THIS WRITING LIFE

Around & about Matt Hall's FALSE FRUITS (Cordite Books, Castlemaine, '17)
[salvaged from Facebook]

I hope this aint talking out of school, but a month ago in 'chat' with Kent MacCarter i said how i was reading Matthew Hall's book, False Fruits. "I need to get my teeth into it but at first blush the language sings, in my sense, but i dont think that's how it's supposed to rest... i need to get with the argument or dialectic..." Well, thanks to John Hawke's words at last night's launch, April 7th, '17,  we got it! Look forward to reading the speech, what amounted to a short history of the po-mo everywhichway of the lyric, the pastoral, Romanticism, etc --that is, as per Matt's project, lyric that aint lyric, pastoral that aint that kind of pastoral nor that, missus, and aint all parody since, as per Schuyler on NY poetry ca 50s (i'm throwing that in, begging yr pardon) gallons of [paint] true feeling courses it, suffuses it. And so on. Hmm. I confess the radical battle cry that poetry is violence upon language, and that all poetry shares the perspective, except of course that of the unmentionables, poetry's deplorables? --a claim i lived with myself through the 70s & 80s-- doesnt work for me in the way John announced it last night... Eeek! It's Saturday morning i think! Stuck in the middle of another dense & ingenious proposition for the Eco-poetic! Lots to think about, and the book itself to read! Congratulations everyone! It was a stimulating night!


---------------------------

‪Nice memory you recalled in yr remarks last night, Matt, regarding that conference you attended several years ago and the afterparty reading at Collected Works Bookshop, at wch i particularly recall your good self and David Herd's distinctive readings...

RE- violence, and of course your book, On Violence in the Work of J. H. Prynne (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) (--just reminded myself via the abstract up on the Web, and nice to see longtime-nosee ‪Michael Tencer‬'s name there), --the violence John Hawke indicated as a general condition of the practice is NOT, i think, the point of your submission on Prynne (or, indeed, the British poetry in the vicinity of that influence or out of similar Traditional & Modernist extrapolation as the man's), wch is a very particular project... or was --i'm sure by now it's widened to the air that's breathed there, almost commonplace assumptions & similar formal expressions.

(At the beginning of your V., am reminded of Olson, ye olde Projective Verse (how sprightly they read, all these assayes of the Big O even now) --our poet, "How he conceives his relation to nature, that force to which he owes his somewhat small existence. (.....) For a man's problem (...) to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature..." --reminded by your quotation from JHP that, like O, his poetry is another kind of human manifestation, and an imp is tickling me to suggest meta-literary, metaphysical, even of Platonism! --like for ex., Korean poet Ko Un adamant that his poetry's not to do with literature but "the universe!" --away with thee, imp!) --

I wish right here i could jump into statement of what i'm feeling (and to include something on feeling, on wch last night i thought John Hawke very good)... something about the relation to this being here, this relation to nature (and the nature of things), which is rather more interesting than literary cleaving (i mean grading) right & left & all about one! (--that vivacious intellectuality, --importunate mind, promiscuously vital --and dont i recognize that myself)...

My sentence runs away! I shall return after another helping of Fresh Fruits...!


[April 8/9, 17]

THIS WRITING LIFE

Introducing novelists Colin Talbot & Shane Maloney at Collected Works Bookshop recently, for the former's book launch on December 9th, '16, I described a potential customer's enquiry as to whether we stocked any "amusing travel books"… Jules Verne? I wondered to our audience. Joseph Conrad? Malcolm Lowry? B Traven? Traven Collins aka Colin Talbot?

Long captivated by the splicing of author & character(s) in novels, I'm led to ask the question What is "fiction"? --what is fiction for Colin Talbot, for example, who's first to confess that his form of detective fiction isn't concerned with serial killers! He'll say it's his vehicle for writing, writing per se. There'll be another opportunity to discuss Talbot's work, but since mentioning Lowry that night the latter has been in my mind, and only yesterday did I select Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place as my travelling companion to & fro' the sea on the 246 bus, & whose author was then quoted into my Christmas Day "Beach Report" largely written in situ (posted on F/book & the Poetry & Ideas blog).

