Given I hadn't picked up a piece of charcoal in earnest for ... um ... 6 years? ... I'm quite proud of the results. In the good old bad old days, I'd be going to classes 2 or 3 times a week.
Not so sure about the well-rounded, though - but, yes, words and pictures will do me. I'd love to be able to play jazz on the piano but I was much too lazy to put in the hours as a kid (much to my mum's frustration). Pieces with names like 'A Breezy Day In Autumn' didn't seem very interesting. Then, of course, I discovered Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans and Monk and playing the piano seemed cool. Too late! I never seem to be able to hit the really good chords.
As for the snow scene - you'll hear French and Flemish around here. In fact, you'll also hear English, Spanish, Greek and Polish. My daughters go to the local school - a typical Belgian French-speaking education. However, hardly any of the kids are 100 per cent home grown. That's the effect of the European parliament, global corporations. etc.
I really ought to find out how to do music with these little films - I hear something oriental? I always think that bridge belongs in some Basho haiku or scroll painting. Probably best simply to turn the sound down and hum.
Frustrating days at the moment - much like walking up the down escalator. Deadlines for projects and university applications are looming and there are internal exams to set and mark. Never a dull moment. I really am trying to maintain the 'Morning Pages' practice - in my case more like Late In The Evening Pages - and even then it's a challenge to find the time before conking out. Is this a healthy way - creatively speaking - to live? Hmm. I thought not.
I've ordered Daniel Kane's interviews with U.S. poets - d'you know the volume? The usual suspects.
I thought you might have views on the Punk posts - or maybe you're more the Jazz & Blues purist and Punk was a regrettable aberration? I wonder ...
I left a lengthy reply here a day ago but it seems to have disappeared -- am I being edited out or is that unduly paranoid?
Anyway, suffice to say it said that you were a force for good in the world, then went on to cite 'EMI' and 'Bodies' as my favourite Pistols songs, then 'Repetition' and 'Psycho Mafia' by the Fall, 'At Home He's a Tourist' and 'Damaged Goods' by Gang of Four for the post-punk section.
I also wondered if you'd ever come across Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, the accompanying CD of which had some tracks by the Slits and the Raincoats that came to mind when I heard that Life Without Buildings track...
But somehow all this was deleted, as was my question about Yeats -- Waffle opinion of...
That’s strange – no editing is going on to my knowledge. There’s that Steve Wright (the U.S. comedian) story about driving along the motorway late at night and suddenly noticing that – glancing into his rearview mirror – everyone was following him … . I’ve always liked that joke.
Good to hear about a Punk Walrus. Needless to say – as you’ll gather from the current lifestyle & titbits about past Belgianwaffle incarnations - I’m no Sid Vicious. (More a Johnny Past-His-Sell-By- Date?).
Punk passed me by & I only really got into it c. 1993 when Ben – aka Out To Lunch – burst into my life. An intensive re-education occurred in a front room in Glossop Street, Leeds (Bow Wow Wow, PIL, McLaren, etc.), and I promptly rushed out to catch up on the zeitgeist. Late as always!
I’ve just got some CDs sent over by the Central Mediatheque – the Life Without Buildings CD (yummy scrummy!), Pigbag, 23 Skidoo and a (late) Scritti Politti – I’ll try and get something earlier. (Knowing, of course, that punk & CD is something of a contradiction in terms).
(Holy) Greil Marcus is certainly on my radar screen – a key text in making Punk matter (i.e. he aestheticizes it & makes links to Situationist theory etc.). That I approach Punk theoretically is one of the major reasons OTL & Belgianwaffle speak different languages. But there’s not much I can do about it. You were ‘there’ – or you weren’t. And I wasn’t. Sean Bonney seems a key figure in this regard.
The Slits sound great to me. As did ‘The Crabs’ which – around 1985(?) - I heard on The John Peel Show (where else?) and then went round Surrey record shops trying to find:
Young Belgianwaffle: Excuse me, do you have The Crabs?
Even Younger Record Shop Female Assistant: Excuse me????
You get the picture.
Actually, why I want to post a reply is that I‘ve started reading Jack Spicer. Don’t ask me how I jump from Eva Hesse to Spicer. Suffice to say, a little Poetry Demon voice whispered in my ear this morning: “check out Spicer”. So I did.
