Niedecker - reading into the 'For Paul' poems and thinking what must have fuelled the writing despite all efforts to keep the biographical Self out of the picture (poems ostensibly 'addressed' to Zukofsky's legitimate son after Niedecker herself had aborted the child she was to have with LZ).

*

Ed Baker's correspondence with Cid Corman in a series of web files - a tip off from Ed himself:

Yes, also, quiet is good. Don’t overstate. Let a certain bareness enrich the whole. Let the sun enter. The contingencies others provide inevitably. Space in which to breathe – or from which. Another (empty) center. (Corman to Baker)

*

Ikea - to buy a mattress and a basic table top. There's a fire alarm and so I spend half an hour out in the car park with everyone else wondering what's going on.

*

Begin a new notebook - the larger one has gone stale and is proving too cumbersome; the smaller black one has become too precious (i.e. self conscious). I need something to flex the muscles in, not caring. Easier said than done, of course.

*

Someone sends me pictures of their three dogs on the bed. Is this Junk mail? A Blog follower showing solidarity with the kitten pics?

*

I write to Geof Huth. His post on Nico Vassilakis - coming after a week of my plundering his Blogs for various leads and ideas - makes me think I really ought to make contact. It's so difficult, though, to strike the right note in an e-mail between a friendly nod and weirdo intrusion.

*

The swing two gardens away makes a noise like a mule being strangled. It's hard to believe no one else's nerves are being set on edge.

*

One strawberry - red and slightly damaged - from the plants we just stuck in the ground a month or so ago. Evidence that Nature finds a way against all odds.

*

Looks like we're in for a hot & sunny week.

Friday & not one minute of Wimbledon watched so far.

*

"The world" according to the BBC "mourns Michael Jackson".

*

Niedecker, apparently, slept "with a pencil under her pillow so as not to miss any dreams" (Dahlberg).

A rare sighting of Rosie at the window.

A Poem is first of all an amulet, an OBJECT bearing energy (c.f. the objectivist poem as object and Olson's poem as "at every point a high-energy discharge"). The poem is first of all a charm, relic, medicine, compass, key.

In between grading I was trawling through Geof Huth's many Blogs. I hit upon his posts about John Martone and he's been a real find (Huth too!).

Martone's poems are perhaps just too austere for me to get a handle on (right now anyway) but the collage work is really electrifying.

We are not talking about the poem sitting on a page like a jewel in a ring but the two inseparable, Eshleman’s THE ONE ART given its place. In this context, to “reproduce” (i.e. publish) a poem widely is to pass on as little of it as the “reproduction” of a painting or sculpture. We would speak instead of instances of a poem – think of the poet as writing down the poem again and again. The signed book carries a weak, memorial suggestion of this; those priceless books handmade by the poet in editions of twenty-six (Bob Arnold, Cid Corman, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jeremy Seligson, Emily Dickinson) come closer, almost close enough. The next step would be to take up Vietnamese tu phap or find an American equivalent to Japanese sosho. We must learn how to write again, from the beginning.[*] Inscribed by hand preferably on stone, wood, paper, that which bears an organic relation to the world wherein its power resides, a poem is an act of sympathetic magic. Here we see Levertov’s organicism brought to the medium itself. Crude, yes brut, an arte povera, WITHOUT ILLUSION of being “above” anything (much less “it all”). The poem as medicine. And life today is nothing if not in need of healing.

Hitting upon Martone is sending me back to Niedecker (this time for real), Lew Welch, Kenneth Patchen and - to find out about - Eshleman & Cid Corman.

And the timing's great: as of midday today it's the holiday! Eight weeks in which to explore.

___

(quotations from John Martone, sourced from http://ux1.eiu.edu/%7Ejpmartone/vis/neolithic.htm)

By way of time out from the annual slog of summer exam grading, I managed to hear an episode of the new format 'I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue'.

Humph has been replaced by Stephen Fry - a predictable and safe choice (I'd have prefered the rumoured-to-be and riskier Chairman Jarvis Cocker).

It's still funny and Fry is - as always - good. However, the script retains the previous style and that's the problem. Lewd jokes are not necessarily funny - especially when they're so in your face. The magic of ISIHAC was lewd jokes being said by Humph - that establishment Etonian voice, that avuncular manner, that air of innocent bewilderment. Humph's great talent was to seem to be in the wrong place for the entire thirty years or so, biding his time until a real presenter came along. The problem with Fry is that he is so eminently good at chairing. The jokes are executed too knowingly, they're the kind of cracks he'd say. Fry is - of all things - too straight.

The solution? Drop it altogether? Maybe. Or alter the style - let Fry evolve his own mannerisms, his own 'take', play off being so utterly well known and omnicompetent - not ape The Inimitable Humph.

Like Tommy Cooper - the skill is in getting it wrong so well.

Happy Birthday (for yesterday) to my Aunt - she'll know who.

K, kids and kittens all say "Congratulations".

I

M

T

A

K

I

N

G

A

S

H

I

T

O

H

H

Y

E

S

u

r


*

I saw this scribbled in the grouting between the tiles in the men's toilet cubicle.

It occurs to me why would anyone take such pains or think it even worth communicating such a message (a redundant one, at that, surely?). Why, too, would anyone want to reply? (A difference in hand is just discernible). And then - most intriguing - the lower case 'u' and 'r', evidence of texting mannerisms - but the (almost poetic) doubled upper case 'H'.*

Perhaps I shouldn't be so judgmental. What, after all, is Blogging? And, going further still, what lies behind the urge to write anything at all? Maybe we are all in our separate cubicles leaving messages for future occupants?**

__

* Fascinating, too, the care required to write in such a narrow space. A whisper down the crack. Rebellion and timidity conjoined.

