Beck Record Club: Velvet Underground & Leonard Cohen

Beck: Record Club

I’ve enjoyed the Beck Record club for some time now:

http://beck.com/record_club

It’s a wonderful project. Beck and whatever friends he gets together do a quick version of a classic album. First was The Velvet Underground, and then Leonard Cohen. What could be better?

Here are four of my favorites:

Record Club: Songs Of Leonard Cohen "Stranger Song" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Beck, et al. doing “The Stranger Song.”

Record Club: Songs Of Leonard Cohen "One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Beck, et al. doing “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.”

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico "Heroin" (Alt. Version) from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Beck, et al. doing “Heroin”

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico "I'll Be Your Mirror" from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Beck, et al. doing “I’ll Be Your Mirror”

John Cage - from Silence

John Cage – from Silence


[It is interesting to note that all these comments come before 1962. And also how similar the situation has been for the other arts, poetry especially.]


As for the quality of irritation, that is a more subjective matter. One might say that it is at least preferable to soothing, edifying, exalting, and similar qualities. Its source is, of course, precisely in monotony, not in any forms of aggression or emphasis. It is the immobility of motion. And it alone, perhaps, is truly moving.

Any attempt to exclude the “irrational” is irrational. Any composing strategy which is wholly “rational” is irrational in the extreme.

It is therefore very useful if one has decided that sounds are to come into their own, rather than being exploited to express sentiments or ideas of order.

Implicit here, it seems to me, are principles familiar from modern painting and architecture: collage and space. What makes this action like Dada are the underlying philosophical views and the collagelike actions. But what makes this action unlike Dada is the space in it. For it is the space and emptiness that is finally urgently necessary at this point in history.

If one uses the word “experimental” to mean simply the introduction of novel elements into one’s music, we find that America has a rich history . . . . Once, in Amsterdam, a Dutch musician said to me, “It must be very difficult for you in America to write music, for you are so far away from the centers of tradition.” I had to say, “It must be very difficult for you in Europe to write music, for you are so close to the centers of tradition.”

Why, since the climate for experimentation in America is so good, why is American experimental music so lacking in strength politically (I mean supported . . . )?

It is evidently a question of bringing one’s intended actions into relation with the ambient unintended ones.

The conscientious objectors to modern music will, of course, attempt everything in the way of counterrevolution. Musicians will not admit that we are making music; they will say that we are interested in superficial effects, or, at most, are imitating Oriental or primitive music. New and original sounds will be labeled as “noise.” But our common answer to every criticism must be to continue working and listening, making music with its materials, sound and rhythm, disregarding the cumbersome, top-heavy structure of musical prohibitions.

Before studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, things become confused. After studying Zen, men are men and mountains are mountains. After telling this, Dr. Suzuki was asked, “What is the difference between before and after?” He said, “No difference, only the feet are a little bit off the ground.”

With clarity of rhythmic structure, grace forms a duality. Together they have a relation like that of body and soul. Clarity is cold, mathematical, inhuman, but basic and earthy. Grace is warm, incalculable, human, opposed to clarity, and like the air. Grace is not here used to mean prettiness . . .

Were he saying something in particular, he would have to focus the painting; as it is he simply focuses himself, and everything, a pair of socks, is appropriate, appropriate to poetry, a poetry of infinite possibilities.

Is there any need before we go to bed to recite the history of the changes and will we in that bed be murdered?

Not ideas but facts.

Should one use the materials characteristic of one’s time? It is an intellectual question. Now there’s a question that ought to get us somewhere. I shall answer it slowly and autobiographically.

“If you think you are a ghost you will become a ghost.” Thinking the sounds worn out wore them out. So you see: this question brings us back to where we were: nowhere, or, if you like, where we are.

But the important questions are answered by not liking only but disliking and accepting equally what one likes and dislikes. Otherwise there is no access . . .

We are in the presence not of a work of art which is a thing but of an action which is implicitly nothing. Nothing has been said. Nothing is communicated. And there is no use of symbols or intellectual references. No thing in life requires a symbol since it is clearly what it is: a visible manifestation of an invisible nothing.

Each something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.

If one adopts this attitude art is a sort of experimental station in which one tries out living: one doesn’t stop living . . . . It all goes together and doesn’t require that we try to improve it or feel our inferiority or superiority to it. Progress is out of the question.

Before studying Zen men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen, things get confused. After studying Zen men are men and mountains are mountains. No difference except that one is no longer attached.

But we are still at a point where most musicians are clinging to the complicated torn-up competitive remnants of tradition, and, furthermore, a tradition that was always a tradition of breaking with tradition . . . that . . . was out of step not only with its own but with all other traditions.

The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all.

I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry.

What I am calling poetry is often called content. I myself have called it form.

The only structure which permits of natural activity is one so flexible as not to be a structure; I write in order to hear; never do I hear and then write what I hear. Inspiration is not a special occasion.

What I think & what I feel can be my inspiration but it is then also my pair of blinders. To see one must go beyond the imagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though in the center of a leap.

An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.

Most anybody knows about the future and how uncertain it is.

A sound is a sound. To realize this one has to put a stop to studying music.

The thing to do is to keep the head alert but empty. Things come to pass, arising and disappearing. There can be no consideration of error. Things are always going wrong.