I’ve re-read the first sections of ‘After Lorca’ and find some ways in this time. I think you’ve been exploring Spicer, too?
What grabs me this time is the subtle sound chains at work in the poems – he seems to be deliberately working off vowel modulations – the long and short ‘o’ in “snow” and “sound” for example. I think I might do a post or two on this.
Spicer’s one of those poets I really feel little affinity with – and yet enormous (perhaps unhelpfully so) respect. Lisa J., Peter Gizzi, etc. seem so indebted to him.
Perhaps we can take this further?
Turkeyed out - a result of doing a kind of Thanksgiving dinner and then having 2 kilos of cold meat to get through.
I'll be honest: I ought to re-read the entire works (which, given circs. seems rather unlikely right now) before expressing an opinion.
But so what ... Here goes: I have the sense of several different 'Yeats's: the Irish folklorist & Celtic Twilight figure (who doesn't grab me much but Heaney seems to emerge from); the Noh drama Orientalist (who did fascinate me); the Beckett precursor figure (who brings out a ghostly quality in late Beckett which I find unsettling); the Magician Yeats with wacko theories of Nietzschean cycles (who I used to disregard but increasingly find fascinating - cf. Spicer & poetry as magic); and the sound conjuror Yeats (who I should re-read much more attentively).
I suppose the main problem is that he's been Institutionalized - like TSE and Auden - and so it requires major efforts to extract him from the Blue Plaque Official Kulchur version.
Did you know that Plath took a flat at the same address WBY lived at & killed herself? (That's if a BBC documentary is correct).
I did attend a series of lectures by Frances Warner in the 80s & he made Yeats into someone who mattered in the same way Blake did - and scary. (I wouldn't mind going back to those classes.)
Yes indeed, I think it's working rather intensely on Spicer that made me suddenly want to return to Yeats -- the late Yeats of A Vision (I used to have a copy, but sold it -- now of course it's hard to find).
Afer Lorca is great, I agree. I've also been enjoying Language and Book of Magazine Verse. I'm interested in his notion of dictation from the Outside (whether Martian or ghost) and Blanchot's notion of the Outside.
Anyway, in Poet Be Like God, Ellingham & Killian say the following:
The WBY connection is made explicit in the lectures too (The House that Jack Built, ed Gizzi).
I suppose what's happened is that Spicer has given me a new way in to reading Yeats, whose experiments with automatic writing seem to anticipate some of the activities of the American avant-garde (I know there's also Robert Desnos, etc.).
Also, I've always been impressed by Yeats's total devotion to his art -- he took poetry very seriously -- as seriously as, say, Celan, and I'm attracted to poets who are really, genuinely serious about poetry.
Reading Ellmann's chapter "Esoteric Yeatsism" in The Man and the Masks I'm also reassured by Yeats's stance on parenthood. Sometimes I do start to feel that parenthood is a kind of martyrdom for the artist as he sacrifices his art on the altar of the family, but Yeats (and Joyce) are some of the few names I cling to who affirm family life as a positive force for art.
Here's WBY on the subject: "I think that a poet, or even a mystic, becomes a greater power from understanding all the great primary emotions & these one only gets out of going through the common experiences & duties of life."
That sliding of "poet" into "mystic" I also find attractive.
Elsewhere he observes that "The marriage bed is the symbol of the solved antimony." Marvellous stuff! I love that kind of high seriousness -- as if we are all reincarnations of Sir Thomas Browne . . .
That was a really useful – and timely – post. I think the challenge is to integrate life & writing & drawing & swimming & making soup & everything else. Basically, it’s where you are & make the most of it & why wish to be anywhere else? (Creeley says it better – “In any case, we live as we can, each day another – there is no use in counting. Nor more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it, me.”)
As I understand it, Duncan has this whole concept of hearth/heart and home. And that I value enormously in his work – even if it’s a very different household (no kids for a start!). And then there’s Bernadette Mayer’s work which – for me – is exemplary for working with the inconsequential essentials of dailiness (is that how you spell it?). Her poem about babysitting – written it seems as the kids sleep – is superb. D’you know it?
