Ok

Yeah! Heraclitus - I've been speaking w/students about Plato 'n' Descartes this week, so it's kind of perfect to talk about a persistent 'endarkening' even as I try to explain that an alternative translation of Descartes' shit is: "I doubt, I think, therefore, I am."

We=Mrs. Maybe's retainers.

Lauren and I have been talking (on the phone) a bit about this desire to proscribe or prohibit certain moves in poems, an kind of 'stay against confusion' method of approaching experience, and that we preferred to leave it at "I'm up for whatever." L, correct me if I've misrepresented. And I just want to say, that perhaps a better term for our project here isn't 'irrationality' but is 'an expanded sense of empiricism.'

To whit: Brenda Coultas' Marvelous Bones of Time. In subject, paranormal. In practice, fairly flat and lucid, but also very rich. I'd argue that it's an example of 'expanded empiricism.' She relates secondhand stories about ghosts. They are 'eyewitness reports,' and therefore expansively empirical, however untestable. Also, quite 'negative irritability.'

Do I understand empiricism wrong? yes and no. Coultas compiles stories, not evidence, and what's more, makes poems. As Brent says, so beautifully of the form, "[poems] can be perverse, obscene, grotesque, and then suddenly turn all earnest, wondering and vulnerable." Nothing abstract about that!

L, your sense that the present is most occult really resonates with me (and the historian here concurs). But, how does that effect the 'patina,' the whiff of the 19th century that the term brings? I like that spoiled, bad, soft, unconvincing part of it, you know? And I wish my present had more of the past in it. Make the present more dusty.

My stepfather's family's ranch in Forestville, among the Redwoods, an incredible dusty place (Redwood offal and loam collecting on the roofs for years). Brother and I used to play with a box of fox and mink stoles there. They smelled so. They smelled like Mrs. Maybe. So, maybe I'm saying that I want a present engaged a bit more with the past. It's not anti-future. It's just that I have a strong aesthetic attraction to old stuff. I really like shabby chic.

Regarding Shakespeare's fools. You're so right. Is it because they puncture the veneer, so good, and arrhythmically? They are wilful, sure.

So, can we say that we are wilful in our mystification, or are we being empiricists, honestly poets?

In Re: Goldsmith: He quotes Gysin: "Poetry is 50 years behind painting" and provides this as a suggestion that there is all this great work to do - and that we're "Pop." Ridiculous! The implication that we have a long time 'til we get our John Currin (Stan Apps - ahahahahaha - JK) or our Richard Tuttle, our exciting Stockholder. It maybe makes sense that he holds this opinion -"Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole - not in New York!" - but, it doesn't really give us much room. It's fatalistic, huh?

For a refreshing alternative, check out Peter Holsapple's entry in the Times' songwriting blog here

-Jared

III

Megsy writes:

"Can poetry not be present?"

Ah, yeah - so, poetry is present to the reader, yeah, but is poetry actually 'between two people?" I don't think so - and it makes an emotional quivering for me, if I think of ideal in poetry like this:

experience (and all that can mean) > writing > poem > reader (a second experiencing)

But the sadness in the relationship b/t "experience" and the "poem" which is its residue. The Mark that's left behind. So, extending the Abram metaphor, the poem is with the reader in the present, but it existed before reader read it, then reading brings the original experience back into presence - like crushing old oregano so that the smells will come back out?

Huh. But it still doesn't bring the experience (broadly defined) back. I think Shakespeare was wrong about that shit. I think poems gain patina, and the patina is one of those potent admixtures of nostalgia and genially passing ideas. I was reading Spicer's one night stands this morning, and he refers to baseball players I don't know. So, their presence changes..

Like this Lucio Fontana painting - the slash implies a prior presence.

So, is a focus on this 'patina' a deliberate mystification? And is that bad decadence?

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Megan also writes "Does contrary poetry imply a lean future?"

That's it! What the hell do we have to do with the future? If Hermeticism is about studies in the past, what is our work to us and others, a few miners in the pastless world? I don't think the future will be lean - but for me that depends entirely on figuring out whether poetry is concerning itself with the future by bringing the past, and the juiciness and crying of the present, into an equilibrium with the future - not that I'm arguing for classicism, but that I'm arguing for the impossible goal of fully present poetry - probably the only solution is to do readings all the time.

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On another note and adventure, I was watching "The Life of Mammals" and Reading L. Jarnot. "Oppen's Lemur!" Such a sick poem.

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We're adopting another rabbit.

Endarkement Too

Re reading the post, after continuing reading in David Abram on the nature of history as it relates to the old testament, he makes a pretty interesting claim for a different spatial conception of time - I don't have it in front of me, but he suggests that the proper metaphors are:

Future: The horizon - not so interesting

The past: Underground - on first glance, not so interesting, but it provides this interesting spatial thing, in which, as one is walking toward the horizon, the underground is always present, below one's feet, so that, one doesn't leave the past, but that past is always underfoot, always, as one walks toward the horizon.

So, my statements about luddites 'n' atavism from the previous post have been reconceived, in light of this - the lud wants a return. But the present is the place to be?

Additional questions, for Megan and Lauren:

Is writing poetry, contrary to implied "future-leaning" metaphor of the avant-garde, actually a kind of 'coming into presence' that maintains a relationship b/t past and future on the field of the manifest and manifesting present?

Next - can poetry actually be present? Because, the mark on the page is always something held over from the past, and abstracted, from the present.

Regarding Endarkenment

The latest issue of Arthur has this kind of hilarious "Endarkenment Manifesto" in a gatefold, that purports to be a manifesto of green hermeticism. How funny! OMG.

So - I was reading Louis Menand's piece on E. Pound, who kind of suggested that the early Pound is kind of declaring war on the symbolists, and mystification in general. Are we engaging in a project of deliberate mystification? If we are, what does this mean? Are we looking into the future, or into the past? According to the futurologist on Science Friday, by 2040 we're going to be at least 50% cyborg. Will there be Endarkenment under such circumstances? Here is a quote from the manifesto, with a strong luddite sensibility:

Technology mimics and thus belittles the miracles of magic. Rationalism has its own Popes and droning litanies, but the spell they cast is one of disenchantment. Or, rather, all magic has migrated into money, all power into a technology of titanic totality, a violence against life that stuns and disheartens.

Whaddya think of that? Is endarkenment a matter of coming through to another heartening?