Thinking about Malcolm Lowry and reading the collection's first couple of stories, The Bravest Boat & Through the Panama, moved to say that it's a writing laden with 'the art of'. Author's investment in novel as if mythology --concurrent levels of the revelatory fiction. Author here symbolist but not psycho-analyst whatever the volition of his time. He is artist projecting own system of significance but intuits there's no interpretation ahead of the experience which, for consummate writer, is doubly recollected --by & as intense memory & intense invention, & remembered again & again.

Imagine Lowry --poet, poetic intellectual, novelist in age of realism become more-or-less reportage --Bellow, for example, in the '40s, memorably exploiting one of Joyce's tricks without concomitant commitment to larger scheme or idea --story-telling entirely within rhythm of the colloquial, sounding out 'as we think & speak' which was called, when we were young, "contemporary", meaning, I think, post-literary --H E Bates for example, as present-time D H Lawrence one thought then, having cut to the vernacular chase, as earthy & corporeal as DHL but novelistically one-dimensional… Imagine Lowry seeking something else, perhaps as something-else's conduit… Doesn't he let it all slip there on p27 of the paperback collection (leapt when I read it)? "The further point is that the novel is about a character who becomes enmeshed in the plot of the novel he has written, as I did in Mexico. But now I am becoming enmeshed in the plot of a novel I have scarcely begun. Idea is not new, at least so far as enmeshment with characters is concerned. Goethe, Wilhelm von Scholz, 'The Race with a Shadow.' Pirandello, etc. But did these people ever have it happen to them?
Turn this into triumph : the furies into mercies.
-- The inenarrable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where you are; the billows of inexhaustible anguish haunted by the insatiable albatross of self."

Philosophical complexity of 'having no right' allows practical translation at least as no ease with conventional relations, that is regarding definition of the story & story-telling, where elegance & efficacy congeal, & the edges refined, the bumps & whorls of perception's plenitude eliminated…

26-12-16

THIS WRITING LIFE

Listening to the British Library's British Poets CD, which Robert Mitchell kindly gave me the other day because, disappointingly, it was a dud: his expectations of disc 3's WS Graham, Amis, Edwin Morgan, G. Mackay Brown et al, dashed upon the rock'n'roll of Ferlinghetti, Bukowski, Ginsberg, --the American disc slipped incorrectly into the British box-set. And it is a shock on the ear let alone sensibility; the speak easy vs the elocution lesson… The contrast's the greater because one's probably missing Whitman's introduction, from whence the long century of a determined modern cultivation, mostly all free one imagines, even as Ashbery's sestina or Sexton's parables, the colloquial messing up the old poetical.

On the 2nd English disc, Dylan Thomas follows George Barker, and it's his dramatic  diddledy-di which upsets the decorous continuum, as far as annunciation's concerned, from C Day-Lewis through John Betjeman (full of fun, a poetry that sticks in the ear, history recorded via nostalgia and as true as comedy allows), Spender, Auden. Sorley MacLean is different & not only due to the Gaelic (that is, the Gaelic's thoroughly not-Englishness); and R S Thomas in another way. But Dylan Thomas is something else, the strong & continuous flowing, the rhymes & rhythms, the repetitious or better said, the apparent circularity of image & rhyme; in the spirit of Hopkins & Yeats, accessible to their great spirits.

The British disc is an entire lesson, whether or not in the largely bypassed diction --a lesson in the old craft by its late practitioners, the mid 20th Century's sages & stars who were the main men on the shelf when I was beginning, hardly beginning, early '60s ℅ Southampton's public libraries. I got into my own stride by rejecting the lot of them. I was looking for W C Williams not Charles on the poetry shelf!