Before I die, I shall leave a will, because if you want something done, sentimentality is effective.

At all costs inspiration must be avoided which is to say act in such a way that inspiration doesn’t come up as an alternative but exists eternally. Then of course it is theater and music disappears entirely into the realm of art where it knows it belongs. Art silence is not real silence and the difference is continuity versus interpenetration. This is also.

Music is simply trying things out in school fashion to see what happens.

If one feels protective about the word “music,” protect it and find another word for all the rest that enters through the ears. It’s a waste of time to trouble oneself with words, noises. What it is is theater and we are in it and like it, making it.

And what is your purpose in writing music? I do not deal in purposes; I deal with sounds.

Now at last we know that saying one thing requires saying the opposite in order to keep the whole statement from being like a Hollywood set. Perhaps it would be better to be silent, but a) someone else would be speaking; and b) it wouldn’t keep us from going and we would continue doing what we are doing. I remember once his saying: “But this opens up an entirely untouched field of poetry.” And to this day neither one of us has budged to move into that untouched open field.

In the poetry contest in China by which the Sixth Patriarch of Zen Buddhism was chosen, there were two poems. One said: “The mind is like a mirror. It collects dust. The problem is to remove the dust.” The other and winning poem was a reply to the first. It said, “Where is the mirror and where is the dust?”

Dean Young on Intention

Dean Young has several tendencies that I don’t follow, but he has a method with which I am in sympathy. Or maybe it’s that he’s coming from a base of Romantic identity to which I feel resistant, just as he has a relationship to the role of the imagination with which I agree. Whatever it is, it keeps me interested in his poetry and in what he says about poetry, just as I know I’m not going to agree in total.

The current issue of Poets & Writers is a great example of this. In his essay “Beyond Intention,” he has a tendency to get too woo-woo for me (to use the technical term), but he makes several stops at several important stations along the way.

First off, the title, “Beyond Intention.” How could I not adore that? It’s been my biggest problem with a lot of poetry and things said about poetry for a long time now, that I think many endorse a poetry overly steeped in intentionality. As John Cage writes sometime around 1960, about Rauschenberg, and painting (and the arts in general): “Were he saying something in particular, he would have to focus the painting; as it is he simply focuses himself, and everything, a pair of socks, is appropriate, appropriate to poetry, a poetry of infinite possibilities.” So, for me, the idea of “beyond intention” gets a big YES vote. It takes the art from the planning to the embodying, from the mind to the living.

Here’s Young:

“To approach the practice of poetry as an acquiring of skill sets may provide the stability of a curriculum, but the source of inspiration is as much instability, even recklessness. Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always elsewhere for the test. Any intention in the writing of poetry beyond the most basic aim to make a poem, of engaging the materials, should not be realized. If the poet does not have the chutzpah to jeopardize habituated assumptions and practices, what is produced will be sleep without dream, a copy of a copy of a copy.”

*

It’s funny to me that he worked three Zs into the end of that paragraph leading to sleep, but that aside, I like the movement of this away from the planning to the doing of art, even as I am skeptical of dream metaphors.

He goes on to attack the “professionalization of creative writing,” which is all fine. That’s his battle, not mine, so I’ll walk away. To be honest, I very rarely come up against this “professionalization” stuff. Mostly I teach general education classes. Maybe I’m just in the wrong part of the country. It is funny though, a little, that this essay is in the annual MFA issue of Poets & Writers. That's something. So, moving along.

He then tosses some shots at “art that defines itself as resistance,” saying that its vitality is dependant on the “continued health of that which it resists.” I’m in disagreement, but not enough to work myself up about. And then he goes after literary theory, and poetry based in it, saying “reader, you can sleep through this part if you want.” So I did. I had a feeling he was going to say things that showed a blind spot to the fact that theory is always present, even in an anti-theory stance, but again not enough to get worked up about. Anyway, I’m starting to sound contrary, so let’s get back to the stuff that makes me cheer:

“There is no more exquisite, lively, and welcoming body of work in poetry than what Ashbery continues to give us, none more world enlarging.”

I like that he tosses that in, as it seemed, from the Theory and Resistance bashing, that he might be starting to make a case against the very poetry that Ashbery can be said to stand for. This causes his argument to become much more nuanced. He’s not anti- the poetry of poets like Ashbery, but the types of poetry that use Resistance and Theory as some sort of Intentionality, then. OK.

The value of this essay, in the end, and perhaps the book that it’s excepted from, The Art of Recklessness, due out from Graywolf Press in August 2010, is to be a kind of conventional essay about the mystery of poetry that sounds as much as it could have been written in 1969 as 2009, but to use Breton, Ashbery, Stevens and de Kooning as touchstones (which could have been examples in 1969, yes, and probably were, but not in the sort of publication that Poets & Writers stands for). I believe this describes a major shift in the center of American Poetry. Most often in the past, if one were setting out to write this sort of essay about poetry from the center of the art, true, the writer might choose Stevens, but after that, the examples, the touchstones, would be much more from the very center of Big A Big P American Poetry, maybe Robert Lowell or Plath or James Dickey or something?

The very center of the thought of this essay is this:

“’Say you think life is trembling,’” wrote Willem de Kooning of an idea he picked un in Kierkegaard, ‘Pretty soon everything trembles.’”

