dear jared, dear megan,
except for my messed-up back i would have been sitting in this chair sooner - but as it is i will be wiggling out of it again sooner. but i will think on what i've heard here.
j, i am thinking about your experience > writing > poem > reader...
does experience include the experience of bumping around poem while writing it?
bc i can't say that writing is like channeling an experience - much more obstinate and blind than that. more like writing a letter while also frantically describing the shape of the envelope in voice-over. (and contrariness is like powering off the walls.) in odd presentness poems are about the structure of attention.
ways of experiencing the past & future - since i don't have a very good memory, one way i experience the future is by thinking about what in the present i won't remember in the future.
is there a scaffolding to remove?
the patina is really interesting. if poems inevitably gain patina, what does it mean for a fully present poetry?
my thought - poems gain and lose patina - things seem to become invisible from overexposure, then get noticed again when they are invisible enough.
talk more about the lucio fontana painting. see, jared, i posted something!!
ps - the lemur poem is awesome. ancient mot!
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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?
----
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.
---
On another note and adventure, I was watching "The Life of Mammals" and Reading L. Jarnot. "Oppen's Lemur!" Such a sick poem.
---
We're adopting another rabbit.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, June 6, 2008
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?
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?
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Jane Gardam, The Flight of the Maidens
High up in a different air stream, clouds as light as cheesecloth skirmished.
Ulf Stolterfoht, Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop
fistsize words/wounds
(eg the wound BECAUSE) for if we picture the
thinker then altogether bold. does frege perhaps
fretfully ask "horse?" as a matter of course he
does not. to him a concept is a thing. meaning
even passion. as for an outside world no doubt
is gnawing at him. and yet: of unavoidable we
have to speak. of hard language when he
claims: the city of berlin's a city. volcano
vesuvius a volcano. the wound BECAUSE might
well be ditto. according to him it is not.
to him falsehood is true value. a song of
songs. and art how lithe his language sounds.
far out begins a rumbling. of meta-stuff/
cognition-increase/sense. begins with: "i was there.
i have experienced the BECAUSE." shows wounds.
and leaves. such terse confession is remembered
long. has unheard-of effect. however: calling his
"experience BECAUSE" - this far we haven't got.
let us picture the thinker then: as a young beast.
speckled. bashful. nicely with scruples hung.
gutshot and pup-shy he is in generating the
BECAUSE. let us picture the thinker: frail he
leans against the snow and wind. and then:
we really see the thinker in front of our eyes.
(eg the wound BECAUSE) for if we picture the
thinker then altogether bold. does frege perhaps
fretfully ask "horse?" as a matter of course he
does not. to him a concept is a thing. meaning
even passion. as for an outside world no doubt
is gnawing at him. and yet: of unavoidable we
have to speak. of hard language when he
claims: the city of berlin's a city. volcano
vesuvius a volcano. the wound BECAUSE might
well be ditto. according to him it is not.
to him falsehood is true value. a song of
songs. and art how lithe his language sounds.
far out begins a rumbling. of meta-stuff/
cognition-increase/sense. begins with: "i was there.
i have experienced the BECAUSE." shows wounds.
and leaves. such terse confession is remembered
long. has unheard-of effect. however: calling his
"experience BECAUSE" - this far we haven't got.
let us picture the thinker then: as a young beast.
speckled. bashful. nicely with scruples hung.
gutshot and pup-shy he is in generating the
BECAUSE. let us picture the thinker: frail he
leans against the snow and wind. and then:
we really see the thinker in front of our eyes.
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