from Journal,
17-01-17
1/
At the Shop talking to a man looking for a couple of volumes of the Complete Shelley. He's been a celebrant for 22 years. I referred to Jurate's mother's funeral & their celebrant from Alison Monkhouse, a friend of Jurate's. He said you stand up there & face the family & friends of, let's say, an 85 or 90 year-old, but what on earth do you know? what do you say? Described himself as a bookaholic. (Hah! You're in the right place then, my man!) I mentioned Des Cowley's reading of Little Gidding in the service. Obviously he knew it personally, big fan of Eliot, perhaps the later Eliot more so he said. But many of my 'customers' are from the Western Suburbs, he explained: "T.S. Eliot? wasnt he a cricketer?" But poetry of all kinds, he said, the words & music, touches & informs where the facts of a life might not…
2/
Having utilised what could be called experimental writing's template when I began teaching at the Council of Adult Education in the 1970s --believing that contemporary poetry's adventures were far more efficacious for my liberation seeking, mind expanding classes than an historical examination of form --I was redirected by later & perhaps somewhat older students into the classics. I dont mean Greek & Latin or Shakespeare, the Romantics, but the tradition as it ran through the late 19th & 20th Centuries. I had derived exercises from Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Fielding Dawson, Joe Brainard, Dadaists & Surrealists --the tradition of the New but nothing of the Tradition per se. For example, a particular gentleman tested me with his enthusiasm for G M Hopkins. For modern classics I had Robert Browning, Pound, DH Lawrence & a small amount of Eliot but now took on the Hopkins, which had probably defeated me at Tech College in the early '60s, if only to keep the discussion going at the next session! So my reeducation commenced. Similarly, I was asked for both Virginia Woolf & Sylvia Plath, for gender reasons, and investigating them anew realized their abiding value. (All true but this broad brush omits such correctives as, via a lesson Eric Rolls gave to a workshop class we shared in Bathurst,NSW in 1974, De Quincey's marvelous word music in a looping passage of The English Mailcoach --19th century? My hitherto indubitable historical aesthetics could now only unravel! Perhaps on a par with my Cambridge pal John Hall's 1969 lesson --no university in me you see-- making a relation for Robert Herrick, say, & our new British & Americans, Williams to Creeley & Oppen, including Crozier & Prynne...) When I think of it, despite one's wide-ranging reading in the new poetries, mutual exclusivity was rampant & profound. An abiding avant garde bridge should have been Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry --his blind selection (that is, unattributed selection of authors) which could often find one preferring the classic to the contemporary! Now I understood Zukofsky's test of ear, by ear, begging questions of sound & sense…
3/
A resume might run like this : In lieu of traditional form one has a syntax informed by conversation & 'utterance' (from natural strong expression to cultivated Expressionism). Conversation (good hearing / scoring by ear) might have become decoration --the decoration of the ghost of form such that it is seen or hinted at, but without the erstwhile style or gravitas. I mean, of course, the sonority --but without one, none of the other? What is said --what & how --is the priority which required poesy's junking, 19th into 20th Century… the force of saying, of telling --testimony as the new eloquence. And maximum attention to what was previously marginal --poetics of interpolation & interjection on the rebound from the excess of the literary. And so it is --1970s "literature after…", "poetry after death of…", the "belated", the "posthumous"… But, swings & roundabouts --& the gift of a slightly longer life than youth's Lyricism predicted --here one is again in & with 21st Century's "whole house of poetry" (my proposition in the mid 90s, argued in Ivor Indyk's Heat magazine)... For years now literary & anti-literary/post-literary on the same or at least facing pages... the same & not the same... Tis all good my friends... [Available for painting & renovation, local tradesman, CV on request…]
Showing posts with label Pound. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pound. Show all posts
Thursday, January 26, 2017
Sunday, October 30, 2016
ADDITIONAL to "On this day..."
K H :
Hi Tim, I posted some thoughts about John Thorpe & others on my blog y'day, usual memoir/intersection style of thang...
Cheers for now,
Kris
oOo
TIM WRIGHT :
I hadn't heard of John Thorpe - but will remember the name now. The
quotes were interesting to me - particularly that connection between
what Pound was getting at with the ideogram and that ease that kids
have in writing (painting) and later generally lose - "the language of
changing yr mind" I like. You lost me a bit on the opposition between
history -> present/present -> history but maybe I need to read some of
Thorpe's writing to catch your drift here.
oOo
K H :
Now then, re- the history thing. Me too have to get head back into whatever it was, out of Thorpe and then my own riff...
Maybe I mean that the --rephrase, maybe I meant back in 1985! --maybe in the context where the value is in the 'making it historical', because obviously history such a loaded category, such a phenomenal vector. But to fall out of history into the local, the local as all-that-we-have, I mean the 'that's all folks!' versus endless semantic aggregation (data, symbolism et al) , maybe that's the difference I was feeling... And because I was tapping "being here" at that time and, I recall, distinguishing between 'here' & Heideggerian 'there"... Any lack of clarity is because of that focus, an ecstasy of thinking & feeling & writing I remember inhabiting at that time!
Re- John Thorpe himself, several books of poems, proses, commentary. In my piece I refer to his booklet, MATTER, or giving, wch was part of the inspiring series published by the late John Clarke, out of Buffalo. I was in touch with those people once upon a time, a brilliant time, and actually to an extent recovered by meetings in February & March '16 in Melbourne, separately, with our two North American visitors, Sharon Thesen & Stephen Ellis...
oOo
TIM WRIGHT :
I guess my comment was just an inclination
or tendency to think (or try to think) of those two ..vectors.. as
somehow the same, if oppositional, which may or may not be different
to your take - I'll have to read over your email below again. Reading the
blog again I also like his 'I make space-time. IT is not making it (….)
If i describe a condition, it changes' which seems a completely sensible
position, in that any poem will articulate a time-sense of some kind,
when heard/read by others...
[Email conversation, Sunday, 30th October, '16]
Hi Tim, I posted some thoughts about John Thorpe & others on my blog y'day, usual memoir/intersection style of thang...
Cheers for now,
Kris
oOo
TIM WRIGHT :
I hadn't heard of John Thorpe - but will remember the name now. The
quotes were interesting to me - particularly that connection between
what Pound was getting at with the ideogram and that ease that kids
have in writing (painting) and later generally lose - "the language of
changing yr mind" I like. You lost me a bit on the opposition between
history -> present/present -> history but maybe I need to read some of
Thorpe's writing to catch your drift here.
oOo
K H :
Now then, re- the history thing. Me too have to get head back into whatever it was, out of Thorpe and then my own riff...
Maybe I mean that the --rephrase, maybe I meant back in 1985! --maybe in the context where the value is in the 'making it historical', because obviously history such a loaded category, such a phenomenal vector. But to fall out of history into the local, the local as all-that-we-have, I mean the 'that's all folks!' versus endless semantic aggregation (data, symbolism et al) , maybe that's the difference I was feeling... And because I was tapping "being here" at that time and, I recall, distinguishing between 'here' & Heideggerian 'there"... Any lack of clarity is because of that focus, an ecstasy of thinking & feeling & writing I remember inhabiting at that time!
Re- John Thorpe himself, several books of poems, proses, commentary. In my piece I refer to his booklet, MATTER, or giving, wch was part of the inspiring series published by the late John Clarke, out of Buffalo. I was in touch with those people once upon a time, a brilliant time, and actually to an extent recovered by meetings in February & March '16 in Melbourne, separately, with our two North American visitors, Sharon Thesen & Stephen Ellis...
oOo
TIM WRIGHT :
I guess my comment was just an inclination
or tendency to think (or try to think) of those two ..vectors.. as
somehow the same, if oppositional, which may or may not be different
to your take - I'll have to read over your email below again. Reading the
blog again I also like his 'I make space-time. IT is not making it (….)
If i describe a condition, it changes' which seems a completely sensible
position, in that any poem will articulate a time-sense of some kind,
when heard/read by others...
[Email conversation, Sunday, 30th October, '16]
Saturday, October 29, 2016
21st October: On this day in 1969, Jack Kerouac died...
"21st October: On this day in 1969 Jack Kerouac died. The Lonesome Traveller. Among friends & allies here in Heaven." Our notice up on the wall at Collected Works Bookshop, 21-X-16.
[Facebook post: On that day, the day after, the morning after? the Hemensleys were visiting George Dowden in Brighton, up from Southampton for a couple of days. I'd begun corresponding with George as editor of little mag, Our Glass, in Melbourne, '69. Found his Letters to English Poets in Mike Dugan's collection in '68, which gave me a postal address. What more does a boy in the sticks require?! Anyway, cut to the chase Hemensley! George took us around the corner from his fine apartment to meet Bill Butler, fellow American, at Bill's Unicorn Bookshop. Bill was fetching us a cuppa or finding a book to show, something like that, but he returned with the newspaper, New York Times, the Herald Tribune? Oh my, he was saying, have you seen this, Jack Kerouac died. Took the wind out of our sails.
George burrowed into his shoulder bag, fetched out a note book. Ive got a new notebook, he said. This'll be the first entry I make in it. Bill Butler kind of drew himself even taller than us and said, cuttingly, I always thought one only wrote small things in small notebooks.
Ye-es. Hmmm.
On the subject of Kerouac... infinite. On the subject of Bill Butler, great little shop, nice catalogues, central to the Brighton scene. I liked him, his Americana poems. Not everyone did. I recall Andrew Crozier generally congratulating the particular issue of my English mag. Earth Ship, in '70 or so, but particularly objecting to Bill's poems. (I'll take this opportunity to reread him now; I mean Bill. Andrew's a constant though wasnt always for me...) And on the subject of George... what happened to George? Bibliographer of Allen Ginsberg in the 70s, prolific on the little mag scene. I shared poems he sent to Melbourne with other little mags. He corresponded with Charley Buckmaster; Charles hoped to get across to England. I have some poetry on this in the book Kent MacCarter's publishing soon...
Yep! This has to be Heaven!
*
re- John Thorpe
John Thorpe is always ''descending from history''. He brings one back --to Pound (Canto II, "…Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices: "), that is to say, to the poetry able to listen &, whatismore, hear. He brings one back to the instant which is always local --to logography ("is the language of changing yr mind. It was not discovered by Pound (who called it ideogram) or Olson, etc it's so primary only kids & a very few writers have been able to equal -- 'english' being full of alphabetic, syllabic & prosodic reflexes."), that is to say, to writing as a way of being human, which realises & manifests nature, extending the possibility of life, enhancing the precondition, never setting out to be 'literary'.
John Thorpe is always descending from history into the present, the instant, the local, which really is the opposite of making the local etc. historical. What does he mean, "changing yr mind"? : "I make space-time. IT is not making it. (….) If i describe a condition, it changes. Or i hope to hell it does. If it didn't I'd be in trouble & I have been."
*
re- George Dowden
From This Is the Land of the Dead, The island of the Blessed, published by Hapt (Bournemouth, UK), 1970,
This is the Land of the Dead, the Island
of the Blessed
There is no Ship of Death - no where
to go but here
Here are the sweet-smelling trees, the gems
of the Earth are flowers, stones, a palace
is in the center - it is you, it is I,
that's all to know for beginning
*
Dowden's Ship of Death is a companion of John Thorpe's "Stranger in Paradise" --from Matter, or giving (Institute of Further Studies, Buffalo, N.Y., '75), "we came here on the 'Stranger in Paradise.' These were americans searching ease in the orient, never leaving Paradise, their ideological capitol, to look at the earth."
Literature is their prehistory. They swear that no more will they be led astray. (Though one wonders what's happened to that resolution in Dowden's most recent publication (three works by Kaviraj [George Dowden], published as loot 1 : 3, 1979, UK), praise poems for Muktananda, which are sopping wet with sub-Beat adoration.)
*
At the beginning, Dowden was one of the poets I found in Michael Dugan's treasure-trove of English little magazines. Or, at the beginning, in Melbourne, there was Michael Dugan, with his treasure-trove of English little-magazines, through which I rummaged at his home in Canterbury… Or, at the beginning, I was in Melbourne, putting my first little mag, Our Glass, together, when Ken Taylor, in some excitement, told me about & then showed me another little magazine, Crosscurrents, emanating from completely outside of our La Mama cafe-theatre circuitry. It was produced by Michael Dugan from his home in Wentworth Street, Canterbury. For at the beginning I was an English poet in Melbourne, who reconnected with the English scene through fortuitous meeting with Michael Dugan, whose treasure-trove of English little-magazines had inspired him to publish his own, Crosscurrents, & confirmed me in my own Roneo style direction!
George Dowden's poems in an issue of Ambit had caught my eye. I found his address somewhere amongst Michael's things. I wrote to him (& to Jeff Nuttall, & Simon Cutts). He replied, with poems, "(…) from my current 'set' called EARTH INCANTATIONS (Body Chants) - Blake, "O Earth, O Earth, return!" Etc. These have been my work through 1968-69, and are proving of interest to editors in a number of countries, underground papers as well as poetry magazines. I hope you will be able to get them into papers or mags or your own roneo series there. (….) Hope this catches you before you sail [back to England via French Polynesia, the Panama, Martinique, Madeira, Marseilles, departing Sydney August, '69]. Good luck to your group, and on your trip…" (27,VII.69)
At my farewell party, given by Betty Burstall, July '69, I distributed poems by George Dowden, & Michael, similarly, poems by Jim Burns. We were four La Mama poet-editors, Michael Dugan, Charles Buckmaster, Ian Robertson & myself. Buckmaster corresponded then with Dowden. Dowden negotiated an Australian issue of the English magazine, The Curiously Strong, to be edited by Buckmaster. Dowden sent copies of his books to Ken Taylor (at the ABC, the 'safest' address!) for distribution 'for everybody'. And so on…
It seemed to me, in '69, '70, that Dowden's poetry, his Blake/Ginsberg epistles, could be a stimulus & elevation in the level of political-poetic address then being attempted in Melbourne by such poets as Charles Buckmaster, Paul Adler, & Geoff Eggleston. Both Ian Robertson & Buckmaster were enthusiastic to publish him. Dowden (an American living in England, teaching, writing Ginsberg's bibliography for New Directions) was closer to the Melbourne aspiration, was more accessible than Michael McClure for example.