*

It’s about the stance before the work begins. It begins with a conception of life. Which for Young gets described this way:

“The word, then, is not only fit referent but also magical embodiment of the thing; the word takes its flesh from the world. Transubstantiation. The names of the dead are not to be trifled with. Forgiveness is asked for. And power. And self. We have arrived at the primitive.”

For me, I’d like a version of this without using the words “magical,” “transubstantiation,” and “primitive,” but I’ll not quibble. Or maybe I’ll quibble a little. He goes on:

“I’m asking you here to consider poetry that is unhindered by doubt(while acknowledging that doubt can begin the inspiration toward liberation), a poetry that arises out of recklessness and is composed of convictions of first needs, first minds, of truth in language arising from the active impulse of emotion, moving through the calculations of the rational toward irrational detonation.”

Again, I’d like it better without the bit about “liberation” and the bit about “first minds” and “truth,” but I like the idea here of moving into the irrational. I would posit that the irrational is the content that surrounds us already, and it’s in the materials themselves. We can’t get away from it. It’s the basis of deconstruction. But it’s also the basis of belief. The irrational is the IS. Art that denies this, or attempts to circumvent it by a sort of reductive certainty is more a shell game of what words can do, than any real move to a sort of cooperation with reality. But that’s my own essay that I keep not writing.

Here’s Young, doing a better job with “the primitive”:

“By the primitive I mean exploration of primary human dilemmas, the assertion of the monstrous if need be, the instinctual, visceral, sexual, rogue, absurd, sometimes derangement as a form of innocence. Primary even in afterness. Not ironic.”

I hope in The Art of Recklessness, Young includes the examples of this that are as inclusive as his assertion and touchstones seems to imply they might be. It would be easy for him to take this wild exclamation and then turn to a writer like Kim Addonizzio or Kay Ryan as example. That would be fine, I suppose. But I’d be interested more in what he might do with Michael Palmer and Rae Armantrout after such an assertion.

He then goes on to say something I so completely agree with I actually did give a little cheer: “Everyone is a wonderful poet up until the third grade.” Going further with this, would cause me to spiral out into several more pages, so I’m walking away. Suffice it to say that those of us who teach at universities, who teach content areas to Education Majors, need to seriously consider how we can not just make those Ed Majors read lit and write papers or whatever, but also how we need to do more with how poetry can remain open, inclusive moments where imagination can roam, not atrophy. Less a reduction to a scantron test, and more a way to explore. Now I’ll bail out and turn back to the most important word of Young’s essay: imagination. And I’ll add my little YES to that as well.

The last word goes to Dean Young:

“Poetry must assert itself as poetry. Emotion is our greatest primary effectual mode, moving from recollections in tranquility to meditations in emergency, and to speak of emotion as a noun is misleading. It is a verb: feeling, constantly moving, negotiating between the obligation to and liberty from the world, the medium, and instinctual biological as well as philosophical need. Feeling. The preservation of being is an imaginative act.”

Yacov Gabay from http://www.cerisepress.com/

These are simply stunning. The light. The line. I just keep going back to them.

Here's the direct link:

http://www.cerisepress.com/01/02/interiors-and-jerusalem

John Cage - SILENCE

I had a copy, years ago of John Cage’s “III. Communication” from Silence, but I’ve never had a copy of Silence, or of any of his other books. I’ve now rectified that. His influence on the arts has been massive, and one can hear echoes of his process in much that is now. (Even though yes of course Dada and Gertrude Stein were obvious influences on Cage. The question still remains the answer. Or as e.e. cummings would say, “the answer is the more beautiful question” or something like that.)

For instance Michael Palmer’s Notes for Echo Lake.

So to honor my new, old things, here’s the opening snippet from “III. Communication”:


NICHI NICHI KORE KO NICHI: EVERY DAY IS A BEAUTIFUL DAY
What if I ask thirty-two questions?
What if I stop asking now and then?
Will that make things clear?
Is communication something made clear?
What is communication?
Music, what does it communicate?
Is what’s clear to me clear to you?
Is music just sounds?
Then what does it communicate?
Is a truck passing by music?
If I can see it, do I have to hear it too?
If I don’t hear it, does it still communicate?
If while I see it I can’t hear it, but hear something else, say an egg-beater, because I’m inside looking out, does the truck communicate or the egg-beater, which communicates?
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?
What if the ones inside can’t hear very well, would that change my question?
Do you know what I mean when I say inside the school?
Are sounds just sounds or are they Beethoven?
People aren’t sounds, are they?
Is there such a thing as silence?
Even if I get away from people, do I still have to listen to something?
Say I’m off in the woods, do I have to listen to a stream babbling?
Is there always something to hear, never any peace and quiet?
If my head is full of harmony, melody, and rhythm, what happens to me when the telephone rings, to my peace and quiet, I mean?
And if it was European harmony, melody, and rhythm in my head, what has happened to the history of, say, Javanese music, with respect, that is to say, to my head?
Are we getting anywhere asking questions?
Where are we going?
Is this the twenty-eighth question?
Are there any important questions?
“How do you need to cautiously proceed in dualistic terms?”
Do I have two more questions?
And, now, do I have none?