** I don't have to hand that Ashbery poem in Houseboat Days with something along the lines of "and leaving behind us our shit and our sperm/ up creeks for the landscape to make what it would of us". (A whole new genre announces itself: poems composed out of misrememberings).

More on the Allforabit

"and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity" (Dogberry, Much Ado About Nothing, III.iii. 20-21)

(image sourced from the interview with Nico Vassilakis conducted by Tom Beckett - http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2008/05/tom-beckett-interview-with-nico.html)

Thinking the orientation of the page and the order of reading of the page. Left to right. Right to left. Top to bottom. Bottom to top. Might it even be looking down ‘upon’ the page (as a carpet). Up at (as a ceiling)? Multi-angular reading.

Thinking the scale of typography. The impact of larger font but how spacing and orientation can disperse reading – the letter looms, the sense fades. Smaller fonts acquire an occult quality – the small print – a significant whisper.

Thinking visual structure. Chanced upon material (guitar chord boxes) is integrated and offers a visual compositional logic: a rectangle composed of rectangles (a Sol LeWitt series). Thus 18 mini texts integrate into a larger text. Also the grid connotes structure, order, arranged information but also games, possible moves, strategy, play. Power’s alliance with the Ludic. And this is Language: grammar rules to be (AB)used. A life sentence in sentences.

Thinking chord boxes: sound given visual form; note values and terminology – EGBDF … ACE

Thinking the use of coherent sentence with discrete lexical items. How do they integrate? Lexical items are split apart by syllable or juxtaposed as if to create meaning. Whereas a statement is heavily enjambed allowing syllables to trigger the eye into multiple possible readings: en/dl/es/sl/y/th/e/lif … . Thus the sound and visual dimensions of writing are dissected.

Thinking the levels of reading – how the eye(s) move across the page. Where does it/they hold? At what point do letters surrender their inky printed shadow and ‘vanish’ sublimed into The Word? (And subsequently into the phrase, the sentence?).

Thinking the need to make sense. The central band of letters: B H O A M D E K R C T U. Always this compulsion to normalize, make sense of. Extends beyond the page: the World as Anagram. Francisco: “Stand and unfold yourself” (demand of the password in anticipation of the low ghost of The Father). Identity as anonymity – the excerpted Go game commentary where players are identified by letters of the alphabet.

meanwhile …

9:00-12:00 Exam invigilation. The premise of examinations: that Knowledge can be expressed, assessed through the written word. One hundred and eighty bodies writing. Millions of hand & finger movements. The flows of ink taking shape as words. Strings of thought. How will they be read? Which examiner reads every word of a script? As the saying goes: following the criteria to the letter.

The varieties of physical posture. Writing as a kinaesthetics. Cross legs, lotus position, the angles of elbow and head. The different rhythms – a constant movement left to right or sporadic fits and starts. The dip and lift of the head.

Authoritarian Silence cannot mute the tap of pen tops, scratchings of nib on paper, the shuffling of sheets. Sequence from Wenders’ Wings of Desire: the hubbub of voices the Angels overhear.

Around the walls the magnified letters of the alphabet, rows A … B … C … D … . Desks in a grid: 10 x 18. Beneath our feet the floor of the gym is an elaborate (for me arcane) geometry of lines and boxes. I distribute ruled sheets from blocks of A4 paper. A student's T-shirt reads: You Are Here.

Sun is in the sky

Oh why oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?

Sun is in the sky

Oh why oh why would I wanna be anywhere else?

One of the great joys this week - Lily Allen in the car to and from work.

Anyone who'd rhyme Tesco with al fresco can't be bad.

ICON
COIN
NICO

AN OPEN LETTER
(to Nico Vassilakis)

I

recently heard news perhaps myself going how really it was easy to reach and it will be curious to observe to sound a million gestures a never the less we hear and myself if one hears I mean not just paper how can one not be seduced by that when pursued we find that world that there when this world leaves off noise is travel on distant seas where as experience granite is physical

II

a foregrounding of the actual the phone rings she asks questions could be about yet could in other ways registers merge the domestic poetic aesthetic as poem is as mother so instinct does its work half listening feldman morton born gently insisted upon thematic jan twelve living in being in writing within kitchen nineteen twenty six kitchen cooking television poem from below chunky intersperse with and again full stop and why not not just the sounds but the slippage of sense to senses seasons word split by comma shine of vowel light in night and day for the time being

III

as paintings are as music so poetry explosion of break through codes a slowing which allows idea of value hence delight spokes inwardly in voices the assumption thought on high hearing voices not we to say not to be able money is just so much subject matter word blocks pipe or neck of bottle so obviously pressing buttons open it push you pull you know I like to walk around in poems words in different corners creating thoughts

IV

and inevitably I lose which means inevitably temper purpose gone kaput thank you again dead september parallel to within outside third nine top off thumb rim teen of nail gone eighty raw and quick eighty seven and what is immunity according to you soup and fruit a chord disconcerting near melodies die

The Thoughts of Lily (I)

Once upon a time when I had begun to think about the things that are ...

... my thoughts soared high aloft ...

... my senses had been put under restraint by sleep, yet not such sleep as that of men ...

... methought there came to me ...

... a Being of vast and boundless magnitude ...

... who called me by name and said to me ...