*
George Dowden to K.H., "Had weird letter from GREAT AUK Chas. Buckmaster. I got Fred Buck to do an Aussie issue of THE CURIOUSLY STRONG, sent a couple of samples to Chas, told him choose 3 or 4 poets there and make up (edit) the whole thing as per the way it's laid out. Said a few words I thought were encouraging, like poetry should be really strong, dangerous, etc., things I thought they were after and were finding in my poems they were praising -- he took it all wrong, thought I was trying to tell him what to write, but was only trying to impress on him the idea of making a really strong issue in his editing (what else?). It must have been that I honestly told him I didn't care for a few little poems he included in letter, wanting me to get published for him --I told him to make them better in THE CUR. STRONG. Oh, well, sensitivity and all that. I explained that 'known' poets when asked for criticism/opinion can only give it from what they want and are doing -- the younger takes it or leaves it (same as in my LETTERS TO ENGLISH POETS, 1967, where I say that they are firstly for me, and only secondly for anyone else who wants to listen). Forget it. Nothing serious. But must be understood: when one is asked for opinion, he does the younger poet no good by lying…." (30. I. 70)
"Yes, overemphasis on description in aussies -- must be a nice place to describe, physically, Pacific, the sun, greenery. But hoping that can be fused with saying something vital -- will be in best, always is (where Pound is so good so often)…." (7. II. 70)
----------------------------
Quoted from Being Here, the draft of its first part, Interference, published in the Being Here issue of H/EAR #7, 1985.
Sunday, October 18, 2015
The HOWL Report
Preface
[Posts shared/retrieved from Facebook]
(October 4, '15)
DAVID PEPPERELL : Dear George. Thanks for the ad [HOWL reading at Collected Works Bookshop : Saturday, 10th October, '15] and thank you for including me in your Six Gallery Commemoration. I'm looking very forward to being a part of a celebration of the very beginning of the Beat Generation. Just a pedantic point - I'm sure you know that Phil Lamantia did not read his own poetry at the Six Gallery but those of his recently deceased friend John Hoffman. Those poems are in the back of Lamantia's City Lights book "Tau". Wouldn't it be good to read at least one of those as a tribute to a poet lost at 21 to a peyote overdose in Mexico?
GEORGE MOURATIDES : Thanks so much for being part of this, David. Yes, I absolutely agree with you re. Lamantia and Hoffman. I have a copy of that book and have asked Larry Schwartz to do some Hoffman and maybe one or two Lamantia... Really looking forward to meeting you... Peace and blue notes
DAVID PEPPERELL : That's great George and thank you for including me. I am delighted that casual remark of mine to Kris Hemensley a few years ago has borne fruit. Thank you so much for organising it.
oOo
(October 6, '15)
The HOWL Report!!!
Great to hear from Jude Telford : "wowee zowee HOWL it was my fave .... I used to work in a book and record shop in Toronto back in the 70`s and I placed HOWL by the cash register ." Now that's an unintentionally funny juxtaposition! Discuss $$$$$ later... !
The event on Saturday a/noon at Collected Works coordinated by George Mouratides (who as people may or may not know, is one of the 4 younger scholars who worked on Penguin's "SCROLL" edition of On The Road) is unique as far as i can see looking around the Web...
Our celebration/commemoration is anchored, as it ought to be, by Ginsberg's Howl, and includes poems by the other readers at the Six Gallery (7 Oct 1955), namely Lamantia (who read J Hoffman), McClure, Whalen, Rexroth, Snyder, --read on Saturday a/noon by, as George says, LOCAL poets! My own sense of the occasion is held in Doctor Pepper's ascription "the very beginning of the Beat Generation" , thus Rexroth & Lamantia as slightly older current still flowing of course and the Beats as catching the splash. Expand this thought to say that from the 40s Apocalypse poets onwards, late translation in part of the cross Channel surrealist excitements, something else was in the air, abounding naturally in contradictions but fomenting the condition for Beats & everything else that follows.
oOo
(October 7 '15)
The HOWL Report, 2nd
Thinking yday about the 'new poetry''s relationship to Ancient Chinese & Japanese poetry --and yes of course, Pound & Fenollosa... But along this line : when the East & Ancient became adjacent, available, it was at the expense of the exotic... or at least, since i happen to like Mr Binyon, the East & Ancient as exotic wasnt any longer the only sound or optic in town... Life as well as letters, so an equivalence, a contemporaneity to the Chinese Mountain poets, or the Japanese haiku masters... thus the mid 20C translators including Rexroth, Snyder, and so the Beats...
Another thing : listened yday to Larry Schwartz's CD gift of the Rexroth & Ferlinghetti reading at the Cellar, 1957... Rexroth's long poem Thou Shalt Not Kill (i.m. Dylan Thomas) so reminiscent of Ginsberg's Howl... and Ferlinghetti, reading from Coney Island of the Mind, --europeanly funny & ironic hitched to the same american drive out of Whitman as all the others...
oOo
(October 8, '15)
The HOWL Report, 3rd
Stephen Hamilton came by yday in acknowledgement of the magic moment : 7th October, actual 60th anniversary of the Six gallery [HOWL] reading. James had copied for him the original announcement : "6 POETS AT 6 GALLERY". The text, by Kenneth Rexroth i assume : "Philip Lamantia reading mss. of late John Hoffman-- Mike McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen--all sharp new straightforward writing-- remarkable collection of angels on one stage reading their poetry. No charge, small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event. Kenneth Rexroth. M.C. 8 PM Friday Night October 7, 1955 6 Gallery 3119 Fillmore St. San Fran"
Or maybe it's Ginsberg's text re- "remarkable collection of angels"! Yet "charming event" has arch edge to it wch is why i thought Rexroth!
oOo
(October 8, '15)
The HOWL Report, the 4th
(Actually the third & a half-th!) Further to my mention of the tete a tete yesterday with Stephen Hamilton at the Bookshop (who was on his way to rendezvous with similarly maniacal Beat enthusiast James Hamilton to raise a glass to the 6 Gallery originals) : Stephen, looking along the American shelf, mentioned his interest in Jackson MacLow & the relevance of MacLow to the Beats & co --the segue i guess would be neo-dada/surrealist, Steinian, Cagean experimentalism --Ah yes, i said, JACKSON MACLOW, met him at a party once! Oh, really? says Stephen, --wch is fatal temptation for me to spin one of my stories! Yes, it was at the party in his honour thrown by Robert Vas Dias in Hampstead in 1975, June or July? --the year of the inaugural Cambridge Poetry Festival which i turned into a wonderful three month trip around the England of the British poets of my acquaint-- Robert Vas Dias the American poet, little mag publisher, residing in London --I'd set out from long way across town with John Robinson, editor of Joe di Maggio mag & little books, with whom i was staying a couple of nights --it was late afternoon, the party wasn't due to start till six or seven --We came to a pub, and it was OPEN (the maddening English after-lunch licensing restrictions of that time)! I persuaded John we should get a drink because it was HOURS until we were expected. John wasn't so sure but i persuaded him! One pint became another & another. I told him no one turned up to a party on the dot, well not in Melbourne anyway! We walked around the treed & curving streets (is that right? slight ascents too?) & eventually found Robert Vas Dias's house. And the party was in full flight! Greeted the host, (we'd met up at the Cambridge Fest, as everyone else had)and joined in! Packed. We were the last there. Jackson MacLow was seated at a long table eating dinner --salads, cold serves-- surrounded by friends, colleagues, fans, all filling their faces. We must have missed dinner or werent expected! Jackson MacLow, big grey-white beard, long wiry hair, man of the moment. And i noticed a bit of chicken caught in the fronds of his whiskers! It must have been there for a while, no one seemed to notice, respectful conversation was being had, he was talking seriously, and the chicken (was it a wish bone? or just a bit of skin?) bobbing as his head did, as he ate & talked... Many people to talk to --Bob Cobbing? Allen Fisher, Pierre Joris & Paige Mitchell, David Miller (to play music?), Derek Bailey (ditto), Anthony Barnett? The Chaloners? Lee Harwood? I cant remember. If i cld find the note-book of the time it might be there. At some point i'd moved out of the main room, was by myself having a drink, when an American woman said hello (now, her name WILL be in that notebook). We clicked. Her opener : what are you doing at this chicken-shit party?! I pointed out the uninvited guest in Jackson's fuzz. Extended laughter, joking about English high society, where we could go for a real party. Exchanged phone numbers. Her boyfriend and then John joined us. And things began breaking up. I phoned her up from Southampton but never heard back. That's life in 1975!
oOo
(9th October, '15)
The HOWL Report, the fifth
Brian Hassett is "in Lowell for the JackFest", and sends this message : "So cool and am so happy about your Six Down Under. I was just with Michael M yesterday at his rare East Coast (or anywhere) appearance and I mentioned the Sixtieth of the Six to him and ... he had no idea !! He said, "Oh, I must drop Gary a line." But like — the guy's not booked anywhere. (!) (And of course, nor's Gary.)"
I guess that old joke, de Kooning's? about birds not into ornithology (he was talking about art criticism), could apply here! But this is surely something else. Once again intersections & connections : enthusiasts become historians eliciting palpable, tangible meaning from out of pop celebrity on one hand and the valueless abyss informed by carelessness & forgetfulness on the other.
I coined the term "active archive" thirty-odd years ago to account for the type of magazine i was publishing : a simultaneity of remembering & reflecting and the imperative to (and this'll sound like Ram Dass) be here now!
George Mouratidis programme for tomorrow, the 10th October at Collected Works Bookshop, is prime example : the local poets, never less than individuals of current vigour & personality, channeling, if you like, the Six Gallery originals! Yeah!
[Posts shared/retrieved from Facebook]
(October 4, '15)
DAVID PEPPERELL : Dear George. Thanks for the ad [HOWL reading at Collected Works Bookshop : Saturday, 10th October, '15] and thank you for including me in your Six Gallery Commemoration. I'm looking very forward to being a part of a celebration of the very beginning of the Beat Generation. Just a pedantic point - I'm sure you know that Phil Lamantia did not read his own poetry at the Six Gallery but those of his recently deceased friend John Hoffman. Those poems are in the back of Lamantia's City Lights book "Tau". Wouldn't it be good to read at least one of those as a tribute to a poet lost at 21 to a peyote overdose in Mexico?
GEORGE MOURATIDES : Thanks so much for being part of this, David. Yes, I absolutely agree with you re. Lamantia and Hoffman. I have a copy of that book and have asked Larry Schwartz to do some Hoffman and maybe one or two Lamantia... Really looking forward to meeting you... Peace and blue notes
DAVID PEPPERELL : That's great George and thank you for including me. I am delighted that casual remark of mine to Kris Hemensley a few years ago has borne fruit. Thank you so much for organising it.
oOo
(October 6, '15)
The HOWL Report!!!
Great to hear from Jude Telford : "wowee zowee HOWL it was my fave .... I used to work in a book and record shop in Toronto back in the 70`s and I placed HOWL by the cash register ." Now that's an unintentionally funny juxtaposition! Discuss $$$$$ later... !
The event on Saturday a/noon at Collected Works coordinated by George Mouratides (who as people may or may not know, is one of the 4 younger scholars who worked on Penguin's "SCROLL" edition of On The Road) is unique as far as i can see looking around the Web...
Our celebration/commemoration is anchored, as it ought to be, by Ginsberg's Howl, and includes poems by the other readers at the Six Gallery (7 Oct 1955), namely Lamantia (who read J Hoffman), McClure, Whalen, Rexroth, Snyder, --read on Saturday a/noon by, as George says, LOCAL poets! My own sense of the occasion is held in Doctor Pepper's ascription "the very beginning of the Beat Generation" , thus Rexroth & Lamantia as slightly older current still flowing of course and the Beats as catching the splash. Expand this thought to say that from the 40s Apocalypse poets onwards, late translation in part of the cross Channel surrealist excitements, something else was in the air, abounding naturally in contradictions but fomenting the condition for Beats & everything else that follows.
oOo
(October 7 '15)
The HOWL Report, 2nd
Thinking yday about the 'new poetry''s relationship to Ancient Chinese & Japanese poetry --and yes of course, Pound & Fenollosa... But along this line : when the East & Ancient became adjacent, available, it was at the expense of the exotic... or at least, since i happen to like Mr Binyon, the East & Ancient as exotic wasnt any longer the only sound or optic in town... Life as well as letters, so an equivalence, a contemporaneity to the Chinese Mountain poets, or the Japanese haiku masters... thus the mid 20C translators including Rexroth, Snyder, and so the Beats...
Another thing : listened yday to Larry Schwartz's CD gift of the Rexroth & Ferlinghetti reading at the Cellar, 1957... Rexroth's long poem Thou Shalt Not Kill (i.m. Dylan Thomas) so reminiscent of Ginsberg's Howl... and Ferlinghetti, reading from Coney Island of the Mind, --europeanly funny & ironic hitched to the same american drive out of Whitman as all the others...
oOo
(October 8, '15)
The HOWL Report, 3rd
Stephen Hamilton came by yday in acknowledgement of the magic moment : 7th October, actual 60th anniversary of the Six gallery [HOWL] reading. James had copied for him the original announcement : "6 POETS AT 6 GALLERY". The text, by Kenneth Rexroth i assume : "Philip Lamantia reading mss. of late John Hoffman-- Mike McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen--all sharp new straightforward writing-- remarkable collection of angels on one stage reading their poetry. No charge, small collection for wine and postcards. Charming event. Kenneth Rexroth. M.C. 8 PM Friday Night October 7, 1955 6 Gallery 3119 Fillmore St. San Fran"
Or maybe it's Ginsberg's text re- "remarkable collection of angels"! Yet "charming event" has arch edge to it wch is why i thought Rexroth!
oOo
(October 8, '15)
The HOWL Report, the 4th
(Actually the third & a half-th!) Further to my mention of the tete a tete yesterday with Stephen Hamilton at the Bookshop (who was on his way to rendezvous with similarly maniacal Beat enthusiast James Hamilton to raise a glass to the 6 Gallery originals) : Stephen, looking along the American shelf, mentioned his interest in Jackson MacLow & the relevance of MacLow to the Beats & co --the segue i guess would be neo-dada/surrealist, Steinian, Cagean experimentalism --Ah yes, i said, JACKSON MACLOW, met him at a party once! Oh, really? says Stephen, --wch is fatal temptation for me to spin one of my stories! Yes, it was at the party in his honour thrown by Robert Vas Dias in Hampstead in 1975, June or July? --the year of the inaugural Cambridge Poetry Festival which i turned into a wonderful three month trip around the England of the British poets of my acquaint-- Robert Vas Dias the American poet, little mag publisher, residing in London --I'd set out from long way across town with John Robinson, editor of Joe di Maggio mag & little books, with whom i was staying a couple of nights --it was late afternoon, the party wasn't due to start till six or seven --We came to a pub, and it was OPEN (the maddening English after-lunch licensing restrictions of that time)! I persuaded John we should get a drink because it was HOURS until we were expected. John wasn't so sure but i persuaded him! One pint became another & another. I told him no one turned up to a party on the dot, well not in Melbourne anyway! We walked around the treed & curving streets (is that right? slight ascents too?) & eventually found Robert Vas Dias's house. And the party was in full flight! Greeted the host, (we'd met up at the Cambridge Fest, as everyone else had)and joined in! Packed. We were the last there. Jackson MacLow was seated at a long table eating dinner --salads, cold serves-- surrounded by friends, colleagues, fans, all filling their faces. We must have missed dinner or werent expected! Jackson MacLow, big grey-white beard, long wiry hair, man of the moment. And i noticed a bit of chicken caught in the fronds of his whiskers! It must have been there for a while, no one seemed to notice, respectful conversation was being had, he was talking seriously, and the chicken (was it a wish bone? or just a bit of skin?) bobbing as his head did, as he ate & talked... Many people to talk to --Bob Cobbing? Allen Fisher, Pierre Joris & Paige Mitchell, David Miller (to play music?), Derek Bailey (ditto), Anthony Barnett? The Chaloners? Lee Harwood? I cant remember. If i cld find the note-book of the time it might be there. At some point i'd moved out of the main room, was by myself having a drink, when an American woman said hello (now, her name WILL be in that notebook). We clicked. Her opener : what are you doing at this chicken-shit party?! I pointed out the uninvited guest in Jackson's fuzz. Extended laughter, joking about English high society, where we could go for a real party. Exchanged phone numbers. Her boyfriend and then John joined us. And things began breaking up. I phoned her up from Southampton but never heard back. That's life in 1975!
oOo
(9th October, '15)
The HOWL Report, the fifth
Brian Hassett is "in Lowell for the JackFest", and sends this message : "So cool and am so happy about your Six Down Under. I was just with Michael M yesterday at his rare East Coast (or anywhere) appearance and I mentioned the Sixtieth of the Six to him and ... he had no idea !! He said, "Oh, I must drop Gary a line." But like — the guy's not booked anywhere. (!) (And of course, nor's Gary.)"