*

*

*

I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY AND I AM SAYING IT

Hadara Bar-Nadav - Show Me Yours

We here at The Laurel Review are pleased to announce that the judge of this year’s Midwest Chapbook Series, Martha Collins, has chosen, Hadara Bar-Nadav’s chapbook Show Me Yours, as this year’s winner. Here's a section from one of the poems from the chapbook:

From “Night, White, and Gold for Louise Nevelson”
6. Assemblage with Night


I’ll make room for you in my bed. Bed of maple, oak, ash, or my sweet favorite cherry. I kneeled in the dust, smelled it on his clothes. My father owned a lumberyard, which means wood was home. Familiar, though I plunged each piece into paint—black, white, and gold—to unhinge the familiar, anonymously at home. Later there was aluminum and steel. Whole monuments storeys and stories high. High stories, stacking one story on another. Each box with letters inside. I turned to Lucite, epoxy, and glass to be closer to the light. I wore silver armor around my neck and walked through the day thinner than light. Darling, I was disappearing. Wind passed through the thin room of me. A tumor inside the room of my mind. So light and thin I could feel my skull lifting at the seams. At last my mind released me. The boxes watched.

A wall full of stories. A wall like a letterpress, like letters being set. Leading like leather and setting. Kerning like kernel and keening. A wall to lean on, simple as hope. Either you would stay there or cut your throat. Such mercy inside shadow and form. Each box, a loving alphabet of its own. Each wall, an assembly of letters left behind. Discarded, I found them on the streets at night.

Look at time and it passes. Like a twitch. In the end, even fabric and paper were knit. The pieces, ready-made and willing to hinge. Assemblage, montage, collage, architectural debris, detritus, free, found on the street, offal, piecemeal, a meal in pieces but a meal nevertheless. Piecing is feminine. I saved each piece to hinge and knit. I gathered each and myself into the landscape. Salvaged a doorknob and a day.


The finalists were:


Jason Bredle, The Book of Evil
Jerry Harp, Creature Confidential
Megan Kaminski, Favored Daughter
Amanda McGuire, The Round of It
Trey Moody, The Quiet Room
Chad Parmenter, His Negatives of Leaves
Adam Peterson, The Flasher
Carter Smith, White Sky
Sathya Sridharan, A Practical and Detailed Account of How to Play Hamlet


A word about the contest: The entries are read blind by the editors of The Laurel Review, and then sent to the outside judge. Because of the regional focus of the chapbook series, and the relatively small pool of chapbooks (this year there was under 150) it is inevitable that several of the finalists will have some connection to the editors of The Laurel Review. (I know Hadara Bar-Nadav and Chad Parmenter quite well, for example. As well, we’ve published some of the finalists in The Laurel Review in the past.)

Devin Johnston - Aversions

I’m finding such wonderful things in my big pile of books.

Aversions
Devin Johnston


Dead


Some find it dangerous
to analyze the dead:

they shut a collie in
the cote, then find him gone—

or else, the blackest plum
proves bitter on the tongue;

an unequated remnant
lodges in the head.

When venturing abroad,
they tilt each name and date

against their silhouettes,
and looking up, take aim:

the landscape loses depth,
collapsing near and far

as plumbing groans when taps
are turned, emitting air.

The bed is hard, the room
is cold, and some have found

the dead, though well-attuned,
are slow to understand.

As You Can't Have Too Many Books

Part III

I know what you’re thinking. You're thinking this is getting absurd. Yes, yes it is.

Bernadette Mayer. Poetry State Forest.
Ted Berrigan. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan.
Ron Padgett. How to Be Perfect.
Bin Ramke. Theory of Mind: New & Selected Poems
Jack Spicer. Hokku Notebook (Chapbook)
Barbara Guest. The Collected Poetry of Barbara Guest.
Donna de la Perrière. True Crime
Leslie Bumstead. Cipher/Civilian
Kaia Sand. Interval
Kevin Davies. Golden Age of Paraphernalia
Anselm Berrigan. Free Cell
Noah Eli Gordon. A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow
Gordon/Wilkinson/Saterstrom. Figures for a Darkroom Voice
Joshua Marie Wilkinson. The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth
Ray Gonzalez. Cool Auditor
Gustaf Sobin. Aura: Last Essays
Ernest Farrés. Edward Hopper
John Koethe. North Point North: New & Selected Poems
Noah Eli Gordon. Novel Pictorial Noise
Devin Johnston. Aversions
Donald Revell. The Bitter Withy
David Shapiro. New & Selected Poems (1965-2006)
Jesse Ball. March Book.