Listening to the American disc, I can imagine the converse surprise of the American poetry buff, the  horror listening to Larkin or Hughes instead of John Ashbery or Le Roi Jones… And I can hear how Adrienne Rich connects with Anne Sexton & I'm sure Sylvia Plath too. Incantation by which didactic is kept sweet to the lyric. Question : How remain individual (retain eccentric personality) in the vortex of the topical (perhaps the involuntary generality)? How save individual in the maelstrom of the everyday (one's 'particular narrowness' as per Celan)? How prevent the signature American poetry (the declasse vernacular to which all accents adhere, Walt's 'democratic idiom') convoluting to artless prose? My questions, only mine, never finally put away…

(December, 8th, '16)

THIS WRITING LIFE : James Liddy & et cetera

From Journal,
[Saturday, 8 Oct. ‘16]

Ive been reading James Liddy’s It Swings from Side to Side (Arlen House, 2011), poems written in 2008 during his illness, a knowingly posthumous collection? Again I’m struck by the exultant writing which is the timbre of thinking aloud/talking/singing in the moment, receptive, responsible indeed, to the frame, the field delineated by the moment. Nothing to do with style, everything to do with being present. Paradoxically such a writer is historically fluent, for the history that flows in the poetry is ultimately opportunity for his own song, that is his own compounded phrasing, intent for his own sound, intensely himself.

P.S.
[Tuesday, 11 Oct. ‘16]

This kind of historical man --history not incorporated as Whitman, Pound, but constituent of the flow, perhaps even constituting it --for which “song of myself” the intensity of presence is what one reads & hears.

P.S. (2)
[from Facebook post, 13 Oct. 16]

Suddenly realized that the author of the article "A note on the legacy of Patrick Kavanagh" in the splendid Honeysuckle, Honeyjuice : A Tribute to James Liddy (ed Michael Begnal, Arlen House, Galway, 2006), is the same Emily Cullen met here in Melbourne couple of years or so ago! Dropped her a line, described current reading around George Stanley, James Liddy & other Irish & American poets. She confirmed, mentioned the introduction to Libby Hart, a continuing connection she says. Likes my description of Liddy's poetry as 'powerful & poignant'...

Meanwhile Ive read Brendan Kennelly's essay on Patrick Kavanagh (in Journey into Joy, Bloodaxe, '94), excellent in itself, in which Liddy is described as a 'loner'. Kennelly, "I'm thinking of poets who, instead of becoming embroiled in Ireland's local squabbles, write and work in different parts of the world. Bernard O'Donoghue, Eamon Grennan, Peter McDonald, Greg Delanty, James Liddy, Matthew Sweeney are, literally, outsiders whose work reflects that fact. Ireland is an island washed, in the eyes of many exiles, by nostalgic seas. None of the poets I've mentioned has been a victim of this nostalgia." Whilst holding up as & within an Irish literary-political perspective, Liddy's hardly a loner in the psychological sense, and in America was a San Franciscan at an important time for the New Poetry, and later in Wisconsin, pivotal to Irish & American cross-currents.

Regarding the Kavanagh/Liddy correlation Emily writes, "In the same way that James Liddy is uniquely James Liddy, Patrick Kavanagh was Patrick Kavanagh alone --his own man, true to himself --ultimately inscrutable, but wonderfully original in every way. It is one of the tragedies of Irish literature that the gift of Patrick Kavanagh was not more widely appreciated during his lifetime. Without the recognition Kavanagh received from a core group of the upcoming generation of poets, including Liddy, Eavan Boland, Brendan Kennelly, Leland Bardwell, Paul Durcan, etc., there would be a palpable gap in the acknowledgement and passing on of the poet's work..."