I guess that old joke, de Kooning's? about birds not into ornithology (he was talking about art criticism), could apply here! But this is surely something else. Once again intersections & connections : enthusiasts become historians eliciting palpable, tangible meaning from out of pop celebrity on one hand and the valueless abyss informed by carelessness & forgetfulness on the other.
I coined the term "active archive" thirty-odd years ago to account for the type of magazine i was publishing : a simultaneity of remembering & reflecting and the imperative to (and this'll sound like Ram Dass) be here now!
George Mouratidis programme for tomorrow, the 10th October at Collected Works Bookshop, is prime example : the local poets, never less than individuals of current vigour & personality, channeling, if you like, the Six Gallery originals! Yeah!
Sunday, November 9, 2014
MYTHS & TEXTS
MYTHS & TEXTS
Ive signed & inscribed it "from Retta, Myer's sale, Feb. 68" --amazement & glee when she presented Gary Snyder's little book, Myths & Texts, to me. Avant-garde hunter gatherers in them thar days. The shining lights of the New Writing ever in our sights. Golden season of Franklin's bookshop in Russell Street throughout '66, first year of my emigration, when every visit turned up something --a paperback Kerouac, Holmes or Brossard, Broyard, Cassil, Mandel (a hardback), Salinger, Mailer et al… And continued after I met Loretta, --through '67, '68, all & any of the many Melbourne bookshops --Gaston Renard, the Russian Bookshop, Cheshires, the Anchorage, --but Franklin's by far the best 2nd hander…
In February '68 I'm in the lap of luxury having been let go by the Education Department (Technical Division), advised before end of term, December '67, that I wouldn't be re-employed at Williamstown Tech after the summer holiday, yet fully paid for the entire period! Friends told me to go to the Teachers Union and fight it. The Union said it was a strange case since a sacking before end of school year normally meant no holiday wages at all. Unless I seriously wanted a teaching career they advised me to take the money & run! I'd known from the moment I set foot at Williamstown Tech that the Principal couldn't handle my looks or my books --long hair in a pony tail, poetry anthologies & anarchist tracts --and the Teachers Union anti-conscription petition I pinned up on the staff notice-board the last straw --unless it was the cricket match I unilaterally abandoned (defacto sports master & umpire in addition to my English & Social Studies brief) when one team's Anglo-Australian boys and the Greeks & others of the opposition attacked each other with bats & stumps --'race riot' as I declared it, occasioned by the Greeks belting the Aussies around the park, wielding cricket bats as though baseball clubs, not guarding their wicket, no technique, solely eye & instinct… Next day at the staff meeting, a more liberal minded teacher than most, a literary man, Tennessee Williams enthusiast, interceded in my castigation. If Mr H agreed, he said, he'd gladly cane the perpetrators, beat some respect into them! Culture & race had nothing to do with it, discipline was the key, he said!
Another teacher I occasionally spoke to, Mrs Brass, sympathised with me about the incident. Over the years I've thought her husband was the journalist Douglas Brass because of their shared name and memory of her reading & discussing articles in The Australian for which he was a columnist, but it isn't so. Additionally Ive found her on the Web described as teaching at Williamstown High, so perhaps she was only temporarily at the Tech school. Like me she wasn't trained but hired on interview in that uncredentialed era. Ruth Brass was from Germany and if we spoke in the staff-room I'm sure my friendship with Inge Timm & visiting her in Soest, Westphalia in '65 would have cropped up. She was connected with the Goethe Institute in Melbourne and the thought begins to percolate that late '70s, when Walter Billeter introduced me to its splendid library, I may have talked to her there and perhaps brought up our earlier Williamstown connection!
Peter Norman was my head of humanities, an athlete, to whom I told the story of visiting the great Percy Cerutty at his famous Portsea training camp, under the wing of my friend Kelvin Bowers, British middle-distance junior champion, whom I'd met on the migrant boat in '66, & who'd been invited to train there. I remember Peter as often around the corridor in track suit as in shirt & tie. I probably thought he was quicker on his feet than tongue. I'd picked up he was Christian and though he generally agreed with my anti-war politics, didn't sign the anti-conscription petition. I was appalled. Only a year later imagine the surprise when I saw my regular-guy colleague in the Black Power protest on the hundred metres medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics? A la Spike Milligan, had I played a part in the Aussie sprinter's radicalisation? Nah! That was the era and zeitgeist impossible to buck, or what?
I'd've been home in my tiny rented terrace cottage in Canning Street, Carlton, next to the all-night thumping of the bakery and its permanent bread-dough aroma, almost suffocating in mid-summer, the bread smells trapped in the airless heat. I'm typing poems or letters, being paid by the Education Department essentially to sit on my arse, read, study, be a poet, when Loretta came in with her prize! Perhaps I'm psyching myself up to fulfil the curtain-raiser for Michael Hudson's production of Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theatre at the La Mama cafe-theatre around the corner in Faraday Street, Betty Burstall's good idea to justify the night's billing of such a short play, and redeemed she was when our poetry began pulling an audience in its own right. It grew another leg when Bill Beard joined me, so that Mike's Bread & Puppet appeared to be supporting us! But here it is, my God, Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts, published by Corinth Books, "in conjunction with Totem Press/Le Roi Jones" --wow-ee! What on earth was it doing, engulfed by bad popular fiction, romance, thrillers, on a sale table in the book department of Melbourne's flagship department store? The only copy, the only poetry book! What were the odds that Retta should find it? Incredible!
[22/26-5-14]
oOo
On misty, damp, after-rain morning, writing as I stand in doorway section of smooth-running stop-all-stations train from the 'Garth & Creek's quasi rurality into the Big Smoke, surrounded by pleasant hum of commuter small-talk --like I'm Walt & not Gary Snyder, subject of the memorandum I'm heading to, --Walt & not Gary, definitively, because in Gary's poetry the daily milieu is foil or natural context but its candour never so grown & substantially remarked as in Walt's inexhaustible ledger, small glint of which is mine here --and plainly isn't the point of it, isn't his ideology, like Walt's Song of this and Song of that, determined to include everyone & everything within the call's special ring, like an auctioneer in Kentucky or, nodding back through the years to my sister Monique who sent me its postcard, the Appleby Horse Fair, long long ways as these may be from Camden, New Jersey --hoo! Gary, hoo!
*
And chatting with Chris Wallace-Crabbe one morning in the Shop, on his way over the river to the William Blake exhibition at the NGV, --bright as a button, dapper as Barry Humphries --in response to his polite question about reading &/or writing, --Snyder I said, and searched for the right word to describe him --irony? no, --separateness? exclusivity? --And though we're all carried by Walt's democratic ebullience, this civic ecstasy not expected in Snyder contrary to an image perhaps preceding him? --because Snyder is found in singleness, singularity, singing also but to distinguish not occlude --each natural jewel of rain sun forest (--this is some conversation! ) --I just happen to be supervising a student in Snyder at the moment he says --laugh : let's tutor him/her together, I say! -- What I like, I say, is the simultaneity of American & Japanese --Chinese, Californian, Chris adds laughing --
But stay with the double outline, the casual slippage of ancient & modern, registered as here & now --no more arcane than acorns are --seamless collage --logger, Marxist, Wobbly, hitch-hiker. folklorist, Native-American, Chinese, Japanese, Buddhist, lover, shaman --
"Bodhidharma sailing the Yangtze on a reed
Lenin in a sealed train through Germany
Hsuan Tsang, crossing the Pamires
Joseph, Crazy Horse, living the last free
starving high-country winter of their tribes.
Surrender into freedom, revolt into slavery--
Confucius no better--
(with Lao-tzu to keep him in check)
"Walking about the countryside
all one fall
To a heart's content beating on stumps." [from part 6, Burning; Myths & Texts, 1952-56]---
Snyder, --like at Collingwood Farm I told Chris, drawing the cabbage with two pencils in my hand, the blurs outlining instant contradiction, adding dimension, so is our subject all-over, all-around, always, expressed as the simultaneity of alternating here & now --
*
1968 reading Myths & Texts same age as when Snyder began writing it. What accomplishment, teens & twenties! --especially as the post WW2 generations become younger, suspended by personal prosperity/social welfare in new norm cotton wool adolescence. Reading Snyder, there's no discount for youth -- realise Snyder is as Snyder does, was ever who he is --which is how one appreciates all notable & memorable writing in the retrospect one never thought twice about at the start of it. Not that '60s reading was at the beginning of anything other than that season of English & Australian youth's education. But if only for Myths & Texts, Snyder could uncontroversially have qualified for Robert Duncan's class-roll, The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound (Agenda vol 4, no 2, 1965), wonderful to read in Melbourne in '68 --describing the importance in the late '40s, early '50s, of Pound & Williams in opening "the way for a group of younger writers --Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn, Gael Turnbull, Theodore Enslin, Cid Corman and myself --who were concerned with immediacy and process in the development of their poetics." Pound & Williams are unambiguously sounded by Snyder --and the only magpie would be seen & heard along what's become his very own way, killing the Buddha at every bend.
*
Walking/working backwards from his influence --on Franco Beltrametti's Nadamas for instance --I cant put my hand on the chapter he published (his own & Judith Danciger's translation) in the Grosseteste Review, '72, so refer to the section I published in Earth Ship #10/11 (Southampton, August, '72, just prior to returning to Melbourne), summed up in this sentence : "Here we are again in the swing of the events following each other always more rapidly so that you don't have to be interested if they overlap or ride over one another." As Beltrametti so Snyder --the absolute presence of the narrative, no progression only what's current, and time passing's subsumed within the concurrence or simultaneity. Beltrametti's 'additional handwritten poem' in the signed edition of Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973) makes the same call :
"reckonings don't come even
roughly on the same latitude as
Seville / Richmond / Wichita / Nigata /
Seoul / Askhabad
magpies
from one carob tree
to the next"
[10/7/70]
*
And though Snyder's Myths & Texts does 'contain history' after Pound, Williams' grafting (for example the young feller Ginsberg's correspondence included in Paterson, which serves to bless the incidental with the historical) is a propos --real bits of world, documents, quotation, letters as they come, as world comes, observed, overheard, perceived. (No reason to be peeved, if he really was, when his own stuff landed up in Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Material is material and the private subordinate to a larger literary good?) All of which suggests the fluidity or openness of the poem as the measure of experience yet the Snyder poem is also composed --much more of a made poem, confirmed by standard capitalisation & lineation, than the rangy field-work of the first poems of Mountains & Rivers Without End which chronologically follow Myths & Texts.
*
What to say of his Jewish joke not quite lost in the anti-Christian jibe :
"Them Xtians out to save souls and grab land
'They'd steal Christ off the cross
if he wasn't nailed on'
The last decent carpentry
Ever done by Jews." [from Logging, section 10, Myths & Texts]?
Sure, Snyder's target is both bible-bashing colonialism and the theologically guaranteed human dominion over nature, the bete noire of the ecological philosophy & politics he champions. An example of casual anti-semitism maybe, and only funny within it. Sure, hearsay, quoted speech, but seamless in Snyder's drawl-scrawl, his droll-scroll…
*
P. S. : Rip Rap
Permit mind blown in the fatal collision of wilderness & industrial civilisation --"I cannot remember things I once read / A few friends, but they are in cities." Consider the few days between worlds, and all gone that other one --and what another one "Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup / Looking down for miles / Through high still air." --what room for anything else when this other imposes such permanence that the very notion of contrast shrivels, no register except "caught on a snow peak / between heaven and earth" --except the lad is a scientist, can unsentimentally state "in ten thousand years the Sierras / will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion." And the Milton he's pulled out of his ruck-sack's (as last of August light extended by camp-fire's) "Too dark to read". Hah! --pun into blackguard Milton aka Western dramaturgy, --but as though autobiography, Cold Mountain's just the place to slough off "Damn me a fool last night in port drunk on the floor & damn / this cheap trash we read. Hawaiian workers shared us / beer in the long wood dredgemen's steel-men's girl-less / night drunk and gambling hall, called us strange sea- / men blala and clasped our arms and sang real Hawaiian songs " ---Ah, right royal navvy's days & nights…
*
In Rip Rap's 50th Anniversary edition there's long footnote apology for a phrase in the poem, For A Far-Out Friend. He confesses it's earned him flack over the years but now it's time to clarify. "Because once I beat you up / Drunk, stung with weeks of torment / And saw you no more", was an untruth right from the start he explains. She was the violent one, not he. "She started beating on me in some anger and I let her whack me (protesting) till I got her into the car. (….) I thought that saying I'd hit her was the more manly, or even gentlemanly, thing to say, an idea that comes from chivalry, perhaps. I never laid an ungentle hand on her. My critics, especially my colleague Sandra Gilbert, have said that there is no excuse for treating violence against women casually, and they are absolutely right. This note seems the best way to deal with the problem rather eliminate the poem or change the line in silence." Hmmm. Didn't want to change the original poem he says but bows now to feminist pressure and seeks to 'explain'…There you go. But surely, what's good for the goose is good for the gander? Snyder evidently doesn't blush for the "kulak" reference describing farmers & landowners in one of his much admired Han Shan translations, Cold Mountain poem # 16.
"Cold Mountain is a house / Without beams or walls. / The six doors left and right are open / The hall is blue sky. / The rooms are all vacant and vague / The east wall beats on the west wall / At the centre nothing. // Borrowers don't bother me / In the cold I build a little fire / When I'm hungry I boil up some greens. / I've got not use for the kulak / With his big barn and pasture - / He just sets up a prison for himself. / Once in he cant get out. / Think it over -- / You know it might happen to you."