On Editing:

The Fact-Checker’s Bible
The Copy-Editor’s Handbook
Bill Henderson. The Art of Literary Publishing.
The Chicago Manual of Style 15th Edition.
The Public Domain
Adobe Creative Suite 2

How to Make Embryonic a Good Album

How to make The Flaming Lips’s Embryonic into a good album:

First, relax. If you’ve ever liked The Flaming Lips in the past, you’ll more than likely like this album. You might even love it. You just have to find it. In order to do that, you have to buy Embryonic. You will get:

1. Convinced Of The Hex 3:54
2. The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine 4:10
3. Evil 5:38
4. Aquarius Sabotage 2:10
5. See The Leaves 4:24
6. If 2:04
7. Gemini Syringes 3:41
8. Your Bats 2:34
9. Powerless 6:57
10. The Ego's Last Stand 5:40
11. I Can Be A Frog 2:14
12. Sagittarius Silver Announcement 2:58
13. Worm Mountain 5:21
14. Scorpio Sword 2:01
15. The Impulse 4:06
16. Silver Trembling Hands 3:59
17. Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast 3:44
18. Watching The Planets

OK, now, step two. Look around on amazon.com for the non-album tracks. You will find three. As a Lips fan, you should know this already. The Flaming Lips always have extra tracks floating around. Often these tracks are as good or better than most of the tracks on their actual albums. This year is no different. Buy them. They should be these:

Anything You Say Now, I Believe You (Amazon MP3 Exclusive)
What Does It Mean? (Non-Album Track)
UFOs Over Baghdad (Non-Album Track)

This will cost you $2.97.

Good. Now it’s time for step three. Take these tracks off the CD:

4. Aquarius Sabotage 2:10
7. Gemini Syringes 3:41
11. I Can Be A Frog 2:14
14. Scorpio Sword 2:01
17. Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast 3:44

Two of them are short, freak-out instrumentals, two are ambient instrumentals over a spoken text from a scientist-sounding guy worried about things such as whether or not there is a beginning to things and how many options there are in any given situation, and one is a sort little ditty where Wayne Coyne sings a duet of sorts with a woman on a telephone who imitates animal noises. All these songs are interesting enough and worth your time, but we’re out to make this a good album, and in order to do so, eggs must be broken.

OK, now mix the three new tracks into the line-up like so:

1. Convinced Of The Hex 3:54
2. The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine 4:10
3. Evil 5:38
Anything You Say Now, I Believe You (Amazon MP3 Exclusive)
5. See The Leaves 4:24
6. If 2:04
What Does It Mean? (Non-Album Track)
8. Your Bats 2:34
9. Powerless 6:57
10. The Ego's Last Stand 5:40
12. Sagittarius Silver Announcement 2:58
13. Worm Mountain 5:21
UFOs Over Baghdad (Non-Album Track)
15. The Impulse 4:06
16. Silver Trembling Hands 3:59
18. Watching The Planets

Now you have a good album. Some might want to make an even better album, by taking off track 15. The Impulse 4:06, but I think that would be going too far. I consider this track to be the hidden gem on he album. Granted the vocal is almost totally obliterated by a synth effect (maybe The Flaming Lips borrowed Neil Young’s vocoder from the early 80s?), but this allows the listener to make up his or her own words and sing along, or to at least, as the song seems to be saying, “try and try and try and try and try, oh yeah.”

When you are done, you should have a 16-track, very good album, which should cost as little as $12.00, depending on how you purchase it, and an album much more in line with how the Lips first envisioned it, where it was going to be a mix of heavy drum and bass over-compressed freak-outs along with some Lips-style pop numbers.

Stand out tracks: “Convinced of the Hex,” “Silver Trembling Hands,” “What Does it Mean?,” “Worm Mountain,” and “Watching the Planets.”

It’s worth the effort. Trust me. Remember, one must suffer for one's art.

The Rather Daunting Pile of Books

I’m rather daunted with the massive pile of books I have across my desk and little table and window sill. It’s going to take a long time to make my way through this pile, which also includes several books I got this summer, before the BIG BUY began. And I have more on the way. MORE ON THE WAY. Oh my.

Well, I’ve finished the Padgett, and enjoyed it so much I ordered two more books from him, along with some Marjorie Welish and a book on the “second Generation New York School” that Kevin Killian recommended on amazon.com. I’ve found I like most everything Killian recommends.

I’ve gotten a little way into Bernadette Mayer’s Poetry State Forest. I’m quite envious of her ability, along with Padgett’s, of such an easeful voice. They make me want to relax. Maybe they even make me relax. Or help. Anyway, I’m feeling relaxed, even in the face of this daunting pile of books (and of course my usual work—why can’t people just give me a pass on all this work, so I can get to my reading?).

I’m also reading the current, MFA issue, of Poets & Writers. The only thing that’s really struck me so far is the little essay from Dean Young, from a forthcoming book of essays on poetry. That’s some interesting news of which I wasn’t aware.

Here’s another poem from Ron Padgett’s How to Be Perfect:


Elegy for No One


Time passes slowly when you’re lost in paradise,
then gradually slows down to a disappearance

but only for a moment, as if inside a footstep
that pauses on the stair to wait for its shadow

to catch up, for it had not yet vanished as
the other had, and you have the idea you

wanted to have had when
the candlelight took away the distance,

leaving only the residue of dimness and fading
falling to one side and off. Time goes past or you

go past time, the outcome is the same if you think
of it that way, but if you don’t think at all

the footstep will have existed on the stair
without you, as it always has, and perfectly so.

Ron Padgett - How to Be Perfect

I’ve fallen in love with the poetry of Ron Padgett. I was aware of his work only generally, having (I think?) seen something in one of the Best American Poetry anthologies. So I put him on my big “to buy” list. I, fairly randomly, chose his 2007 book, How to Be Perfect. I started reading it last night, and I've gone all crazy with it.