THIS WRITING LIFE, #4

Reading poems by Gu Cheng --a prior vague memory of his short life, killing his wife, his own suicide, but didn't know of his high reputation in China. Ouyang Yu would probably dispute it? He's certainly not one of the hundred contemporaries in Ouyang's anthology, In Your Face (Otherworld, Melbourne, 2002) --but he is a reference, an image, in the poem of one who is --Xu Jiang's The xiao jie at Dongdan (translator's note : xio jie = little sister, prostitutes).  I liked those poets, poems, when I first read the anthology, and right now Xu Jiang's impresses me as the kind of poetry I'm thinking my way into as the feeling of writing poems stirs inside me again.

Preamble : On the inordinately long bus ride into the City this day (the trains at Clifton Hill bizarrely unable to proceed down the line in either direction --imagine scores of passengers suddenly having to seek other transport, running across the freeway to the Queens Parade bus & tram hub) I read the poems of Dimitris Tsaloumas, --Helen Nickas's selection for the French edition (in which I'm astonished to find myself quoted in her introduction, in French so I cant really read it) --Un chant du soiree, published 2014, Orphee / La Difference, Paris. It's the book Petr Herel mentioned to me a few weeks ago when he popped in to the Shop and said it was a good translation as far as he could make out. I, of course, read only the original English, though Dimitris's earliest poems would have been translated from the Greek, followed then by the poems he wrote directly into English --the couple of decades he seemed to have accepted English language & life in Australia, in Elwood, alternating six months in Australia & six months on his beloved Leros in Greece. But not at the last --one day he dramatically claimed English wasn't the language nor this the place he wanted to be poet of or in. I read his poems on the stop start crawl from Clifton Hill through North Fitzroy & then Carlton & finally the City, and liked again the local settings, appreciating, again, how his classical poems, mythological & historical, have a similar purchase, --the parochial elevated to the Elysian & the Elysian made accessible, colloquialised --a switch of reference but the same tone of voice, --his tongue in one cheek & then in the other --chasing the same morsel around his mouth, doggedly. I quote here, Of Trees and Birds :


Three are the hardy trees that haunt
the space of my obsessions;

the cypress, pointed sharp in starlight
gathering shadows of friends long gone,

piercing the song of nightingales,
the break-of-day exuberance of larks;

the poplar, tremulous of yellowing leaf
in a far island's marshy cove

where September cranes land on their flight
from the oncoming snows of desolation;

the gum, its vastness of land and horizons
and sun-struck screeching birds that mock

the stubborn traveller who staggers on
trusting the certainties of maps.


I remembered some of the poems I wrote in The Red Book (1981-83) --naturally, another unpublished collection, still in handwritten exercise book, though at one time I began typing it, airmail-thin paper easily punctured by heavy handed typing, long lost now I think. The Red Book wasn't so much a parody of social, even socialist, realism but a redeeming of a bad idea by the lyrical & anecdotal of the higher literature. One poem imagined my own mum as its reader, the poem written for her to understand, intended to explain itself while holding a tone & shape which seemed true to poetry when it was done :

the rooster is bigger than the tree it's perched upon
the rooster is the rooster as the tree is the tree
nothing more a name could give to me

sky is blue
ground is white
houses village this terrain
snow pillages what spring'll regain

rooster is whatever rooster seems to be
ordinarily rooster's on its farm
out of harm's way
where's the farm you say
surely rooster's lost
and where is village come to that
& why's there snow on the longest day of summer?

sun's refraction above the hills
rooster's beak cued for crowing
metaphor & allegory might not at all
be blowing through
what breeze there is doesn't ruffle vermillion-red
yellow brown black & blue

you see through eyes which know what to see
does rooster see through our dreaming?
we groom our dreams & leave rooster to its crowing
what is is what it is & also what it's seeming
tree dreams its rooster whatever its human
coming & going