'Kulak's traditional meaning is "a tight-fisted person"; "a peasant wealthy enough to own farm and hire labour" (Concise Oxford). But it's inextricable from the vicious Soviet connotation. This term from the Stalinist lexicon refers to as wicked a pogrom as any in the USSR, its horror & madness if anything magnified when the attitude was inherited by Maoist China. What did Snyder intend? "You know it might happen to you" a little more sinister than a comment on personal salvation? Simplest & kindest to say that in the '50s, as a young man of the left, revolting against the American way, he's amenable & acquiescent to leftist gloat and a say-what-I-like macho glib… Fiftieth anniversary or not, time's ripe, methinks, for more clarification of such hot & cold war attitudes & language… The Right is unfailingly called to proper account for its reflections of Fascism & Naziism, but the Left hardly at all for its toeing the line of iron fist Communism, Stalinism, Maoism and whatever flows on through contemporary Socialist reflexes & assumptions…
The older & younger survivors of the ideological storms are we, especially as the poets we're able to be… Time to be poets & not suckers & saps… hoo! hoo! hoo!
[7/10-10-14 (4-11-14)]
*
P-P. S
The issue of what is or isn't 'politically correct' is prickly enough in the present day. And there's a greater problem with the retrospective judgement of previous generations, earlier societies & epochs, according to contemporary attitude & belief, and not least because the legitimation of such attribution implies a standard set, unchanging through time. This installs the progressivist depiction of human affairs as the only one, coacervate, indeed, with history itself. On the other hand, reform & repudiation of atrocious acts is generally laudable & necessary. I guess expression, whether or not literary or artistic, being what is held, spoken, depicted, is rightly personal --eccentrically formed, not legislative whatever its aspiration. So the question I ask of Gary Snyder is as reader-writer of a colleague poet, though he be exemplary, & one who hasn't confined his work to the literary domain. If you like, when reader-writer addresses another it's poetry & literature of which the question is asked, asked whatismore within & behalf of poetry & literature.
[5/9-11-14]
Saturday, April 19, 2014
POSTS RETRIEVED FROM F/BOOK OBLIVION : IKKYU; ON DOLPHINS; JACK SHOEMAKER; JOHN MATEER; FIELDING DAWSON; NORMAN GERAS; ALAN BURNS.
[April 17/'14]
Off the top of my head about Ikkyu on or about 600th anniversary of the death of his master, Keno
for Bernard H & Robert L
A few days after a conversation about Ikkyu, Robert Lloyd leant me a copy of John Stevens' translations, Wild Ways : Zen Poems of Ikkyu (Shambhala, 1995). We stocked it years ago, perhaps in a different format? Also Stephen Berg's versions of Ikkyu, Crow With No Mouth (1989). I'm enjoying this re-immersion in Ikkyu. Ever tickled by dates I realize this is the 620th anniversary of the year of Ikkyu's birth, and, importantly, the year of the 600th anniversary of the death of Ikkyu's first great influence, Keno, "the Modest Old Man, abbot of Saikinj. Temple of Western Gold." Via Google I found very interesting extract from Perle Besserman & Manfred Steger's book, Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers (Wisdom, 2011). Nothing wrong at all with John Stevens' potted biography, there's just more in the Besserman & Steger.
"Keno's example, and Rinzai's beforehand, exerted such a powerful influence on Ikkyu's mind that he never accepted or gave inka throughout his life as a Zen student or teacher. For the legitimate heir to Rinzai, true Zen meant transmission beyond words, scriptures, or written certificates of enlightenment. And Keno was just such a master --unconventional, uncompromising, strict in his dedication to meditation, with no worldly ambitions whatsoever. Ikkyu spent four years training in the lonely temple of Western Gold [Ikkyu was his only student], until Kano's sudden death put an end to his Zen idyll."
Suicide attempt, the search for a teacher, from Keno to Kaso, & eventual enlightenment --awoken from meditation by "the cawing of a crow in early evening, Ikkyu achieved his great satori. the entire universe became the cawing of the crow..." John Stevens translates the enlightenment verse : "For twenty years I was in turmoil / Seething and angry, but now my time has come! / The crow laughs /, an arhat emerges from the filth, / And in the sunlight a jade beauty sings!"
Writing this as crows are popping up again hereabouts, bringing in Autumn & Winter in Melbourne, reminding me of my feeling for crows. Here are two from The Millennium Poems (1997-2000), contributed to Raffaella Torresan's anthology, Literary Creatures (Hybrid, 2009) :
milkcloud-sky canvas
leafless branches red tin roofs -
artist-crow due now
*
raven on favourite branch
confides to the tree
that as far as friends go
ravens' loyalty outdoes
humans'
trees' imperturbable
where raven's merely proud -
a bunch of people scuttle past -walking trees! scoffs raven -
leaves! exhales the tree
*
Amours, sex, & philosophy in Stevens's Ikkyu but no crows! Lots like this though :
One short pause between
The leaky road here and
The never-leaking Way there:
If it rains, let it rain!
If it storms, let it storm!
*
Sexual love can be so painful when it is deep,
Making you forget even the best prose and poetry.
Yet now I experience a heretofore unknown natural joy,
The delightful sound of the wind soothing my thoughts.
oOo
DOLPHINS
[31-3-14]
A PROPOS BEACH REPORT : DOLPHINS AT ELWOOD BEACH!!!
Amazin', as Tommy Hafey might say... Sitting yesterday, late afternoon, at the Kiosk on the beach, writing abt Dimitris Tsaloumas who swam right here for years, --thinking about that sentiment he expressed in a poem, that the mermaid doesnt swim here anymore, --pollution on his mind but also the degradation or loss of meaning, the loss of significance of classical myth, and probably his own sense of meaning as he turned back to Greece again, --writing about this when I saw dark shapes, fin, disturbance in the sea, and thought 'whale' but then 'dolphins'... And so it was! DOLPHINS, at least three, maybe half a dozen. WONDERFUL! Man with family sitting under brolly beside us leapt to his feet, shouting for people to LOOK! Everyone peering at the dolphins swimming from right (Point Ormond) to left, and then the sunbathers along the beach, standing, looking... I say swimming : the dolphins were jumping, up & under again, --and of course then Ezra Pound in my head, "Came Neptunus, dolphins leaping" --and I felt it was a 'reply' to Tsaloumas... You had to have been there!
oOo
[26-3-14]
Bernard Hemensley's message : "Jack Shoemaker : Alive and Well!...You'll be pleased to know, Kris...re our telephone conversation. Ah! How we enjoyed those yellow-paged paper catalogs from Sand Dollar some 40 years ago!!!"
Yes indeed... very relieved & happy for this news! (For some reason I'd suddenly thought otherwise...)
Hugely deserved award! Another bookseller, publisher. poet! I'll drop him a line!
*
[27-3-14]
[copied from B H's page] Rereading : So the award was made in 2013. Missed it or have forgotten, but thinking of the news today all the sweeter! As you remark about his catalogues, they were like a curriculum; for example, and at random. I've picked out Sand Dollar Books new titles list #23, dated 26 April 1978, --his categories were poetry & fiction; literary magazines; Japanese fiction; Sources & texts. It was the 'sources & texts' wch indicated poetry's reach, if you like, an expansion of the possibility not a single track. For example, from this 'yellow-paged paper' marvel : J Blumenthal's The Printed Book in America (Godine); Alfred Brendel's Musical Thoughts & Afterthoughts (Princeton); Haslam, The Real World of the Surrealists (Rizzoli); Mitchell, Blake's Composite Art (Princeton); A Rich, Of Woman Born (mass p/b); E Weston, Nudes (Aperture).... The most expensive book Jack listed in that catalogue was the Bibliography of the Grabhorn Press 1957-66 & Grabhorn-Hoyen 1966-73, ed R Harlan, printed by Andrew Hoyen, ed of 225 copies; "this supply is already exhausted and we have only one copy left", $250... worth what today? I published a poem sequence by Jack --Magical Mayan Survival Techniques : A Gathering for Michael Palmer-- in my mag The Ear in a Wheatfield, #17, Autumn 1976. My contributor's bio for him goes : "Jack Shoemaker is better known as a bookseller (1205 Solano Avenue, Albany, Cal. 94706) & as a publisher (the excellent Sand Dollar programme). His identification of Australia as the stop beyond Fresno on the American poetry circuit is an indication of his rare perceptions." For 'American', understand 'new poetry' tho I do recall Michael Wilding at the time suggesting that Oz become the next state of the Union & thereby qualify for its subsidies & literary recognitions! Of course, political teasing but a smidgin of the truth of the feeling of the time!
*
[B H on his own page] : "Yes, wonderful catalogs to complement what came thru via Nick Kimberley at Compendium and then his Duck Soup etc. What i obtained from Jack were lots of rare books (now) = titles by Bukowski, Enslin, Eigner, Creeley and Dawson. i would receive special lists of the titles available and order = Well-paid social-worker at the time! Of course, it was Jack Shoemaker's MAYA QUARTO chapbooks which caught the imagination for me when i started Stingy Artist publications in 1978....and the first one was!!! = Montale's Typos by KH!!!"
oOo
[March 26/'14]
Thanks for the link, Kent MacCarter...[http://cordite.org.au/essays/nativism-and-the-interlocutor/] I remember all of this from when it occurred... the controversy surrounding John Mateer's poem for and about the Noongar warrior Yagen... Reading the 'Nativism..' essay I'm struck by John's split or double characterizations as also last night at his excellent reading at Collected Works Bookshop... I'm moved by John's investment in the Poet which is both the simple & the imaginative figure, sincerely bearing the existential burden... Seemed very strongly to me that Mateer's poetry is the act which precedes politics (even its own). Felt, thought, expressed, and as I would say, warts & all. The alternatives are of diplomacy & politics; decorums which are not essentially poetry, that is Poetry, the parallel dimension where The Poet might exist... Part of that parallel dimension is Storyteller, --contemporary lyric poet become or returned as storyteller. Different subtleties, different transparencies... Asking me about the 'few words' of my introduction to John's reading last night, Fiona Hile wondered if it was 'off the top of my head'. Yes, sort of! Off the top of my head, but I wrote the words down, I joked! Like I do here --which always feels like someone else thinking through me (however straightforward); off the top of my head, thinking with my pen... No obfuscation in John Mateer's dreams of the world; to reiterate, he is bearing the existential burden --dreams of the parallel worlds... 'next life' always this life, which is where I meet him...
oOo
[March 23/'14]
IN BETWEEN THE BEACH REPORTS
Quoting from what might be the last of the series, several not yet posted, --in this piece I'm discussing Fielding Dawson :
(......) I abjure saying 'one dimensionality' --he was a collagist damn it! --not only the frisson of the cut & paste but the curious images & strange feelings emerging between the rough cut edges, flickering like revelations but for the understandings thereof, & like shadows, Jung & all, --because the whole truth of the matter's what's at stake, otherwise odious conformity, dissembling that negates the particular in favour of at all times politically correct cypher --which Fielding Dawson never was. His greatest value surely candour about personal relations, its powerful resonance founded on fine ear & fluent speaking style... And he wrote this --first words of his I ever read, published by the late, lamented Andrew Crozier as a beguiling, black-covered Ferry Press booklet, THREAD, which begins, "I have green eyes, I sit at the table nervously listening to them I am watching myself listening and looking I am telling myself to pay attention, see and listen and not see and listen, my hair is a little grey, a woman walks in me, she pays no heed, I sit there and listen and look, I am myself(....)" --I was hooked, riveted -- "a woman walks in me" spoke to me of floating gender, a poetic life's polymorphous potential... I set it as an exercise in the Adult Education classes I taught in Melbourne, mid '70s, the phrase as is for the men, the reverse for the women ("a man walks in me"). It seemed always to open things up --themselves, the class, their writing...
Apropos here a reference to Fielding Dawson in letter from Larry Eigner, written Sunday, Feb 16, '75, included in the pamphlet AH ! published as # 15 of my mag, The Ear in a Wheatfield (August, '75). In the letter Larry describes what he's read of issue #9 of The Ear : "(....) AE Coppard stories on Masterpiece Theatre these last two Sundays [and Dawson's story is after Coppard]. I never got to a Dawson story much, following it and taking it in (a lot here for years unlooked at) til last night when I read "The Man Who Changed Overnight" before watching "Boy", 6th in a series of Japanese films with Ed O Reischauer (et al) commenting. Eye-openers, quite a lot. That Dawson hits very substantially (H James, G Stein, Creeley, Dawson...) --the vivid mix of experience. (.....)"
oOo
[January 23/'14]
Thank you for this, Nick Dryenfurth [Norman Geras: an obituary; http://overland.org.au/2013/10/norman-geras-an-obituary/
... The obituary went through to the keeper, as they say, so it's opportune to reconnect here...
N D : "It's now 4 months since the great Norm Geras was taken from us all too early. I miss his blog everyday. Reading over his many obits I was struck by the ungenerous offering of Overland. In this fantasy Trotskyite world of the Sparrow-ites Norm's ethical and morally-grounded politics is utterly disconnected from his Jewishness. Indeed, the author cannot bear to call him a Jew at all. In a word: shameful."
Re- 'ungenerous' : relates for me to what Ive thought about for many years as 'humility before the fact' versus a variety of 'vanity'... I understand Philip Mendes' reading of Geras (above) within that perspective... Best wishes to you & all who sail with you!
*
From the Guardian [UK]'s obit last October, this summary does for me : "From his perspective, the response to the events of 11 September 2001 was appalling. He found the readiness of many to blame the US for bringing the terrorist attack down on its own head to be intellectually feeble and morally contemptible. He argued that this section of the left was betraying its own values by offering warm understanding to terrorists and cold neglect to their victims. He detested the drawing of an unsupported and insupportable moral equivalence between western democracies and real or proposed theocratic tyrannies in which liberty of thought and speech, and the protection of human rights, would play no part. Norm wanted to engage in this debate and not just with academics. So he went online, to provide himself with a space in which he could express these and other views, and Normblog was born."
*
The name 'Normblog' rings a bell now but I'd never followed it... These notes & comments, conversations, encounters, are all occasions within a journey; opportunities for clarity, knowing oneself better, as clean & bare as one can be... Romantic anarchist & communist beginnings, mixed with art & literature & poetry's education, mixing DHL & Miller & Durrell & all & the cavalcade of existentialists, surrealists, dadaists, Beats, --and that's just into my 20s!!! ---45 + years since then --and the examination continues as it must vis a vis individuals, communities, society in which one lives... Here, via Nick D's interjection, accept serendipity's invitation to reflect upon it again. Much dismay there has been (since, for example, the party sec in 1962 equivocated & lied about Hungary --Ive written that story, must resurrect from moth-eaten mss!) -- but these days 'warts & all' is the sometimes rueful but oftentimes best of smiles I visit upon the world!
