthandness with respect to narrative. I’ve always been drawn to narrative material, to backstory, but I’ve found that in using such material in a poem, it’s difficult to accomplish a glancing reference to the narrative, to isolate the particular contour of the narrative that interests me without getting caught up in telling the story. The weight of backstory always exerts its gravitational pull, trying to distort the poem into a linear narrative mode. I remember one poem I had to abandon because of this, based on one particular episode – more specifically on one particular image from that particular episode – from Sir Walter Raleigh’s voyages in Guiana. But I wasn’t interested in having the poem narrate the episode, and I didn’t want it to become a poem about Raleigh. As I said, I had to give it up. It’s even more problematic when you’re dealing with contemporary material – But I’ve never been particularly interested in telling stories in poems, and I certainly don’t want to feel forced into it by my choice of an unfamiliar subject. In the Ignatz MS, I’ve been able to shunt off any such burden -- to proceed on the assumption that the reader is familiar with the contours of the modular story. (I intend to include a frontispiece of the comic strip, or if copyright issues make that unfeasible, at least an explanatory note.) Lifting this expository burden has been unbelievably freeing – I don’t have to spend any of any poem explaining who Ignatz is, or Krazy or to describe or justify their “relationship.” (In a weird way, this must have been what it was like to write a poem like “Endymion” in Keats’ era – to have the questionable luxury of assumed familiarity, and to be able just to go off on a tangent to a preexisting line. But I oppose the canon in all its forms.) Also freeing, in an unexpected way, has been the devotional exercise of doing 40-some takes on a particular subject. (The great thing about comic strips as a narrative form is that character is static, rather than dynamic.) No particular take bears the burden of being authoritative, so that I’m able to take much more oblique angles on the subject than would normally be comfortable, while feeling confident that the reader is grounded in a deepening understanding of the character and backstory. As I said, addictive. * * * People are always (I exaggerate) asking me what the relationship is between my poetry and my law practice. What I miss more and more in law is exactly the ability to be lighthanded that I’ve just been describing – to say what you mean simply and then to stop speaking. In law, one is always getting bogged down, not only in the calcified locutions of brief-writing or contractual boilerplate, but also in the particular grammar of a common-law legal system, which draws both its function and its political legitimacy from precedent-based reasoning. It’s a commonplace of jurisprudence that law is an analogical system backed by very real force – the force of the State – and is always, as language, constructing a justification for that threat of force even while enacting it. And in the Anglo-American common-law system, that justification rests on legal precedent, which can boil down to the historical baggage of a phrase – on the previous deployments of the particular nugget of power-language (“beyond a reasonable doubt,” “cruel and unusual punishment”) you are trying to redeploy in the particular context of the current argument. As a stylistic matter, the power of a legal argument thus has a direct correlation to the number of string-citations or footnotes that back it up, to the point where the pages of law review articles commonly have a single line of original thinking borne up by a visual and functional foundation of footnotes, like the mattresses of the princess and the pea, or like the stack of turtles upon turtles on whose backs the universe rests. (Ask not, dear reader, on what foundation the original turtle is standing.) But it’s possible that this back-story – this bogging down – has something to do with responsibility, to rootedness, to what’s at stake in a particular language game. But it may be a trap to think this way. In law school, miserable, I was reading Wallace Stevens obsessively, but was finding in the artistic escapism of Harmonium the negative message that the more alluring the created worlds into which one retreats in one’s daily post-work reveries, the harsher the quotidian world will seem come 9 a.m tomorrow. Tonight there are only the winter stars. The sky is no longer a junk-shop, Full of javelins and old fire-balls, Triangles and the names of girls. Stevens, though a model as a poet, shouldn’t function as a model for a life. (Can one emulate the poems without living the life?) The poetic world can’t, and shouldn’t exist with regard to the everyday world in a relationship of escapism – such a stance is not just irresponsible, but may be a prescription for personal misery. Yikes, how did I get onto this? Hard to sympathize with old Wally while watching light leaping off the river and groundhogesque mammals frolicking on the lawn. Even ever-grumpy visiting friend D is smiling. Project for September (when I return to law job (or “La Job”) and immediately have to throw myself on the grenade of this massive trial): figure out how not to associate poetry with time off, dissolve poetry / life dichotomy. * * * Bryan Kest says, “It’s not about aesthetics, it’s about sensation.” (Creepy, but still not as creepy as my other yoga tape instructor, Yogi Alan Finger – “Yogi Finger” – who exhorts you to “take the perineum and draw it back into the body.” (Great, now this blog will show up on Google searches for “jurisprudence + perineum.” Bring on the pervy emails!)) * * * So friend M requested another recipe, and tonight for dinner I was able to try out a tart experiment that was a fair success, judging by requests for seconds after a large grilled meat meal. The problem with summer fruits in the Hudson Valley – the peak of ripeness — is that ripe fruit throws off too much water, and turns any potential pie effort into fruit soup. (Friend J3 – poet and professional piemaker – whom I’m trying to coax upstate next week, may have a solution for this, but I haven’t yet discovered it.) So here’s the recipe for my open-faced ripe peach tart experiment. Make a normal single pie crust, except with proportions as follows: 6 tablespoons butter, _ cup mascarpone cheese, one cup plus extra flour, 4 tablespoons ice water. 1/8 teaspoon baking powder, and _ teaspoon salt. Refrigerate in plastic wrap for at least an hour, than roll into a tart shape. In the meantime, caramelize peach wedges (about 6 large ripe peaches, or any other suitable fruit) over medium heat in about 4 tablespoons butter and about 4 tablespoons sugar (depending on fruit ripeness). When peach wedges are brown around the edges, remove with slotted spoon and reserve juices (reduce if too liquidy). Bake tart shell in 350 oven for 15-20 minutes until golden brown. Take about 1 cup mascarpone and stir in a few teaspoons honey just until spreadable. Spread mascarpone in warm tart shell, arrange peach wedges attractively on top, and glaze with reserved peach juices. Refrigerate for about 15 minutes to set the glaze. Enjoy! (I also tried this with halved, uncooked Bing cherries, with notable success, except that it pushed my daily cherry consumption over the hallucinogenic threshold.) Signing off now, full of peach pie and goodwill. Thanks for listening. |
Photo © Joanna Eldredge Morrissey |
||||||
|
POETRY TOOL Search for poems by poet, title, theme, and occasion. Also, articles, audio, and works for children. 
|
|
E-MAIL SIGN-UP News, updates, events, and media releases by e-mail.
|