So now there is Gu Cheng (collections published by Copper Canyon & New Directions) & Xu Jiang --Xu Jiang's poem about working girls jumps with topicality yet is elegiac-- "it's knock-off time for them / the morning breeze in beijing was so gentle, blowing / across the faces of the harvesters / another night of labour / as gratified as gu cheng or hai zai [another suicided poet] / having just finished writing their immortal poems". I feel it's my kind of poem! --the language, the sound. As for Gu Cheng --five years of exile, predominately in Aukland --imagine that little house on a little island, the Chinese poet in New Zealand? --five years a lifetime and New Zealand another universe. At the last, October 1993, in the letter he wrote to his parents, this philosophy : "We have now returned from America, via Tahiti, to our small island in the sea. With that sudden change of winds, I have a better understanding of people now; I bear no hatred or resentment. To be separated, in the furthest corner of the world, is not easy; that people can be born and be together is the fortunate thing. Whether life is good or bad is really only a state of mind." (translated by Joseph Allen, Sea of Dreams : The Selected Writings; New Directions, 2005) --what equanimity! --but immediately followed by his atrocious act.

What is Xu Jiang's poem but a homecoming? --"at dongdan, i knew my life was light  / in that instant, waking up from all my wasted and tormenting / hours" --the "xiao jie, (in fact just women)" --that is the fact of the xiao jie, --thunderclap half-hidden in the bracket as Ouyang Yu translates it, --the otherwise diminutive or qualification 'just' is here the crucial foundation of the poem, the poem-of-perception --and not surprising 'so dazzling that i was shocked' --because 'grrrrls' aside, it is the way of seeing that's conclusively justified --the humility (as I'd say) of it, open sesame to golden treasury of world given up to poetry --the fact of the world, --& 'humility before the fact' first principal in my book, the which becomes 'The Book' through the years I've used it. Xu Jiang's poem ends : "i was lucky to encounter you at dongdan / and in that instant / i experienced the long-forgotten call of poetry again"... Touche! We shall see...


[15/18-4-14]

THIS WRITING LIFE, #2

1.

The series I'm currently working on isnt a sequential narrative; that is, the poems arent episodes of a continuing story. It is a sequence though, and contains narrative. Thinking aloud : what kind of a step between 'series' & 'serial' and, by the same token, between 'sequence', 'series' & 'serial'?

In this series, each poem stands alone but gains value from the overall gathering. The opening gambit ("More Midsummer Night's Dream than Dante") is a constant. It registers the sound of the poem & marks its place, both tonal & topographical. It's the crucial refrain. Resonances obtain, but apart from the major references, Midsummer Night's Dream & Dante's Inferno (principally the 1st canto's famous beginning), it isnt a meta-poem (that is, a poem about poetry or the writing of poetry).

Autobiographical material occurs spontaneously, memories arising as riffs off the Shakespeare & the Dante. Astonishing to me when the characters or situations seemingly echo Shakespeare & Dante; as though, for example, the women in the poems are mediating Beatrice! And then it occurs to me that the Shakespeare & Dante, important as they were in their time as literature & language, a kind of mnemonic for the entire tradition, are archetypal by nature and stand now amongst our very own ur-texts.

As writer I'm interested in what poem & series will deliver, and being the writer doesnt preclude any such revelation. I look forward to what each poem will make of itself even as I write it. This species of authority is rather like W.S. Graham (from the third of his series The Dark Dialogues) : "I speak as well as I can / Trying to teach my ears / To learn to use their eyes / Even only maybe / In the end to observe / The behaviour of silence." Not it exactly but Graham is always a propos, even in broad daylight.

2.