*
Olson & that curriculum from '67; cant underestimate the political influence, elicited, imagined, as much as taught-- '67 to '75 contradictory paths, and all the way through to the early '80s when my 'turn' began! Rereading, rethinking the whole shebang... EP Thompson pamphlet re- implications of independent East European Peace Movements, yes I remember that --and the East European & Soviet dissident literature & criticism... A return to the Zen which sits in with the existentialism & etc of early '60s... Incredible to think of such journey or spirals...Haha! impossible encapsulation! So must insert that comment of Lawrence's wch fired me very early on, For God's sake let us be men & not monkeys minding machines! The main dynamic ['crucial contradiction' the axiom as I taught it at CAE many years] is libertarian/individualist alongside social/communitarian... Kerouac's Dean (in On the Road) who excuses himself from the partying discussions for a few hours to go do his job then returns to the real life! That was something of a lifesaver for me, not to be defined by the necessary rent/food job... Ginsberg's 'be kind to yourself' mantra at Dialectics of Liberation conference London 1960s I heard on tape... Nat Tarn turning me on to Nishitani Keiji early '80s (I published his review in my H/EAR mag) was my opening to the Kyoto philosophers & their ancient & modern practice & theory wholly contemporary & present spin! And --this'll get up someone's nose-- G Gentile's remark abt the awful utopian error of 'sugaring the pill' (of the facts of life) --And and and...
oOo
[January 23 /'14]
via Ken Edwards' posting on Alan Burns' death
Takes me back... Mid '60s in Melbourne began following the Calder & Boyars 'stable' of authors with Alan Burns very much at the heart of this new &/or 'experimental' prose --Carol Burns, Anne Quinn, --I'll have to think who else. Back in Southampton '69+ , publishing my own mag Earth Ship (mimeographed of course, '70-'72) wrote to him, solicited a piece, very proud to publish... Sad to hear of his passing... must reread the work... Uppermost in my mind is AFTER THE RAIN...
Philip Salom : He taught for one year at Curtin Uni - 1975? A great shock to that otherwise earnestly conventional system (then). His cut-ups and experiments in class were exciting highlights that long ago. His Europe After the Rain was read with wonder/doubt but read all the same. He also contributed to the 'dark' side in two agreeably interesting ways. He was popular even among the students who wouldn't go along with his provocations. Sad to see (assume) his career didn't grow as I'd imagined it might. UK lit just too conservative.
K H : Calder & Boyars was a life-line for this strand of prose... Of course, British literature not French whose authors we read avidly in the same breath so to speak, C & B publishing Beckett & the nouveau-roman at the same time... 'Just too conservative' like Oz I guess? Though my grumbles of the '60s & '70s have their best place there... Good experiences, grist to the mill happily still turning, grinding!
P S :Yes, like Oz. Or the publishers... At least poetry gets it done - in shakes and shebangs!
K H : And how interesting to have been in his class, Philip...
P S : Aye, it was. He talked about Max Ernst in one class, those rubbings and palimpsests etc, and asked us to take print and images from mags and make collages. One bloke who hated this resisted by ripping up paper and gluing it into a rough-edged ski-slope of cheap print. Burns loved it and praised him over all the rest of us!
K H : Brilliant! Can imagine it! As writer as teacher! Superb!
P S : I liked him a lot, was sad to see him leave. When he left, he did what most teachers at least fantasise when faced with weeks of marking - he gave out marks but took all assignments to the dump and burned them!
K H : Re C&B, as with Editions Minuit, this 'new novel' reflected the publisher the writers had in common as much as a poetics or practice... As a young reader one probably attributed a commonality, and some of that adheres to this day... Your last comment about A B 's penchant for the bonfire is most amusing! Also strikes me as very Zen! Am reminded of an account I read of Bukowski's stint as poetry editor of a mag... you can imagine the time passing and the pile of mss growing... he realizes he has to act and finally, months (years?) down the track he separates the SAEs from the submissions, sets fire to the pile of poems, pisses on it, & places a black deposit in each envelope to return! Zen bastardry!
P S : This tale of burning arrived via a staff member who drove our Burner and our ms to the tip! I thought it was a bloody hoot. Zen, yes, but also Freud - anxiety over the children rising above. I had only written two stories (if that) when I entered his class, knew nothing at all, and only broke into poetry (with Bill Hart-Smith). Alan (giving me high but not v high mark) said I don't know what H-S means (with your extraordinary mark!) but I accept HE knows what he's doing. The nicest back-handed praise. I've thought of him often.
oOo
Off the top of my head about Ikkyu on or about 600th anniversary of the death of his master, Keno
for Bernard H & Robert L
A few days after a conversation about Ikkyu, Robert Lloyd leant me a copy of John Stevens' translations, Wild Ways : Zen Poems of Ikkyu (Shambhala, 1995). We stocked it years ago, perhaps in a different format? Also Stephen Berg's versions of Ikkyu, Crow With No Mouth (1989). I'm enjoying this re-immersion in Ikkyu. Ever tickled by dates I realize this is the 620th anniversary of the year of Ikkyu's birth, and, importantly, the year of the 600th anniversary of the death of Ikkyu's first great influence, Keno, "the Modest Old Man, abbot of Saikinj. Temple of Western Gold." Via Google I found very interesting extract from Perle Besserman & Manfred Steger's book, Zen Radicals, Rebels, and Reformers (Wisdom, 2011). Nothing wrong at all with John Stevens' potted biography, there's just more in the Besserman & Steger.
"Keno's example, and Rinzai's beforehand, exerted such a powerful influence on Ikkyu's mind that he never accepted or gave inka throughout his life as a Zen student or teacher. For the legitimate heir to Rinzai, true Zen meant transmission beyond words, scriptures, or written certificates of enlightenment. And Keno was just such a master --unconventional, uncompromising, strict in his dedication to meditation, with no worldly ambitions whatsoever. Ikkyu spent four years training in the lonely temple of Western Gold [Ikkyu was his only student], until Kano's sudden death put an end to his Zen idyll."
Suicide attempt, the search for a teacher, from Keno to Kaso, & eventual enlightenment --awoken from meditation by "the cawing of a crow in early evening, Ikkyu achieved his great satori. the entire universe became the cawing of the crow..." John Stevens translates the enlightenment verse : "For twenty years I was in turmoil / Seething and angry, but now my time has come! / The crow laughs /, an arhat emerges from the filth, / And in the sunlight a jade beauty sings!"
Writing this as crows are popping up again hereabouts, bringing in Autumn & Winter in Melbourne, reminding me of my feeling for crows. Here are two from The Millennium Poems (1997-2000), contributed to Raffaella Torresan's anthology, Literary Creatures (Hybrid, 2009) :
milkcloud-sky canvas
leafless branches red tin roofs -
artist-crow due now
*
raven on favourite branch
confides to the tree
that as far as friends go
ravens' loyalty outdoes
humans'
trees' imperturbable
where raven's merely proud -
a bunch of people scuttle past -walking trees! scoffs raven -
leaves! exhales the tree
*
Amours, sex, & philosophy in Stevens's Ikkyu but no crows! Lots like this though :
One short pause between
The leaky road here and
The never-leaking Way there:
If it rains, let it rain!
If it storms, let it storm!
*
Sexual love can be so painful when it is deep,
Making you forget even the best prose and poetry.
Yet now I experience a heretofore unknown natural joy,
The delightful sound of the wind soothing my thoughts.
oOo
DOLPHINS
[31-3-14]
A PROPOS BEACH REPORT : DOLPHINS AT ELWOOD BEACH!!!
Amazin', as Tommy Hafey might say... Sitting yesterday, late afternoon, at the Kiosk on the beach, writing abt Dimitris Tsaloumas who swam right here for years, --thinking about that sentiment he expressed in a poem, that the mermaid doesnt swim here anymore, --pollution on his mind but also the degradation or loss of meaning, the loss of significance of classical myth, and probably his own sense of meaning as he turned back to Greece again, --writing about this when I saw dark shapes, fin, disturbance in the sea, and thought 'whale' but then 'dolphins'... And so it was! DOLPHINS, at least three, maybe half a dozen. WONDERFUL! Man with family sitting under brolly beside us leapt to his feet, shouting for people to LOOK! Everyone peering at the dolphins swimming from right (Point Ormond) to left, and then the sunbathers along the beach, standing, looking... I say swimming : the dolphins were jumping, up & under again, --and of course then Ezra Pound in my head, "Came Neptunus, dolphins leaping" --and I felt it was a 'reply' to Tsaloumas... You had to have been there!
oOo
[26-3-14]
Bernard Hemensley's message : "Jack Shoemaker : Alive and Well!...You'll be pleased to know, Kris...re our telephone conversation. Ah! How we enjoyed those yellow-paged paper catalogs from Sand Dollar some 40 years ago!!!"
Yes indeed... very relieved & happy for this news! (For some reason I'd suddenly thought otherwise...)
Hugely deserved award! Another bookseller, publisher. poet! I'll drop him a line!
*
[27-3-14]
[copied from B H's page] Rereading : So the award was made in 2013. Missed it or have forgotten, but thinking of the news today all the sweeter! As you remark about his catalogues, they were like a curriculum; for example, and at random. I've picked out Sand Dollar Books new titles list #23, dated 26 April 1978, --his categories were poetry & fiction; literary magazines; Japanese fiction; Sources & texts. It was the 'sources & texts' wch indicated poetry's reach, if you like, an expansion of the possibility not a single track. For example, from this 'yellow-paged paper' marvel : J Blumenthal's The Printed Book in America (Godine); Alfred Brendel's Musical Thoughts & Afterthoughts (Princeton); Haslam, The Real World of the Surrealists (Rizzoli); Mitchell, Blake's Composite Art (Princeton); A Rich, Of Woman Born (mass p/b); E Weston, Nudes (Aperture).... The most expensive book Jack listed in that catalogue was the Bibliography of the Grabhorn Press 1957-66 & Grabhorn-Hoyen 1966-73, ed R Harlan, printed by Andrew Hoyen, ed of 225 copies; "this supply is already exhausted and we have only one copy left", $250... worth what today? I published a poem sequence by Jack --Magical Mayan Survival Techniques : A Gathering for Michael Palmer-- in my mag The Ear in a Wheatfield, #17, Autumn 1976. My contributor's bio for him goes : "Jack Shoemaker is better known as a bookseller (1205 Solano Avenue, Albany, Cal. 94706) & as a publisher (the excellent Sand Dollar programme). His identification of Australia as the stop beyond Fresno on the American poetry circuit is an indication of his rare perceptions." For 'American', understand 'new poetry' tho I do recall Michael Wilding at the time suggesting that Oz become the next state of the Union & thereby qualify for its subsidies & literary recognitions! Of course, political teasing but a smidgin of the truth of the feeling of the time!
*
[B H on his own page] : "Yes, wonderful catalogs to complement what came thru via Nick Kimberley at Compendium and then his Duck Soup etc. What i obtained from Jack were lots of rare books (now) = titles by Bukowski, Enslin, Eigner, Creeley and Dawson. i would receive special lists of the titles available and order = Well-paid social-worker at the time! Of course, it was Jack Shoemaker's MAYA QUARTO chapbooks which caught the imagination for me when i started Stingy Artist publications in 1978....and the first one was!!! = Montale's Typos by KH!!!"
oOo
[March 26/'14]
Thanks for the link, Kent MacCarter...[http://cordite.org.au/essays/nativism-and-the-interlocutor/] I remember all of this from when it occurred... the controversy surrounding John Mateer's poem for and about the Noongar warrior Yagen... Reading the 'Nativism..' essay I'm struck by John's split or double characterizations as also last night at his excellent reading at Collected Works Bookshop... I'm moved by John's investment in the Poet which is both the simple & the imaginative figure, sincerely bearing the existential burden... Seemed very strongly to me that Mateer's poetry is the act which precedes politics (even its own). Felt, thought, expressed, and as I would say, warts & all. The alternatives are of diplomacy & politics; decorums which are not essentially poetry, that is Poetry, the parallel dimension where The Poet might exist... Part of that parallel dimension is Storyteller, --contemporary lyric poet become or returned as storyteller. Different subtleties, different transparencies... Asking me about the 'few words' of my introduction to John's reading last night, Fiona Hile wondered if it was 'off the top of my head'. Yes, sort of! Off the top of my head, but I wrote the words down, I joked! Like I do here --which always feels like someone else thinking through me (however straightforward); off the top of my head, thinking with my pen... No obfuscation in John Mateer's dreams of the world; to reiterate, he is bearing the existential burden --dreams of the parallel worlds... 'next life' always this life, which is where I meet him...
oOo
[March 23/'14]
IN BETWEEN THE BEACH REPORTS
Quoting from what might be the last of the series, several not yet posted, --in this piece I'm discussing Fielding Dawson :
(......) I abjure saying 'one dimensionality' --he was a collagist damn it! --not only the frisson of the cut & paste but the curious images & strange feelings emerging between the rough cut edges, flickering like revelations but for the understandings thereof, & like shadows, Jung & all, --because the whole truth of the matter's what's at stake, otherwise odious conformity, dissembling that negates the particular in favour of at all times politically correct cypher --which Fielding Dawson never was. His greatest value surely candour about personal relations, its powerful resonance founded on fine ear & fluent speaking style... And he wrote this --first words of his I ever read, published by the late, lamented Andrew Crozier as a beguiling, black-covered Ferry Press booklet, THREAD, which begins, "I have green eyes, I sit at the table nervously listening to them I am watching myself listening and looking I am telling myself to pay attention, see and listen and not see and listen, my hair is a little grey, a woman walks in me, she pays no heed, I sit there and listen and look, I am myself(....)" --I was hooked, riveted -- "a woman walks in me" spoke to me of floating gender, a poetic life's polymorphous potential... I set it as an exercise in the Adult Education classes I taught in Melbourne, mid '70s, the phrase as is for the men, the reverse for the women ("a man walks in me"). It seemed always to open things up --themselves, the class, their writing...
Apropos here a reference to Fielding Dawson in letter from Larry Eigner, written Sunday, Feb 16, '75, included in the pamphlet AH ! published as # 15 of my mag, The Ear in a Wheatfield (August, '75). In the letter Larry describes what he's read of issue #9 of The Ear : "(....) AE Coppard stories on Masterpiece Theatre these last two Sundays [and Dawson's story is after Coppard]. I never got to a Dawson story much, following it and taking it in (a lot here for years unlooked at) til last night when I read "The Man Who Changed Overnight" before watching "Boy", 6th in a series of Japanese films with Ed O Reischauer (et al) commenting. Eye-openers, quite a lot. That Dawson hits very substantially (H James, G Stein, Creeley, Dawson...) --the vivid mix of experience. (.....)"
oOo
[January 23/'14]
Thank you for this, Nick Dryenfurth [Norman Geras: an obituary; http://overland.org.au/2013/10/norman-geras-an-obituary/
... The obituary went through to the keeper, as they say, so it's opportune to reconnect here...