I, too, go for the whole Spicer Martianism business – I came at it via Gizzi’s poems and that super Intro. to the Lectures. And I think there’s my entry a year or so back where I put up some stuff on radios & Orphee & Blanchot. Maybe that’s when you first hit onto my Blog?
Maybe you feel this too – I am resistant to the usual kind of Eng. Lit./BBC documentary waffle about Poet as Mystic/Seer (I y-a-w-n-e-d through lectures on Wordsworth). However, the Berkeley Renaissance hook up of experimental poetics plus magic and cosmic consciousness seems liberating, powerful, even sexy. Perhaps it’s that West Coast junk aesthetic – George Herms etc. – which saves it from portentousness and flips it into cool? A sort of wide-eyed D-I-Y feel? Or – as in Pynchon & Philip K. Dick – it’s the techno-gnostic quality?
Yet – as I think you’re saying – Duncan, Spicer, etc. release in key precursor poets a new vitality. So Yeats comes into a new ‘aspect’ – astrological terminology! – with Spicer as does Blake by means of Ginsberg.
What do you think?
Actually, I don’t think wife plus two point four children is the real obstacle. Rather, it’s the daily grind. In the holidays – e.g. the Riddles of Form summer months – a happy & healthy rhythm establishes itself. I am immensely grateful for the structure & noise either end of the day and the hours within to allow the mind to float free. Whereas, my aborted graduate days of mid-80s were agonizingly lonely & purposeless. I realise that I need people & a structure.
Teaching gives you time in a way. However, you’re simultaneously drawing on an ever-diminishing fund in the bank. I reckon I ‘talk out’ poems every day – or at least the verbal energy that ought to be focused into more permanent forms.*
Rather a long reply – but then again why not?
Off to tell the wife about our ‘solved antimony’…
Cheers as always!
The C.
__
* Of course, I don’t mean by this that my every word is a pearl and every sentence spills forth in perfect rhymed pentameters. (But then you knew this.)
7 comments:
Nicely done -- what a well-rounded soul you are... (as is she)
W
Given I hadn't picked up a piece of charcoal in earnest for ... um ... 6 years? ... I'm quite proud of the results. In the good old bad old days, I'd be going to classes 2 or 3 times a week.
Not so sure about the well-rounded, though - but, yes, words and pictures will do me. I'd love to be able to play jazz on the piano but I was much too lazy to put in the hours as a kid (much to my mum's frustration). Pieces with names like 'A Breezy Day In Autumn' didn't seem very interesting. Then, of course, I discovered Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans and Monk and playing the piano seemed cool. Too late! I never seem to be able to hit the really good chords.
As for the snow scene - you'll hear French and Flemish around here. In fact, you'll also hear English, Spanish, Greek and Polish. My daughters go to the local school - a typical Belgian French-speaking education. However, hardly any of the kids are 100 per cent home grown. That's the effect of the European parliament, global corporations. etc.
I really ought to find out how to do music with these little films - I hear something oriental? I always think that bridge belongs in some Basho haiku or scroll painting. Probably best simply to turn the sound down and hum.
Frustrating days at the moment - much like walking up the down escalator. Deadlines for projects and university applications are looming and there are internal exams to set and mark. Never a dull moment. I really am trying to maintain the 'Morning Pages' practice - in my case more like Late In The Evening Pages - and even then it's a challenge to find the time before conking out. Is this a healthy way - creatively speaking - to live? Hmm. I thought not.
I've ordered Daniel Kane's interviews with U.S. poets - d'you know the volume? The usual suspects.
I thought you might have views on the Punk posts - or maybe you're more the Jazz & Blues purist and Punk was a regrettable aberration? I wonder ...
As always, thanks for dropping by!
The C.
I left a lengthy reply here a day ago but it seems to have disappeared -- am I being edited out or is that unduly paranoid?
Anyway, suffice to say it said that you were a force for good in the world, then went on to cite 'EMI' and 'Bodies' as my favourite Pistols songs, then 'Repetition' and 'Psycho Mafia' by the Fall, 'At Home He's a Tourist' and 'Damaged Goods' by Gang of Four for the post-punk section.
I also wondered if you'd ever come across Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, the accompanying CD of which had some tracks by the Slits and the Raincoats that came to mind when I heard that Life Without Buildings track...
But somehow all this was deleted, as was my question about Yeats -- Waffle opinion of...