Still early in the education (firstly via Allen & Creeley's The New Writing in the USA, which I bought in Melbourne in the winter of 1967, when it was published, & secondly, a little later, via Allen's The New American Poetry, published seven years before, but at long last in my hands) one encountered Jack Spicer, though not yet his imprimatur for serialism. Actually, serial composition back then was well & truly in contemporary music's domain, and not even from the Schoenbergian source initially but reading John Cage & hearing Keith Humble lecture! (Isnt it always the case : 'knowing' more than one's yet experienced, that is thinking one knows!) With ginormous benefit of hindsight, Spicer's nine part Love Poems, in The New Writing in the USA volume, does resemble a certain type of serial music's recombinatory technique, as he recalls a line or phrase from another part (for example, "for you I would build a whole new universe") without compromising the integrity of its various renditions. And though one read Billy the Kid (the New Writers' Press edition) in Dublin at the turn of '69/'70 (which Michael Smith published at the urging of their man in San Francisco, Pearse Hutchinson) and around a year later, After Lorca (another pirate, this time from Allen Fisher's Aloes Books in London, except that copyright wasnt an issue then given Spicer's largess), I didnt have the poet's own word on practice until I read the wonderful Spicer issue of Clayton Eshleman's Caterpillar magazine (#12, July, 1970, bought of course from Nick Kimberley's indispensable poetry section of Compendium Bookshop in London). Yet the transcription there of Spicer's contributions to the Vancouver Conference of '65 doesnt actually include Spicer's spelling it out as appears in the statement for the anthology, The Poetics of the New American Poetry (ed Don Allen & Warren Tallman, Grove, 1973) :

"A serial poem, in the first place, has the book as its unit as an individual poem has the poem as its unit, the actual poem that you write at the actual time, the single poem. And there is a dictation of form as well as a dictation of the individual form of the individual poem. And you have to go into a serial poem not knowing what the hell you're doing. (....) What I'm saying is you have a unit, one unit the poem, which is taken by dictation, and another unit, the book, which is a more structured thing. But it should be structured by dictation and not by the poet. (....)" (p233)

3.

I'm tweaked like a deja-vu as I reread the first pages of Earth Ship (the magazine I published in England, 1970-72), # 4/5 (September, '71). It was intended to be an Olson issue, committed as I was to reviewing The Archaeologist of Morning (good to be reminded that this labour of love was coedited by George Butterick, Albert Glover & Peter Riley), sent to me by Tom Maschler at Cape Golliard, to whom I'd written on Nathaniel Tarn's recommendation. I was particularly pleased to publish there a letter from John Thorpe to Ken Irby (tho unsure now whether Thorpe or Irby sent it to me, or perhaps even Riley or Andrew Crozier), for it included part of a J H Prynne missive to Olson (containing the epochal line, "Singleness is emphatically not to line up as showing the individual at the helm...").

Apart from anything else that letter illustrates the disparity between my enthusiasm & their learning --how much of a school-kid in the heavy-duty classroom I must have seemed! Olson's Projective Verse essay was one thing, The Human Universe & other essays something else but that English Olson-language entirely otherwise! At least I could open my mouth in the Olson discussion with such colleagues as John Hall, David Chaloner, Allen Fisher, Paul Buck, Tim Longville & John Riley. True to say, though, the English discourse was always more cerebral than what I'd known around the Melbourne/La Mama (cafe theatre) poets, ca 67-69, particularly that fraction one had in mind as 'Cambridge' (Prynne, Crozier, Peter Riley & others, John James, Doug Oliver & John Temple), exemplars of a perspective one had only begun to nibble at (convolutions of the 'land & language' equation Hall had offered me). Even now, forty years on, reading Peter Riley's latest collection, The Glacial Stairway (Carcanet, 2011), encountering the line (almost a quip?), "I am entitled to make elisions / between geological and moral structures.", the authenticity of that particular perspective with its special vocabulary is clear.

Around that time, Nick Kimberley related to me John James' comment (refering, I think, to a poem I'd published in Nick's little mag, high on Ed Dorn as it happens and not at all a send-up), that "he knows not the ground whereon he stands." If he meant the English scene I'd recently joined he was right --I was happily enrolled in the second English education I'd promised myself when I set sail from Australia for the UK in late '69. However, I never thought I required excuse or permission for my own interaction with the New American Poetry, which was surely the basis for all of our expeditions. The new poetry as, for example, demonstrated in the pages of The English Intelligencer (a great bundle of which John Hall had presented me), was more readily approachable than that very particular Cambridge poetry, and in its diversity not unlike the new poetry movement Down Under...