N D : "It's now 4 months since the great Norm Geras was taken from us all too early. I miss his blog everyday. Reading over his many obits I was struck by the ungenerous offering of Overland. In this fantasy Trotskyite world of the Sparrow-ites Norm's ethical and morally-grounded politics is utterly disconnected from his Jewishness. Indeed, the author cannot bear to call him a Jew at all. In a word: shameful."
Re- 'ungenerous' : relates for me to what Ive thought about for many years as 'humility before the fact' versus a variety of 'vanity'... I understand Philip Mendes' reading of Geras (above) within that perspective... Best wishes to you & all who sail with you!
*
From the Guardian [UK]'s obit last October, this summary does for me : "From his perspective, the response to the events of 11 September 2001 was appalling. He found the readiness of many to blame the US for bringing the terrorist attack down on its own head to be intellectually feeble and morally contemptible. He argued that this section of the left was betraying its own values by offering warm understanding to terrorists and cold neglect to their victims. He detested the drawing of an unsupported and insupportable moral equivalence between western democracies and real or proposed theocratic tyrannies in which liberty of thought and speech, and the protection of human rights, would play no part. Norm wanted to engage in this debate and not just with academics. So he went online, to provide himself with a space in which he could express these and other views, and Normblog was born."
*
The name 'Normblog' rings a bell now but I'd never followed it... These notes & comments, conversations, encounters, are all occasions within a journey; opportunities for clarity, knowing oneself better, as clean & bare as one can be... Romantic anarchist & communist beginnings, mixed with art & literature & poetry's education, mixing DHL & Miller & Durrell & all & the cavalcade of existentialists, surrealists, dadaists, Beats, --and that's just into my 20s!!! ---45 + years since then --and the examination continues as it must vis a vis individuals, communities, society in which one lives... Here, via Nick D's interjection, accept serendipity's invitation to reflect upon it again. Much dismay there has been (since, for example, the party sec in 1962 equivocated & lied about Hungary --Ive written that story, must resurrect from moth-eaten mss!) -- but these days 'warts & all' is the sometimes rueful but oftentimes best of smiles I visit upon the world!
*
Olson & that curriculum from '67; cant underestimate the political influence, elicited, imagined, as much as taught-- '67 to '75 contradictory paths, and all the way through to the early '80s when my 'turn' began! Rereading, rethinking the whole shebang... EP Thompson pamphlet re- implications of independent East European Peace Movements, yes I remember that --and the East European & Soviet dissident literature & criticism... A return to the Zen which sits in with the existentialism & etc of early '60s... Incredible to think of such journey or spirals...Haha! impossible encapsulation! So must insert that comment of Lawrence's wch fired me very early on, For God's sake let us be men & not monkeys minding machines! The main dynamic ['crucial contradiction' the axiom as I taught it at CAE many years] is libertarian/individualist alongside social/communitarian... Kerouac's Dean (in On the Road) who excuses himself from the partying discussions for a few hours to go do his job then returns to the real life! That was something of a lifesaver for me, not to be defined by the necessary rent/food job... Ginsberg's 'be kind to yourself' mantra at Dialectics of Liberation conference London 1960s I heard on tape... Nat Tarn turning me on to Nishitani Keiji early '80s (I published his review in my H/EAR mag) was my opening to the Kyoto philosophers & their ancient & modern practice & theory wholly contemporary & present spin! And --this'll get up someone's nose-- G Gentile's remark abt the awful utopian error of 'sugaring the pill' (of the facts of life) --And and and...
oOo
[January 23 /'14]
via Ken Edwards' posting on Alan Burns' death
Takes me back... Mid '60s in Melbourne began following the Calder & Boyars 'stable' of authors with Alan Burns very much at the heart of this new &/or 'experimental' prose --Carol Burns, Anne Quinn, --I'll have to think who else. Back in Southampton '69+ , publishing my own mag Earth Ship (mimeographed of course, '70-'72) wrote to him, solicited a piece, very proud to publish... Sad to hear of his passing... must reread the work... Uppermost in my mind is AFTER THE RAIN...
Philip Salom : He taught for one year at Curtin Uni - 1975? A great shock to that otherwise earnestly conventional system (then). His cut-ups and experiments in class were exciting highlights that long ago. His Europe After the Rain was read with wonder/doubt but read all the same. He also contributed to the 'dark' side in two agreeably interesting ways. He was popular even among the students who wouldn't go along with his provocations. Sad to see (assume) his career didn't grow as I'd imagined it might. UK lit just too conservative.
K H : Calder & Boyars was a life-line for this strand of prose... Of course, British literature not French whose authors we read avidly in the same breath so to speak, C & B publishing Beckett & the nouveau-roman at the same time... 'Just too conservative' like Oz I guess? Though my grumbles of the '60s & '70s have their best place there... Good experiences, grist to the mill happily still turning, grinding!
P S :Yes, like Oz. Or the publishers... At least poetry gets it done - in shakes and shebangs!
K H : And how interesting to have been in his class, Philip...
P S : Aye, it was. He talked about Max Ernst in one class, those rubbings and palimpsests etc, and asked us to take print and images from mags and make collages. One bloke who hated this resisted by ripping up paper and gluing it into a rough-edged ski-slope of cheap print. Burns loved it and praised him over all the rest of us!
K H : Brilliant! Can imagine it! As writer as teacher! Superb!
P S : I liked him a lot, was sad to see him leave. When he left, he did what most teachers at least fantasise when faced with weeks of marking - he gave out marks but took all assignments to the dump and burned them!
K H : Re C&B, as with Editions Minuit, this 'new novel' reflected the publisher the writers had in common as much as a poetics or practice... As a young reader one probably attributed a commonality, and some of that adheres to this day... Your last comment about A B 's penchant for the bonfire is most amusing! Also strikes me as very Zen! Am reminded of an account I read of Bukowski's stint as poetry editor of a mag... you can imagine the time passing and the pile of mss growing... he realizes he has to act and finally, months (years?) down the track he separates the SAEs from the submissions, sets fire to the pile of poems, pisses on it, & places a black deposit in each envelope to return! Zen bastardry!
P S : This tale of burning arrived via a staff member who drove our Burner and our ms to the tip! I thought it was a bloody hoot. Zen, yes, but also Freud - anxiety over the children rising above. I had only written two stories (if that) when I entered his class, knew nothing at all, and only broke into poetry (with Bill Hart-Smith). Alan (giving me high but not v high mark) said I don't know what H-S means (with your extraordinary mark!) but I accept HE knows what he's doing. The nicest back-handed praise. I've thought of him often.
oOo
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
ADDENDUM TO "REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST"
REGARDING MICHAEL HASLAM
Serendipity, then, in lieu of claiming it for the dream it all seems to be (even synchronicity, which depends upon the perceiver & perception's right place & time), that Vera Di Campli San Vito should place in my hands, at the Bookshop, copies of Poetry Review (London), amongst which pile were vol. 92, #2,Summer'02, containing Michael Haslam's statement on poetry (his reply, alongside Kathleen Jamie's & Kenneth Koch's, to the question, "Which poet, or poets, provide the measure against which you judge your writing?"), & vol.92, #4, Winter '02/3 his 10 page sequence, THE HIGH ROAD BROWN and The Soft Dethroned, --serendipitous because he was reoccurring to me just then as significant to the discussion I'd mooted in my review of American Hybrid (ed Swensen & St John, Norton, '09), viz, "how does British sing-song inheritance come through to the contemporary, & the postmodern contemporary at that?" : triggered by reading Martin Corless-Smith who'd brought to mind Nicholas Johnson & a tweet of Douglas Oliver --but Mike Haslam, unmentioned, was momentously adjacent! : -- "Witness, how a being's thought is like his being thought / arising slowly as an heron from the heron shaw - / arose, a marvel not unusual, aloft." (Like an Ivor Hitchens painting, where expression & depiction perform each other's tricks at no cost to beauty or sincerity...)
And a chap asked, as they do, innocent at the broad shelf, What do you think of Shakespeare (meaning I think, what's a poet of today's take on him given readers are all at sea with modern poetry?) Surprised him, I think, with my terse reply : Shakespeare is the language, isnt he? Of course there's the Anglo-Saxon, Chaucer et al, but for me, as a poet, it was Shakespeare : my writing issued from that language, and out of everything so derived...
All this been & gone and my head down again in the quiet of the room when I flicked through the magazine and found the questionnaire. Astonishingly, Michael Haslam's response was like an extension of the conversation in the Shop. Straightaway : "Shakespeare, in As You Like It, has Audrey ask Touchstone what poetical is, "is it honest in deed and word, is it a true thing?" Touchstone replies, "No, truly : for the truest poetry is the most feigning." And this I'd take for my measure : a technique of feigning, as much as the poet in person, in regard to poetical truth (....) Let me cut my own guff, then, and name my measure : Shakespeare."
Haslam, the gentle dialectician, confesses, "I've seen myself suffer the megalomaniac delusion that I'm, almost singlehandedly, charged with the conservation and transmission of an essential technique of English poetry, but it takes a Fool to compare himself to Shakespeare, and I had to laugh out loud (...)Imagine my (fairly incompetent) Genius told me : Look up Touchstone, and the feigning thing -- The Clown is your personal measure, but he's just one aspect -- Remember Jacques, remember Rosalind, remember Everything --"
Aside (dramatist's permission) : 'remember' means 'know', and no difference between knowing & imagining. This 'self', the doting 'I' (dotty, but follow me) is attracted to subject as well as imposing upon it --that is, it's found in subject without necessarily articulating intention and recalls it as what was always owned.
Patently there's a connection between sound & place, and this plays out as anxiety for me in recent years (ironically, the years I returned, happily, to poetry after the avant garde cul-de-sac) : the sound of the poem amplifies the precariousness of the expat ('where am i?')...
Haslam's place is where he does his wondering/wandering. He goes against Pound/Olson political geography --that is, poem as map which contains maps, a world which contains the world. Not that he isnt referential or associative --he is, but his poetry's fundamentally phenomenological not epistemological. Like Hopkins, the place is experienced in its music (the sound of the words). So too WS Graham, Dylan Thomas, Bunting, Yeats, all the way to Shakespeare : song, song, "continual song"...
Thus Michael Haslam's major work, after the Welsh Triad he explains, which says "there were three places in Britain where monks, time out of mind, took shifts to sing praise for Creation, round the clock (at Bangor-Is-Coed, Caer Caradoc, and Glastonbury). In a notion of that spirit, I had tried to make my book continual, by supposing the book could be read round in circles (...) Poetry is music, but, at its most musical, cannot be sounded. I can write, but can't sound, a chord of three meanings, three tones of voice at once. I can only imagine spirit ditties, polysemous pipes in multiple forms, of alchemy, and alcohol, and alkathene. I'll worship Dick or Gob, and drink and think in peace how Life is Good." [Haslam's website, www.continualesong.com]
According to Michael Haslam's website, he's attempting to assemble his life's works but not sure he has any more to write. Selfishly, I hope the opposite occurs.
Michael Haslam (b. 1947)'s major books are CONTINUAL SONG (Open Township, West Yorks, Uk, 1986), A WHOLE BAUBLE : Collected Poems, 1977-1994 (Carcanet,UK, 1995), MID LIFE, Poetry 1980-2000 (Shearsman, UK, 2007).
----------------
Kris Hemensley,
November 1st/3rd, 2009
-finished Melbourne Cup Day-
Serendipity, then, in lieu of claiming it for the dream it all seems to be (even synchronicity, which depends upon the perceiver & perception's right place & time), that Vera Di Campli San Vito should place in my hands, at the Bookshop, copies of Poetry Review (London), amongst which pile were vol. 92, #2,Summer'02, containing Michael Haslam's statement on poetry (his reply, alongside Kathleen Jamie's & Kenneth Koch's, to the question, "Which poet, or poets, provide the measure against which you judge your writing?"), & vol.92, #4, Winter '02/3 his 10 page sequence, THE HIGH ROAD BROWN and The Soft Dethroned, --serendipitous because he was reoccurring to me just then as significant to the discussion I'd mooted in my review of American Hybrid (ed Swensen & St John, Norton, '09), viz, "how does British sing-song inheritance come through to the contemporary, & the postmodern contemporary at that?" : triggered by reading Martin Corless-Smith who'd brought to mind Nicholas Johnson & a tweet of Douglas Oliver --but Mike Haslam, unmentioned, was momentously adjacent! : -- "Witness, how a being's thought is like his being thought / arising slowly as an heron from the heron shaw - / arose, a marvel not unusual, aloft." (Like an Ivor Hitchens painting, where expression & depiction perform each other's tricks at no cost to beauty or sincerity...)
And a chap asked, as they do, innocent at the broad shelf, What do you think of Shakespeare (meaning I think, what's a poet of today's take on him given readers are all at sea with modern poetry?) Surprised him, I think, with my terse reply : Shakespeare is the language, isnt he? Of course there's the Anglo-Saxon, Chaucer et al, but for me, as a poet, it was Shakespeare : my writing issued from that language, and out of everything so derived...
All this been & gone and my head down again in the quiet of the room when I flicked through the magazine and found the questionnaire. Astonishingly, Michael Haslam's response was like an extension of the conversation in the Shop. Straightaway : "Shakespeare, in As You Like It, has Audrey ask Touchstone what poetical is, "is it honest in deed and word, is it a true thing?" Touchstone replies, "No, truly : for the truest poetry is the most feigning." And this I'd take for my measure : a technique of feigning, as much as the poet in person, in regard to poetical truth (....) Let me cut my own guff, then, and name my measure : Shakespeare."
Haslam, the gentle dialectician, confesses, "I've seen myself suffer the megalomaniac delusion that I'm, almost singlehandedly, charged with the conservation and transmission of an essential technique of English poetry, but it takes a Fool to compare himself to Shakespeare, and I had to laugh out loud (...)Imagine my (fairly incompetent) Genius told me : Look up Touchstone, and the feigning thing -- The Clown is your personal measure, but he's just one aspect -- Remember Jacques, remember Rosalind, remember Everything --"
Aside (dramatist's permission) : 'remember' means 'know', and no difference between knowing & imagining. This 'self', the doting 'I' (dotty, but follow me) is attracted to subject as well as imposing upon it --that is, it's found in subject without necessarily articulating intention and recalls it as what was always owned.
Patently there's a connection between sound & place, and this plays out as anxiety for me in recent years (ironically, the years I returned, happily, to poetry after the avant garde cul-de-sac) : the sound of the poem amplifies the precariousness of the expat ('where am i?')...
Haslam's place is where he does his wondering/wandering. He goes against Pound/Olson political geography --that is, poem as map which contains maps, a world which contains the world. Not that he isnt referential or associative --he is, but his poetry's fundamentally phenomenological not epistemological. Like Hopkins, the place is experienced in its music (the sound of the words). So too WS Graham, Dylan Thomas, Bunting, Yeats, all the way to Shakespeare : song, song, "continual song"...