All the best,
W
Hi
That’s strange – no editing is going on to my knowledge. There’s that Steve Wright (the U.S. comedian) story about driving along the motorway late at night and suddenly noticing that – glancing into his rearview mirror – everyone was following him … . I’ve always liked that joke.
Good to hear about a Punk Walrus. Needless to say – as you’ll gather from the current lifestyle & titbits about past Belgianwaffle incarnations - I’m no Sid Vicious. (More a Johnny Past-His-Sell-By- Date?).
Punk passed me by & I only really got into it c. 1993 when Ben – aka Out To Lunch – burst into my life. An intensive re-education occurred in a front room in Glossop Street, Leeds (Bow Wow Wow, PIL, McLaren, etc.), and I promptly rushed out to catch up on the zeitgeist. Late as always!
I’ve just got some CDs sent over by the Central Mediatheque – the Life Without Buildings CD (yummy scrummy!), Pigbag, 23 Skidoo and a (late) Scritti Politti – I’ll try and get something earlier. (Knowing, of course, that punk & CD is something of a contradiction in terms).
(Holy) Greil Marcus is certainly on my radar screen – a key text in making Punk matter (i.e. he aestheticizes it & makes links to Situationist theory etc.). That I approach Punk theoretically is one of the major reasons OTL & Belgianwaffle speak different languages. But there’s not much I can do about it. You were ‘there’ – or you weren’t. And I wasn’t. Sean Bonney seems a key figure in this regard.
The Slits sound great to me. As did ‘The Crabs’ which – around 1985(?) - I heard on The John Peel Show (where else?) and then went round Surrey record shops trying to find:
Young Belgianwaffle: Excuse me, do you have The Crabs?
Even Younger Record Shop Female Assistant: Excuse me????
You get the picture.
Actually, why I want to post a reply is that I‘ve started reading Jack Spicer. Don’t ask me how I jump from Eva Hesse to Spicer. Suffice to say, a little Poetry Demon voice whispered in my ear this morning: “check out Spicer”. So I did.
I’ve re-read the first sections of ‘After Lorca’ and find some ways in this time. I think you’ve been exploring Spicer, too?
What grabs me this time is the subtle sound chains at work in the poems – he seems to be deliberately working off vowel modulations – the long and short ‘o’ in “snow” and “sound” for example. I think I might do a post or two on this.
Spicer’s one of those poets I really feel little affinity with – and yet enormous (perhaps unhelpfully so) respect. Lisa J., Peter Gizzi, etc. seem so indebted to him.
Perhaps we can take this further?
Turkeyed out - a result of doing a kind of Thanksgiving dinner and then having 2 kilos of cold meat to get through.
Cheers
The C.
... forgot to address your last question - WBY.
I'll be honest: I ought to re-read the entire works (which, given circs. seems rather unlikely right now) before expressing an opinion.
But so what ... Here goes: I have the sense of several different 'Yeats's: the Irish folklorist & Celtic Twilight figure (who doesn't grab me much but Heaney seems to emerge from); the Noh drama Orientalist (who did fascinate me); the Beckett precursor figure (who brings out a ghostly quality in late Beckett which I find unsettling); the Magician Yeats with wacko theories of Nietzschean cycles (who I used to disregard but increasingly find fascinating - cf. Spicer & poetry as magic); and the sound conjuror Yeats (who I should re-read much more attentively).
I suppose the main problem is that he's been Institutionalized - like TSE and Auden - and so it requires major efforts to extract him from the Blue Plaque Official Kulchur version.
Did you know that Plath took a flat at the same address WBY lived at & killed herself? (That's if a BBC documentary is correct).
I did attend a series of lectures by Frances Warner in the 80s & he made Yeats into someone who mattered in the same way Blake did - and scary. (I wouldn't mind going back to those classes.)
Then again, who am I to say?
Cheers
The C.
Yes indeed, I think it's working rather intensely on Spicer that made me suddenly want to return to Yeats -- the late Yeats of A Vision (I used to have a copy, but sold it -- now of course it's hard to find).
Afer Lorca is great, I agree. I've also been enjoying Language and Book of Magazine Verse. I'm interested in his notion of dictation from the Outside (whether Martian or ghost) and Blanchot's notion of the Outside.