Here are a couple poems at random:


For Morris Golde

It might have been when
I was standing in front of
Kierkegaard’s grave thinking
that his name means
churchyard that Moris
Golde was breathing his
last in St. Vincent’s, where
Jimmy died too, and what
was I doing then—and
what am I doing now?
Death throws everything
into high relief, itself
the highest—its uppermost
crag is where we sigh,
relax, and stretch out as
far as the mind can go.
I’m partway there is
A “deep” thought I can do
without, though I just
had it. I wish it would
get lighter faster. If it
were two weeks ago it
would be bright outside
instead of blue-gray.
Morris, you old thing.




Bastille Day

The first time I saw Paris
I went to see where the Bastille
had been, and though
I saw the column there
I was too aware that
the Bastille was not there:
I did not know how
to see the emptiness.
People go to see
the missing Twin Towers
and seem to like feeling
the lack of something.
I do not like knowing
that my mother no longer
exists, or the feeling
of knowing. Excuse me
for comparing my mother
to large buildings. Also
for talking about absence.
The red and gray sky
above the rooftops
is darkening and the inhabitants
are hastening home for dinner.
I hope to see you later.

Rae Armantrout's Poetry

I’ve been a fan of Rae Amantrout’s poetry for years, so I was excited to see Versed as a finalist for the National Book Award. I’ve had a close relationship with this book this year, as I was starting to write a review of it for Jacket, when Rae Armantrout chose my poems for the Boston Review contest. My friends told me it wouldn’t do her book service to have me publish a review of it right after my poems chosen by her came out in Boston Review. After a little bit of thinking (I’d already started the review . . .), I realized they were right. I also realized I could easily toss parts of the review up here on my blog. So here goes. This was the basic approach I was going to take:

Rae Armantrout’s poetry enacts a doubled vision, as it turns both outwardly to the things and events of the world, and inwardly, to the closeness of human desire and being. Or, perhaps said a better way, she brings a “direct treatment of the thing” as straight-on and direct as I’ve ever seen. The things of her poems are the things of the world, and of being in the world. The was a caveat of after “direct treatment of the thing,” in the Imagist directives, and I think this is where Armantrout’s work can be seen as a unification of tendencies, the caveat goes: be it “objective or subjective.” This “objective or subjective” bit is where Armantrout is truly amazing, as her poems tend to change this “or” to “and,” existing as both objective and subjective, in a constant state of assertion and interrogation. This makes for a richly complex perspective, one teetering at the very brink of elusiveness, a vantage point of seeing and saying that is truly hers alone.

And here’s one of the poems to which I was going to want to pay attention:


Anchor


“Widely expected,
if you will,
cataclysm.”

Things I’d say,
am saying,

to persons no longer
present.

Yards away trim junipers
make their customary
bows.

“Oh, no thank you”
to any of it.

If you watch me
from increasing distance,

I am writing this
always


*


People are often talking about Armantrout as a funny poet. That her poems are funny. Sometimes her poems are funny, yes, but I think it’s in poems where she’s anything but funny, that her achievement can be seen most clearly. How she can be both objective and subjective at once, as in the above poem, where yes, if one were to recede from the scene of her writing at the speed of light, one could theoretically remain in the presence of her writing this. It incorporates wit, yes, but it's as chilling as it is funny.

This same sort of objective clarity can be seen in this poem:


Around


Time is placed
to draw itself
out,
permit itself
pendulous loops,

to allow them
meaning,

this meaning,

as it goes
along.

*

Chuck and I are pleased
to have found a spot
where my ashes can be scattered.
It looks like a construction site
now
but it’s adjacent
to a breathtaking, rocky coast.
Chuck sees places
where he might snorkel.
We’re being shown through
by a sort of realtor.
We’re interested but can’t get her
to fix the price.

*

“The future
is all around us.”

It’s a place,

anyplace
where we don’t exist.

[NOTE: in the above poem, lines 3 (the single word "out") and 11 (the single word "along") are to be indented to the drop point of the lines above them. I couldn't get my formatting to make it work for some reason. Apologies. When I get it sorted out I'll come back and fix it. I've gotten it to work in the past.]

Roman Jakobson on Metaphor & Metonymy

Matthew Zapruder mentioned Roman Jakobson in regards to my post of a clip from Rosmarie Waldrep’s Dissonance, so I went looking for it.

I found this description of Roman Jakobson’s “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Disturbances” from “Jakobson, method, and metaphor: a Wittgensteinian critique”:

In his well-known essay "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" Roman Jakobson presents a theory of language based on certain empirical observations and discoveries. Jakobson examines aphasia, a disorder of language use, which he characterizes as consisting of two more fundamental types of disorder. These coincide with what he considers to be the bases and underlying processes of languages as such. These are the metaphoric and metonymic processes that govern all verbal activity and indeed even human behavior in general. Every case of aphasia involves an impairment of the metaphoric or metonymic activities, and every case exhibits at least one of these traits. Normally these two processes occur continuously and interactively in language, though the individual speaker places greater emphasis on one or the other in accord with his or her preferences and predilections. Metaphor and metonymy are the defining poles of language: all linguistic expression lies somewhere between these extremes.