Thus Michael Haslam's major work, after the Welsh Triad he explains, which says "there were three places in Britain where monks, time out of mind, took shifts to sing praise for Creation, round the clock (at Bangor-Is-Coed, Caer Caradoc, and Glastonbury). In a notion of that spirit, I had tried to make my book continual, by supposing the book could be read round in circles (...) Poetry is music, but, at its most musical, cannot be sounded. I can write, but can't sound, a chord of three meanings, three tones of voice at once. I can only imagine spirit ditties, polysemous pipes in multiple forms, of alchemy, and alcohol, and alkathene. I'll worship Dick or Gob, and drink and think in peace how Life is Good." [Haslam's website, www.continualesong.com]
According to Michael Haslam's website, he's attempting to assemble his life's works but not sure he has any more to write. Selfishly, I hope the opposite occurs.
Michael Haslam (b. 1947)'s major books are CONTINUAL SONG (Open Township, West Yorks, Uk, 1986), A WHOLE BAUBLE : Collected Poems, 1977-1994 (Carcanet,UK, 1995), MID LIFE, Poetry 1980-2000 (Shearsman, UK, 2007).
----------------
Kris Hemensley,
November 1st/3rd, 2009
-finished Melbourne Cup Day-
Sunday, June 17, 2007
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, #7
Melbourne, May 9-12,'07
Dear Bernard, My month came & went --April "with his schowres sweete" etc., "Thanne longen folk to gon on pilgrimages" as Chaucer says --but Taurus, my constellation, has a little way to go yet. English Spring, or how it used to be pre-Climate Change, and Melbourne Autumn have some similarities. The sunshine in the backgarden, where I sat for an hour before the breeze sent me back indoors, is blissful after the burn of Summer, just like sunshine in England after Winter cold.
I'm rereading that part of TDB before Ray's stint with the Fire service --when the trio have returned from their first trip. Japhy & Smith have been joined by Alvah (Ginsberg) & Coughlin (Philip Whalen) for talk & wine. Coughlin urges his fellow devotee recite the Buddhist stories. They're drinking and Japhy, inspired, lays down his vision, the vision, his social programme if you like. And it truly is the vision of our time, you & me in the middle of it.
'"Give me another slug of that jug. How! Ho! Hoo!' Japhy leaping up : 'I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard, the Zen lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refridgerators, tv sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deoderants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em zen lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...'" (pp76-77)
The argument, of course, is between those who do & do not "subscribe to the general demand". If there were millions of "rucksack revolutionaries" (and maybe there were, from the Sixties to the present?) would the general condition have been transformed? Japhy's wish for "a floating zendo, where an old Bodhisattva can wander from place to place and always be sure to find a spot to sleep in among friends and cook up mush" (p77) is closer to the reality I suspect. Thus the Counter Culture : alternative societies within the general subscription society. So Japhy's the social revolutionary and Smith sympathizes but contributes the compassion (as the good conservative should) : "Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye : they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of the One Eye. But neither was Japhy..." (p82)
Smith's narrative swings harmoniously between Zen Lunatics on their dharma bum and the world as it is (as it always was and will be). Recall the start of chapter (actually, more like rave or riff) 24, p125 : "If the Dharma Bums ever get lay brothers in America who live normal lives with wives and children and homes, they will be like Sean Monahan [Locke McCorkle in real life](...) a young carpenter who lived in an old wooden house far up a country road from the huddled cottages of Corte Madera(...)[living] the joyous life in America without much money(...)" (Kerouac's sexism reflects that time's conventional paradigm; women were part of the equation then but generally lacked their narrators. Impossible not to think of men & women now since the upheaval of the Sixties & the Feminism of the Seventies. "Lay brothers & sisters" everywhere...) Who would have believed, though, that in the West, in our time, Buddhism, for one example of an alternative perspective, would become mainstream?
The closing paragraph of the book has Ray offering a prayer to his fire-watching mountain-shack before he "turned and went on down the trail back to this world." Where we are --having our cake and eating it too! --in this world.
*
A NOTE ON THE HAN SHAN ANALOGY
(14/3/07) The Governor's sketch of Han Shan & Shih-te, laughing loudly, Ho! & Ha-ha! (in Snyder's preface to Cold Mountain Poems) is the template for Kerouac's TDB. All there in the ancient Chinese pair's fleeing society the moment freedom was felt to be threatened --hiding in the mountains, disappearing into the cave of the remotest world as well as the world at large) --exactly how Japhy & Ray Smith are meant to be in the novel. Hoo! shouts Japhy. Ray adopts the exclamation. "Hoo" announces & punctuates --the glee of being in the world. The scholarship, the wandering, the drinking & partying , the confrontation with ultimate questions in the silence of the mountains --Japhy as Han Shan, Smith as Shih-te. Plain as plain can be!
Yet although Smith/Kerouac could imagine himself the senior partner, especially as Americana Catholicism brushes off that old Dharma --echo of Alvah earlier in the book, dismissing what real-life Ginsberg will clasp full-on in years to come --it's a conceit. More likely the older amigo's life-experience inflecting whatever can be said of Mahayanna versus Zen for example. Undoubtedly, in terms of Buddhist story rather than natural mysticism, Japhy appears to be Smith's master in the book.
*
A NOTE ON ARTHUR WALEY
(19/3/07) Pound's superiority as translator according to Hugh Kenner, introducing the Collected Translations, is the ability to transpose his own voice upon the ancient text : "Pound after twenty-four centuries lends Confucius his voice." Indeed --and that is the signature of our time. Yet what emerges as a danger after only a few decades of the Poundian influence is the flattening of topical langauge (that is, of expression specific to its time) in favour of what is recognizably "our own". No historical personality, simply our own reflection. The example Kenner offers to advantage Pound over Waley sems to me defficient if only for one crucial word, namely the "way". Referring to the way, Pound reports : "He said : The way out is via the door, how is it that no one will use this method." Method? What happened to The Way, one of the world's most poetic cosmologies? Method? The word reeks of the mechanical, the systematic, the utilitarian. Who couldnt prefer Waley then : "The Master said, who expects to be able to go out of a house except by the door? How is it then no one follows this Way of ours?"
Kenner's put-down requires him to caricature : "Arthur Waley sensed a sage embroidered on tapestry expounding the Way." After reading John Walter de Gruchy's Orienting Arthur Waley : Japanism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English (Hawaii,'03), I think I sense the Modernist reflex against the aestheticism of the late 19thCentury & Bloomsbury in Kenner's representation. And I naturally hope it isnt also bullish sneer at whatever's less than red-blooded vernacular --queer & Jewish, look out!
De Gruchy's contrast of Waley's criticism of Japan, informed by superior scholarship & linguistic acumen, with the Japonism of so many Western literati between the World Wars, is salutary. How blinded one can be by partisan enthusiasm in poetry as in politics, and be led past the pretty flowers sure enough but ultimately right up the garden path!
This isnt a belated denigration of Modernism --our times' great adventure after all --but merely a questioning of some of its idiom & its disguised prejudices. Thanks to de Gruchy, Waley's back on my desk, squarely, as are (wait for it!) Laurence Binyon & other earlier translators so temptingly cited!
*
(8/5/07) Re- the revised/expanded edition of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon, 2000), I enjoyed the confirmation contained in Bill Porter (Red Pine)'s introduction : "If China's literary critics were put in charge of organizing a tea for their country's greatest poets of the past, Cold Mountain [Han Shan] would not be on many invitation lists. Yet no other poet occupies the altars of China's temples and shrines, where his statue often stands alongside immortals and bodhisattvas. He is equally revered in Korea and Japan. And when Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him in 1958, Cold Mountain became the guardian angel of a generation of Westerners as well."
John Blofeld's description, in his introduction, of the Taoist feeling for & about life is surely written with a wide grin --it tickles my heart as I read. The relational people most of us are, living in the pragmatic world as we do, arent entirely lost when we're charmed by truths & tropes of the absolute! "You are going to give me a 32-course (plus side-dishes) Chinese banquet? Thanks, I'll enjoy that. We have only a bowl or two of inferior-quality boiled rice for dinner? That will go down very nicely. We have nothing on which to dine? Splendid, we shall have more time to sit outside and enjoy the moonlight, with music provided by the wind in the pines."
(9/5/07) I'm rereading, after many years, David Young's Five T'ang Poets (Oberlin/Field, 1990), especially his little introductions to each poet (Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-Yin) which describe their lives and discusses the rationale of the translation within the context of the history of each poet's translation. His courtesy is gratifying. Distinguishing "accuracy and scholarship" from poetry in his criticism of another anthology and promising to "rescue my four poets [five in the 2nd edition] from the often wooden & dogged versions of the scholars", Young hopes he might "take my place with other poets -- Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder, in particular, along with Arthur Waley, the scholar who translated like a poet -- who have worked in Chinese translation."
A nonsense to talk of rehabilitation with respect to Waley but necessary --and I'm regailing myself as much as anyone else --to maintain the whole field of reference against the distractions of fashion.
*
(15/5/07) Regarding your closing remark, "But the spirit is there". I'm sure that it is. When mobility has been restricted, as it actually has for you, then spirit is almost everything. It would be trivialising for me to say that "everyone's restricted" in the face of your circumscription. But you are the Abbot of Goldy, you have your library of literature, poetry, philosophy not to mention your music collection. You have the run of the kitchen and you must know your Radipole & Chafey's walks like their official warden (or poet)! Thing is to sow the seed, grow the dream, keep your spirits up!
Love, Kris
*
Weymouth / England
May 2007
Dear Kris, I'm anticipating a letter from you soon. Your last got to me in four days. That's some speedy snail! I still prefer this form. No PC, e-mail, etc, for me thus far. I've said it before --I'm not convinced -- which irked you. But maybe I'll go electronic sometime. Anyway, there's no substitute for the books you consistently send. Keep 'em coming.
Talking of which, Zaza [Monique, sister] visited and brought me a couple of presents today (13th May) -- a jar of amazake (made from millet, which I prefer to the brown rice variety) and a book from Waterstone's bookshop in Dorchester. She said she just had to buy it for me. Whilst looking for something else she saw Poems of Thomas Hardy (selected and introduced by Claire Tomalin, Hardy's biographer). I was very pleased to receive it. Do you know it's the first book of his poems that I've ever had in my possession? I've been meaning to get into Hardy since I moved to Dorset twenty-two years ago. Maybe now I'll make a start. But he's not thus far moved me the way the Powyses have. And he's not moved me the way Kerouac and TDB etc has. But he is someone with whom I'd like to feel more at home. By the way, printed on the bag in which the Hardy book came was a quote from Hemingway -- "There is no friend as loyal as a book!" And books sure are amongst my best friends.
*
Re- Dogen / Shobogenzo
"People have sometimes regarded 'Uji' as his unique discourse on the theory of time. Theory of time, my foot! It is his trying to explain reality in a way that people could understand. As Koho Zenji said to me, Dogen was no more interested in time, as such, than the next man. He was trying to point out that everything which is present is part of a flow, and everything which is in the future is part of a flow. And, he was telling us not to get caught up in periods of time, not to get caught up in appearances, not to get caught up in anything -- just be one with the flow that comprises all of existence."
This is what Jiyu Kennett says in Roar of the Tigress, vol 2. She goes on to say that unless you discover this for yourself you'll have a hard time understanding what Dogen is going on about. It was a great relief for me to read this as I was teetering on the brink of giving Dogen a wide berth, giving up on him. But I'm restored.
*
I bought a beaut of a book recently on handbuilt shelters called Home Work, by Lloyd Kahn. It's published by his own press, Shelter Publications, out of Bolinas, California. And I was most pleased to see in it the house of one of his neighbours -- you'll be delighted as well -- Joanne Kyger. Them Dharma Bums and their friends and neighbours get everywhere dont they? Kahn writes -- "Joanne Kyger is my neighbour, a poet, and an elegant lady. Her house, an old cottage she bought in 1970, reflects her travels to various parts of the world and has a wonderful feeling inside. Everywhere you look are things of beauty : a Tibetan tanka, a Balinese painted calendar, lots of paintings, dozens of baskets, healthy green plants, Japanese vases and laquered plates. There's a mirror from Guatemala, the smell of incense, and a book-shelf with hundreds of books. The old water-stained shingles on the roof show through in the living room, and there's a woodstove for heat."
Is that a bit like your cottage in Melbourne? Poet's hideaway? Tin roof. Bookshelves and paintings. Taoist/Zen Lunatic's retreat? We need such places.
Home Work contains "100 photos and over 300 drawings, all illustrating buildings assembled with human hands -- a Japanese-style stilt house accessible only by going on a cable 500 feet across a river; tree houses, bottle houses, bamboo, yurts etc." Fantastic. A book to get me thinking and dreaming. As I said -- books are amongst my best friends! And these places are what you mention in your last letter (20th May) -- Japhy's "floating zendo".
Pleased that your letter came eventually and at the same time as the Five T'ang Poets which you sent separately. Two packets on the same day. It beats anything by contemporary poets I might read. This is what does it for me. Thanks so very much. I enjoyed Clive Faust's poems you photocopied for me, one for Cid Corman and one for Philip Whalen. Exemplary construction. And of course I appreciated the cutting from The Age on Bill Mollison.
I don't have the new edition of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, but I do have three copies of the original first edition (1983). I will get the new one, complete with photos. I must mention David Budbill whom Copper Canyon publishes -- an American modern-day equivalent of our favourite T'ang poets. The New York Times Book Review said, "When Budbill's on his mountain, he longs for the city, and vice versa. Fame, wealth, and sex are false gods, he insists, but he hastens to add that he still, at times, craves all three. These are not new ideas -- a list of references in the book shows how strongly he's influenced by the classical Chinese poets -- but they find fresh expression here, thanks to Budbill's good humour and gusto. " (Copper Canyon 2006-07, Fall/Winter catalogue.)
*
(25th May) I have just two books bedside at present -- Five T'ang Poets and The way of a Pilgrim. I've taken to reading them aloud to mama. Poor thing, she's not at all well and rests and sleeps a lot. But I try to keep her interest alive by reading to her. Kerouac would've loved the latter (as well as the T'ang poets of course). He did have his Bible which he read -- "I took out the Bible and read a little Saint Paul by the warm stove and the light of the tree. 'Let him become a fool, that he may become wise,' and I thought of dear Japhy and wished he was enjoying the Christmas eve with me. 'Already are ye filled,' says Saint Paul, 'already are ye become rich. The saints shall judge the world.'" (TDB, p99.) Yup, Ray Smith would've loved The Way of a Pilgrim -- the Pilgrim is a sort of Dharma Bum.
Christian? Buddhist? Buddhist and Christian? Ray has doubts but ultimately transcends everything. "Then suddenly one night after supper as I was pacing in the cold windy darkness of the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the ground and cried 'I'm gonna die!' because there was nothing else to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh inhospitable earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like milk in my eyelids and I was warm. And I realized that this was the truth Rosie knew now, and all the dead, my dead father and dead brother and dead uncles and cousins and aunts, the truth that is realizable in a dead man's bones and is beyond the Tree of Buddha as well as the Cross of Jesus. Believe that the world is an etherial flower, and ye live. I knew that I also knew that I was the worst bum in the world. The diamond light was in my eyes." (TDB, p100.)