I'd hoped for more Olson related materials than the handful I presented in the 35 Roneod full-scap pages of Earth Ship, #4/5, but there were adjacent pieces. Rereading it the mag feels like a typical late '60s, early '70s log of the Trans-Atlantic correspondence, which will always lead a reader to the "Anglo-American" sobriquet, correcting the cliche of mutually exclusive (British, American) domains : Gael Turnbull on Cid Corman, my brother Bernard on Larry Eigner, the Snyderesque topographies of Jeremy Hilton, the (possibly Ginsbergean) diaristic passions of Nathaniel Tarn & David Tipton...

I'd retrieved the mag from the trunk because I remembered Tim Longville's poem there, SNOW MAN : A Poem Begun The Day Charles Olson Died, for him and for Jack Spicer, but until it was in my hand again didnt recall the lines I'd quoted from Spicer's A Poem to the reader of the poem at the head of my Olson review. It's a misquotation actually since "The eagle was / God or Charles Olson" doesnt follow the opening salvo, "I threw a naked eagle in your throat / I dreamed last night / That I was wrestling with you on the mountainside". Truer to the tone & sense had I continued the proposition, "The eagle was men wrestling naked / without the hope of men wrestling naked. / The eagle was a wet dream." --after all, Spicer's poem is a many-sided quandary and the quote, reflecting my callow mind-set, supposed the categorical.

Crucially Peter Riley's 'essays' on Olson, Duncan, & Spicer had slipped my mind. I quote the last :

Jack Spicer. An Essay.

1. No, not a voice in the night.
Which leads to the supposition, there is nothing
to be done.
Which leads to masochism and chauvinistic moans.

2. Indians, Esquimos and the dead East in general,
help keep alive the Aristotelian flame in various
outposts, San Francisco, e.g.

3. Fortunately, such men do not often rationalize.
Only in teaching situations.
Some of which got called "poems".

4. Well, it's a difficult place to live in, Vertigo.

Reading Spicer's Textbook of Poetry in that issue of Caterpillar, I'm tempted by the resemblance of Riley's 'essays' to Spicer's enigmatic sections despite the poets' different intentions. It's that final line of Riley's essay which pings the keenest right now, especially as W.S. Graham reenters my thinking. A Spicer/Graham connection has been tickling me throughout just as a few years ago I was want to proffer John Berryman as proximate to Graham in dexterity & idiosyncrasy despite the different stages for their soliloquies. And no vertigo without Paul Celan, --and for Celan eternal indebtedness to Walter Billeter --his translation of The Meridian (I think the first in English; Paul Celan : Prose Writings & Selected Poems, published by Paper Castle, Melbourne, 1977 ) --thus Buchner's Lenz. Says Paul Celan in his Buchner Prize speech, "Who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, ---who walks on his head, has the sky as precipice beneath him."

Celan, or Beckett, or any writing, sick of the replete-sentence assumptions of author, the spectrum of omniscience which cant help but relegate the language/the words as both carriage & frame --as per Spicer's conjunction, "Language is a complex system which involves word, gesture and all of that sort of thing and it's a higher abstraction than words. (....) Words are things which just happen to be in your head instead of someone else's head, just like memories are (....) Now, language is a more complicated thing, but at the same time it's a structure..." (Vancouver Lecture, June 13,1965, published in Caterpiller #12, p204).

And I say this despite simultaneous queasiness at the opposite end of practice, that accumulation of sophistication, against which my Inner Peasant rises up, suing for a rough & ready transparency --"lost land", "last hand" --also vertiginous, --the forever thinking through of such natural contradiction.

[April/June 7, 2012]



oOo