Looking around a bit further, I found this, a messy scan from the 1971 revision of the essay (I think), available here:

http://phoenixandturtle.net/excerptmill/jakobson.htm


THE METAPHORIC AND METONYMIC POLES


The varieties of aphasia are numerous and diverse, but all of them lie between the two polar types just described. Every form of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment, more or less severe, either of the faculty for selection and substitution or for combination and contexture. The former affliction involves a deterioration of metalinguistic operations, while the latter damages the capacity for maintaining the hierarchy of linguistic units. The relation of similarity is suppressed in the former, the relation of'" contiguity in the latter type of aphasia. Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder, and metonymy to the contiguity disorder.

The development of a discourse may take place along two differ­ent semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The METAPHORIC way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the METONYMIC way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. In aphasia one or the other of these two processes is restricted or totally blocked - an effect which makes the study of aphasia particularly illuminat­ing for the linguist. In normal verbal behavior both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes over the other.

In a well-known psychological test, children are confronted with some noun and told to utter the first verbal response that comes into their heads. In this experiment two opposite linguistic pre­dilections are invariably exhibited: the response is intended either as a substitute for, or as' a complement to, the stimulus. In the latter case the stimulus and the response together form a proper syntactic construction, most usually a sentence. These two types of reaction have been labeled SUBSTITUTIVE and PREDICATIVE.

To the stimulus hut one response was burnt out; another, is a poor little house. Both reactions are predicative; but the first creates a purely narrative context, while in the second there is a double' connection with the subject hut: on the one hand, a positional (namely, syntactic) contiguity, and on the other a semantic similarity.

The same stimulus produced the following substitutive reactions: the tautology hut; the synonyms cabin and hovel; the antonym palace, and the metaphors den and burrow. The capacity of two words to replace one another is an instance of positional similarity, and, in addition, all these responses are linked to the stimulus by semantic similarity (or contrast). Metonymical responses to the same stimulus, such as thatch litter, or poverty, combine and con­trast the positional similarity with semantic contiguity.

In manipulating these two kinds of connection (similarity and contiguity) in both their aspects (positional and semantic) - select­ing, combining, and ranking them - an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences. In verbal art the interaction of these two elements is especially pronounced. Rich material for the study of this relationship is to be found in verse patterns which require a compulsory PARALLELISM between adjacent lines, for example in Biblical poetry or in the Finnic and, to some extent, the Russian oral traditions. This provides an objective criterion of what in the given speech com­munity acts as a correspondence. Since on any verbal level ­morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological - either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity) can appear - and each in either of two aspects, an impressive range of possible configurations is created. Either of the two gravitational poles may prevail. In Russian lyrical songs, for example, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic way is preponderant. In poetry there are various motives which determine the choice between these alternants. The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called 'realistic' trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details. In the scene of Anna Karenina's suicide Tolstoi's artistic attention is focused on the heroine's handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches "hair on the upper lip" and "bare shoulders" are used by the same writer to stand for the female characters to whom these features belong.

The alternative predominance of one or the other of these two processes is by no means confined to verbal art. The same oscilla­tion occurs in sign systems other than language.25 A salient example from the history of painting is the manifestly metonymical orientation of cubism, where the object is transformed into a set of synecdoches; the surrealist painters responded with a patently metaphorical attitude. Ever since the productions of D. W. Griffith, the art of the cinema, with its highly developed capacity for chang­ing the angle, perspective, and focus of 'shots', has broken with the tradition of the theater and ranged an unprecedented variety of synecdochic 'close-ups' and metonymic 'set-ups' in general. In such motion pictures as those of Charlie Chaplin and Eisen­stein,26 these devices in turn were overlayed by a novel, metaphoric "montage" with his "lap dissolves" - the filmic similes.

Jay Farrar & Benjamin Gibbard - The Flaming Lips

This week I’ve gotten two new albums I’m pleased with:


Jay Farrar & Benjamin Gibbard
One Fast Move or I’m Gone

For me, Jay Farrar is the most infuriating figure in contemporary music. I think he’s the best songwriter of his generation, and yet, his performances of his songs leave a lot to be desired, mostly in the fact that he sings EVERYTHING the very same way. His phrasing is predictable and monotonous.

If Farrar would get (or would have gotten) the covers treatment Dylan and Leonard Cohen got back when they were starting out, I think he’d be a household name in both Country and Rock circles.

One Fast Move or I’m Gone is a great example. Farrar, from what I’ve been able to find out, wrote 11 of the 12 songs on this album (Gibbard wrote one, and all the lyrics are derived from Jack Kerouac), though he and Gibbard trade off on the vocals. And the expressiveness of Gibbard’s delivery makes his tracks stand out, sounding at moments like lost acoustic tracks from The Grateful Dead, and, freshening Farrar’s vocals, making the album simply beautiful. This album is better, in similar ways to the wonderful Monsters of Folk album, than albums by its individual members (Death Cab for Cutie which mostly gets too sweet and pop for me, and Son Volt, which I love but find monotonous by turns).

Stand out tracks: California Zephyr, One Fast Move or I’m Gone, These Roads Don’t Move, Big Sur, Sea Engines, Breathe Our Iodine


The Flaming Lips.
Embryonic.

It’s too long, of course, which seems to be part of the project. As well, it’s quite aggressive in its arrangement and production – a lot of furious drums that come and go, along with a buzz-saw guitar and heavily-processed vocals. And then, for all that (in spite of? Because of?), it’s quite effective, by turns. It seems like an intentionally imperfect album, which fascinates me.