*
Thich Nhat Hanh is very keen on practicing with both traditions, Christian and Buddhist -- "(...) parents should encourage their children to have two roots and to have both the Buddha and Jesus within their life. Why not? (...) It is just like cooking. If you love French cooking, it does not mean that you are forbidden to love Chinese cooking (...) You love the apple, yes, you are authorised to love the apple, but no one prevents you from also loving the mango." (Going Home : Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, Riverhead,1999; p202.)
Me? I've got plenty of time for all of it. Everything. Multitrack. Not single track!
Love, Bernard
I'm rereading that part of TDB before Ray's stint with the Fire service --when the trio have returned from their first trip. Japhy & Smith have been joined by Alvah (Ginsberg) & Coughlin (Philip Whalen) for talk & wine. Coughlin urges his fellow devotee recite the Buddhist stories. They're drinking and Japhy, inspired, lays down his vision, the vision, his social programme if you like. And it truly is the vision of our time, you & me in the middle of it.
'"Give me another slug of that jug. How! Ho! Hoo!' Japhy leaping up : 'I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard, the Zen lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refridgerators, tv sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deoderants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em zen lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...'" (pp76-77)
The argument, of course, is between those who do & do not "subscribe to the general demand". If there were millions of "rucksack revolutionaries" (and maybe there were, from the Sixties to the present?) would the general condition have been transformed? Japhy's wish for "a floating zendo, where an old Bodhisattva can wander from place to place and always be sure to find a spot to sleep in among friends and cook up mush" (p77) is closer to the reality I suspect. Thus the Counter Culture : alternative societies within the general subscription society. So Japhy's the social revolutionary and Smith sympathizes but contributes the compassion (as the good conservative should) : "Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye : they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of the One Eye. But neither was Japhy..." (p82)
Smith's narrative swings harmoniously between Zen Lunatics on their dharma bum and the world as it is (as it always was and will be). Recall the start of chapter (actually, more like rave or riff) 24, p125 : "If the Dharma Bums ever get lay brothers in America who live normal lives with wives and children and homes, they will be like Sean Monahan [Locke McCorkle in real life](...) a young carpenter who lived in an old wooden house far up a country road from the huddled cottages of Corte Madera(...)[living] the joyous life in America without much money(...)" (Kerouac's sexism reflects that time's conventional paradigm; women were part of the equation then but generally lacked their narrators. Impossible not to think of men & women now since the upheaval of the Sixties & the Feminism of the Seventies. "Lay brothers & sisters" everywhere...) Who would have believed, though, that in the West, in our time, Buddhism, for one example of an alternative perspective, would become mainstream?
The closing paragraph of the book has Ray offering a prayer to his fire-watching mountain-shack before he "turned and went on down the trail back to this world." Where we are --having our cake and eating it too! --in this world.
*
A NOTE ON THE HAN SHAN ANALOGY
(14/3/07) The Governor's sketch of Han Shan & Shih-te, laughing loudly, Ho! & Ha-ha! (in Snyder's preface to Cold Mountain Poems) is the template for Kerouac's TDB. All there in the ancient Chinese pair's fleeing society the moment freedom was felt to be threatened --hiding in the mountains, disappearing into the cave of the remotest world as well as the world at large) --exactly how Japhy & Ray Smith are meant to be in the novel. Hoo! shouts Japhy. Ray adopts the exclamation. "Hoo" announces & punctuates --the glee of being in the world. The scholarship, the wandering, the drinking & partying , the confrontation with ultimate questions in the silence of the mountains --Japhy as Han Shan, Smith as Shih-te. Plain as plain can be!
Yet although Smith/Kerouac could imagine himself the senior partner, especially as Americana Catholicism brushes off that old Dharma --echo of Alvah earlier in the book, dismissing what real-life Ginsberg will clasp full-on in years to come --it's a conceit. More likely the older amigo's life-experience inflecting whatever can be said of Mahayanna versus Zen for example. Undoubtedly, in terms of Buddhist story rather than natural mysticism, Japhy appears to be Smith's master in the book.
*
A NOTE ON ARTHUR WALEY
(19/3/07) Pound's superiority as translator according to Hugh Kenner, introducing the Collected Translations, is the ability to transpose his own voice upon the ancient text : "Pound after twenty-four centuries lends Confucius his voice." Indeed --and that is the signature of our time. Yet what emerges as a danger after only a few decades of the Poundian influence is the flattening of topical langauge (that is, of expression specific to its time) in favour of what is recognizably "our own". No historical personality, simply our own reflection. The example Kenner offers to advantage Pound over Waley sems to me defficient if only for one crucial word, namely the "way". Referring to the way, Pound reports : "He said : The way out is via the door, how is it that no one will use this method." Method? What happened to The Way, one of the world's most poetic cosmologies? Method? The word reeks of the mechanical, the systematic, the utilitarian. Who couldnt prefer Waley then : "The Master said, who expects to be able to go out of a house except by the door? How is it then no one follows this Way of ours?"
Kenner's put-down requires him to caricature : "Arthur Waley sensed a sage embroidered on tapestry expounding the Way." After reading John Walter de Gruchy's Orienting Arthur Waley : Japanism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English (Hawaii,'03), I think I sense the Modernist reflex against the aestheticism of the late 19thCentury & Bloomsbury in Kenner's representation. And I naturally hope it isnt also bullish sneer at whatever's less than red-blooded vernacular --queer & Jewish, look out!
De Gruchy's contrast of Waley's criticism of Japan, informed by superior scholarship & linguistic acumen, with the Japonism of so many Western literati between the World Wars, is salutary. How blinded one can be by partisan enthusiasm in poetry as in politics, and be led past the pretty flowers sure enough but ultimately right up the garden path!
This isnt a belated denigration of Modernism --our times' great adventure after all --but merely a questioning of some of its idiom & its disguised prejudices. Thanks to de Gruchy, Waley's back on my desk, squarely, as are (wait for it!) Laurence Binyon & other earlier translators so temptingly cited!
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(8/5/07) Re- the revised/expanded edition of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon, 2000), I enjoyed the confirmation contained in Bill Porter (Red Pine)'s introduction : "If China's literary critics were put in charge of organizing a tea for their country's greatest poets of the past, Cold Mountain [Han Shan] would not be on many invitation lists. Yet no other poet occupies the altars of China's temples and shrines, where his statue often stands alongside immortals and bodhisattvas. He is equally revered in Korea and Japan. And when Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him in 1958, Cold Mountain became the guardian angel of a generation of Westerners as well."
John Blofeld's description, in his introduction, of the Taoist feeling for & about life is surely written with a wide grin --it tickles my heart as I read. The relational people most of us are, living in the pragmatic world as we do, arent entirely lost when we're charmed by truths & tropes of the absolute! "You are going to give me a 32-course (plus side-dishes) Chinese banquet? Thanks, I'll enjoy that. We have only a bowl or two of inferior-quality boiled rice for dinner? That will go down very nicely. We have nothing on which to dine? Splendid, we shall have more time to sit outside and enjoy the moonlight, with music provided by the wind in the pines."
(9/5/07) I'm rereading, after many years, David Young's Five T'ang Poets (Oberlin/Field, 1990), especially his little introductions to each poet (Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-Yin) which describe their lives and discusses the rationale of the translation within the context of the history of each poet's translation. His courtesy is gratifying. Distinguishing "accuracy and scholarship" from poetry in his criticism of another anthology and promising to "rescue my four poets [five in the 2nd edition] from the often wooden & dogged versions of the scholars", Young hopes he might "take my place with other poets -- Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder, in particular, along with Arthur Waley, the scholar who translated like a poet -- who have worked in Chinese translation."
A nonsense to talk of rehabilitation with respect to Waley but necessary --and I'm regailing myself as much as anyone else --to maintain the whole field of reference against the distractions of fashion.
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(15/5/07) Regarding your closing remark, "But the spirit is there". I'm sure that it is. When mobility has been restricted, as it actually has for you, then spirit is almost everything. It would be trivialising for me to say that "everyone's restricted" in the face of your circumscription. But you are the Abbot of Goldy, you have your library of literature, poetry, philosophy not to mention your music collection. You have the run of the kitchen and you must know your Radipole & Chafey's walks like their official warden (or poet)! Thing is to sow the seed, grow the dream, keep your spirits up!
Love, Kris
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Weymouth / England
May 2007
Dear Kris, I'm anticipating a letter from you soon. Your last got to me in four days. That's some speedy snail! I still prefer this form. No PC, e-mail, etc, for me thus far. I've said it before --I'm not convinced -- which irked you. But maybe I'll go electronic sometime. Anyway, there's no substitute for the books you consistently send. Keep 'em coming.
Talking of which, Zaza [Monique, sister] visited and brought me a couple of presents today (13th May) -- a jar of amazake (made from millet, which I prefer to the brown rice variety) and a book from Waterstone's bookshop in Dorchester. She said she just had to buy it for me. Whilst looking for something else she saw Poems of Thomas Hardy (selected and introduced by Claire Tomalin, Hardy's biographer). I was very pleased to receive it. Do you know it's the first book of his poems that I've ever had in my possession? I've been meaning to get into Hardy since I moved to Dorset twenty-two years ago. Maybe now I'll make a start. But he's not thus far moved me the way the Powyses have. And he's not moved me the way Kerouac and TDB etc has. But he is someone with whom I'd like to feel more at home. By the way, printed on the bag in which the Hardy book came was a quote from Hemingway -- "There is no friend as loyal as a book!" And books sure are amongst my best friends.
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Re- Dogen / Shobogenzo
"People have sometimes regarded 'Uji' as his unique discourse on the theory of time. Theory of time, my foot! It is his trying to explain reality in a way that people could understand. As Koho Zenji said to me, Dogen was no more interested in time, as such, than the next man. He was trying to point out that everything which is present is part of a flow, and everything which is in the future is part of a flow. And, he was telling us not to get caught up in periods of time, not to get caught up in appearances, not to get caught up in anything -- just be one with the flow that comprises all of existence."
This is what Jiyu Kennett says in Roar of the Tigress, vol 2. She goes on to say that unless you discover this for yourself you'll have a hard time understanding what Dogen is going on about. It was a great relief for me to read this as I was teetering on the brink of giving Dogen a wide berth, giving up on him. But I'm restored.
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I bought a beaut of a book recently on handbuilt shelters called Home Work, by Lloyd Kahn. It's published by his own press, Shelter Publications, out of Bolinas, California. And I was most pleased to see in it the house of one of his neighbours -- you'll be delighted as well -- Joanne Kyger. Them Dharma Bums and their friends and neighbours get everywhere dont they? Kahn writes -- "Joanne Kyger is my neighbour, a poet, and an elegant lady. Her house, an old cottage she bought in 1970, reflects her travels to various parts of the world and has a wonderful feeling inside. Everywhere you look are things of beauty : a Tibetan tanka, a Balinese painted calendar, lots of paintings, dozens of baskets, healthy green plants, Japanese vases and laquered plates. There's a mirror from Guatemala, the smell of incense, and a book-shelf with hundreds of books. The old water-stained shingles on the roof show through in the living room, and there's a woodstove for heat."
Is that a bit like your cottage in Melbourne? Poet's hideaway? Tin roof. Bookshelves and paintings. Taoist/Zen Lunatic's retreat? We need such places.
Home Work contains "100 photos and over 300 drawings, all illustrating buildings assembled with human hands -- a Japanese-style stilt house accessible only by going on a cable 500 feet across a river; tree houses, bottle houses, bamboo, yurts etc." Fantastic. A book to get me thinking and dreaming. As I said -- books are amongst my best friends! And these places are what you mention in your last letter (20th May) -- Japhy's "floating zendo".
Pleased that your letter came eventually and at the same time as the Five T'ang Poets which you sent separately. Two packets on the same day. It beats anything by contemporary poets I might read. This is what does it for me. Thanks so very much. I enjoyed Clive Faust's poems you photocopied for me, one for Cid Corman and one for Philip Whalen. Exemplary construction. And of course I appreciated the cutting from The Age on Bill Mollison.
I don't have the new edition of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, but I do have three copies of the original first edition (1983). I will get the new one, complete with photos. I must mention David Budbill whom Copper Canyon publishes -- an American modern-day equivalent of our favourite T'ang poets. The New York Times Book Review said, "When Budbill's on his mountain, he longs for the city, and vice versa. Fame, wealth, and sex are false gods, he insists, but he hastens to add that he still, at times, craves all three. These are not new ideas -- a list of references in the book shows how strongly he's influenced by the classical Chinese poets -- but they find fresh expression here, thanks to Budbill's good humour and gusto. " (Copper Canyon 2006-07, Fall/Winter catalogue.)
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(25th May) I have just two books bedside at present -- Five T'ang Poets and The way of a Pilgrim. I've taken to reading them aloud to mama. Poor thing, she's not at all well and rests and sleeps a lot. But I try to keep her interest alive by reading to her. Kerouac would've loved the latter (as well as the T'ang poets of course). He did have his Bible which he read -- "I took out the Bible and read a little Saint Paul by the warm stove and the light of the tree. 'Let him become a fool, that he may become wise,' and I thought of dear Japhy and wished he was enjoying the Christmas eve with me. 'Already are ye filled,' says Saint Paul, 'already are ye become rich. The saints shall judge the world.'" (TDB, p99.) Yup, Ray Smith would've loved The Way of a Pilgrim -- the Pilgrim is a sort of Dharma Bum.
Christian? Buddhist? Buddhist and Christian? Ray has doubts but ultimately transcends everything. "Then suddenly one night after supper as I was pacing in the cold windy darkness of the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the ground and cried 'I'm gonna die!' because there was nothing else to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh inhospitable earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like milk in my eyelids and I was warm. And I realized that this was the truth Rosie knew now, and all the dead, my dead father and dead brother and dead uncles and cousins and aunts, the truth that is realizable in a dead man's bones and is beyond the Tree of Buddha as well as the Cross of Jesus. Believe that the world is an etherial flower, and ye live. I knew that I also knew that I was the worst bum in the world. The diamond light was in my eyes." (TDB, p100.)
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Thich Nhat Hanh is very keen on practicing with both traditions, Christian and Buddhist -- "(...) parents should encourage their children to have two roots and to have both the Buddha and Jesus within their life. Why not? (...) It is just like cooking. If you love French cooking, it does not mean that you are forbidden to love Chinese cooking (...) You love the apple, yes, you are authorised to love the apple, but no one prevents you from also loving the mango." (Going Home : Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, Riverhead,1999; p202.)
Me? I've got plenty of time for all of it. Everything. Multitrack. Not single track!
Love, Bernard
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