Anyway, in Poet Be Like God, Ellingham & Killian say the following:
“He [Spicer] became convinced that he was in touch with – and perhaps had been in touch with for years – a great ‘Outside’ force, as powerful and omniscient as the spirits that visited Blake and attended the séances of William and Georgie Yeats, or those who wrote the ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ through Rilke. He was now a radio, picking up transmissions from ‘ghosts’.”
The WBY connection is made explicit in the lectures too (The House that Jack Built, ed Gizzi).
I suppose what's happened is that Spicer has given me a new way in to reading Yeats, whose experiments with automatic writing seem to anticipate some of the activities of the American avant-garde (I know there's also Robert Desnos, etc.).
Also, I've always been impressed by Yeats's total devotion to his art -- he took poetry very seriously -- as seriously as, say, Celan, and I'm attracted to poets who are really, genuinely serious about poetry.
Reading Ellmann's chapter "Esoteric Yeatsism" in The Man and the Masks I'm also reassured by Yeats's stance on parenthood. Sometimes I do start to feel that parenthood is a kind of martyrdom for the artist as he sacrifices his art on the altar of the family, but Yeats (and Joyce) are some of the few names I cling to who affirm family life as a positive force for art.
Here's WBY on the subject: "I think that a poet, or even a mystic, becomes a greater power from understanding all the great primary emotions & these one only gets out of going through the common experiences & duties of life."
That sliding of "poet" into "mystic" I also find attractive.
Elsewhere he observes that "The marriage bed is the symbol of the solved antimony." Marvellous stuff! I love that kind of high seriousness -- as if we are all reincarnations of Sir Thomas Browne . . .
W
That was a really useful – and timely – post. I think the challenge is to integrate life & writing & drawing & swimming & making soup & everything else. Basically, it’s where you are & make the most of it & why wish to be anywhere else? (Creeley says it better – “In any case, we live as we can, each day another – there is no use in counting. Nor more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it, me.”)
As I understand it, Duncan has this whole concept of hearth/heart and home. And that I value enormously in his work – even if it’s a very different household (no kids for a start!). And then there’s Bernadette Mayer’s work which – for me – is exemplary for working with the inconsequential essentials of dailiness (is that how you spell it?). Her poem about babysitting – written it seems as the kids sleep – is superb. D’you know it?
I, too, go for the whole Spicer Martianism business – I came at it via Gizzi’s poems and that super Intro. to the Lectures. And I think there’s my entry a year or so back where I put up some stuff on radios & Orphee & Blanchot. Maybe that’s when you first hit onto my Blog?
Maybe you feel this too – I am resistant to the usual kind of Eng. Lit./BBC documentary waffle about Poet as Mystic/Seer (I y-a-w-n-e-d through lectures on Wordsworth). However, the Berkeley Renaissance hook up of experimental poetics plus magic and cosmic consciousness seems liberating, powerful, even sexy. Perhaps it’s that West Coast junk aesthetic – George Herms etc. – which saves it from portentousness and flips it into cool? A sort of wide-eyed D-I-Y feel? Or – as in Pynchon & Philip K. Dick – it’s the techno-gnostic quality?
Yet – as I think you’re saying – Duncan, Spicer, etc. release in key precursor poets a new vitality. So Yeats comes into a new ‘aspect’ – astrological terminology! – with Spicer as does Blake by means of Ginsberg.
What do you think?
Actually, I don’t think wife plus two point four children is the real obstacle. Rather, it’s the daily grind. In the holidays – e.g. the Riddles of Form summer months – a happy & healthy rhythm establishes itself. I am immensely grateful for the structure & noise either end of the day and the hours within to allow the mind to float free. Whereas, my aborted graduate days of mid-80s were agonizingly lonely & purposeless. I realise that I need people & a structure.
Teaching gives you time in a way. However, you’re simultaneously drawing on an ever-diminishing fund in the bank. I reckon I ‘talk out’ poems every day – or at least the verbal energy that ought to be focused into more permanent forms.*
Rather a long reply – but then again why not?
Off to tell the wife about our ‘solved antimony’…
Cheers as always!
The C.
__
* Of course, I don’t mean by this that my every word is a pearl and every sentence spills forth in perfect rhymed pentameters. (But then you knew this.)
Post a Comment