Stand out tracks: Convinced of the Hex, The Ego’s Last Stand, Silver Trembling Hands, and Watching the Planets.




Quick Top 10 Recommendations (so far this year):

1. Monsters of Folk – Monsters of Folk
2. Jay Farrar & Benjamin Gibbard – One Fast Move or I’m Gone
3. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
4. Son Volt – American Central Dust
5. Clem Snide – Hungry Bird
6. The Flaming Lips – Embryonic
7. Andrew Bird – Noble Beast
8. A Camp – Colonia
9. Jason Lytle - Yours Truly, the Commuter
10. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night of the Soul

Cal Bedient - Days of Unwilling

Currently I’m bedeviled by Cal Bedient’s Days of Unwilling. What a tour de something or other. Every time I think I’m on board, I find myself instantly adrift. Whenever I think I’ve grasped the tone, the tone escapes and builds a little bonfire out of my assumptions. Am I in contention with this book? Well, no, not exactly, it’s more that I’m witnessing something amazing, but what it is, I’m not sure. An investigation of perversion, maybe? Or investigation as a form of perversion? It’s fascinating, whatever it is.

Examples from the text don’t equal the experience of the totality, but here goes a poem anyway:


“NOTE THE WREATH OF HAIR AT THE BACK OF HER HEAD, WHICH THOUGH FASTENED BY A SPIRAL FILLET, ESCAPES AT LAST AND FLIES OFF LOOSE IN A SWEEPING CURVE”


Water in its ruins I would surely sponge what I could.
But leaving out the differences on Friday there is some sense in that.
General or particular, you choose, dear, I have to sit down a minute
in the wounded operating sound of this breathing.

You ask, “Can you look into the eyes of a cornered rat
and listen to its chitter as you pick up a stone
without yourself becoming something small and terrified?”
Today, anyway, let me rest like metal strings softening to the rags

of a clavichord’s bing bung, so reminiscent, don’t you think,
of musical glasses, in their “plaintive, disembodied, melancholy” tones?
Yet even if breathing’s a pile in sequence, like rain,
shouldn’t one try to connect up extremes in a mention like sailing

when, suddenly, the mast leans down and gulps salt
water without considering a single person’s feelings?
I have an ache of excellent bits of many things, like a letter
for all the family, also days when no boat approaches to signal

your particular beauty on a background so purely unbreathing.

Big Pile Of Books Pt. 2

Well, I’ve not made it very far at all into my pile of books, and yikes, in comes another huge batch. Here’s the second batch below. One more batch, I think, to go, and then I’m going to go back to not having any money for books for a long, long time. For this one moment in time, though, I can pretend to be well-read. As you can see, I’m trying to plug some holes that go back a little ways, with the Silliman and O’Hara and Spicer . . . and Oppen . . .

One thing I’ve wanted for a long time is the Kenneth Fearing Selected Poems. I giggled opening it for the first time the other day. Good times. And why three books by Lars Gustafsson? That, my friend, was a mistake. I didn’t know which one or two I should get, and I accidently ordered all three.

As well, having the Waldrop arrive today was excellent after yesterday’s news about the National Book Awards finalists. This is the first year in a long time where I actually like a majority of the finalist batch. Very nice. It caused me to go back to Rae Armantrout’s excellent Versed for a while this afternoon. It’s such a good book. But, you knew I'd say that, as I’ve been saying such things about her work for years. This is a good week.

Buying Spree Pt. 2

Keith Waldrop. Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy
Kenneth Fearing. Selected Poems
Mary Jo Bang. The Bride of E
Lars Gustafsson. Elegies & Other Poems
Lars Gustafsson. The Stillness of the World Before Bach
Rosmarie Waldrop. Dissonance (if you are interested)
Don Share. Squandermania
Michael Theune, ed. Structure & Surprise
Peter Gizzi & Kevin Killian, eds. My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer
Richard Deming. Let’s Not Call it Consequence
John Tranter. Urban Myths: 210 Poems
Frank O’Hara. Selected Poems
George Oppen. Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers
Sasha Steensen. The Method
Oni Buchanan. Spring
Ron Silliman. the Alphabet
Beth Bachmann. TEMPER
Lars Gustafson. A Time in Xanadu
Brenda Hillman. Practical Water
Fredrik Nyberg. A Different Practice
Katie Ford. Colosseum
Michael Gizzi. New Depths of Deadpan
Dan Beachy-Quick. This Nest, Swift Passerine
Joshua Poteat. Illustrating the Machine that Makes the World
C.D. Wright. One Big Self: An Investigation
Frank Stanford. The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You


So what did I miss? What do I still need to get?

And what’s in that big third order that hasn’t come in yet?

National Book Award Finalists

Nominated in the category for poetry were:


Rae Armantrout for Versed

Ann Lauterbach for Or to Begin Again

Carl Phillips for Speak Low

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon for Open Interval

Keith Waldrop for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy

Rosmarie Waldrop on Metaphor & Metonymy

Rosmarie Waldrop sees a tension in American poetry, one that has been growing in recent years. I think what she says gets to the very heart of the matter. As she sees it, it’s a tension between two tendencies all poets share, the call to metaphor and the call to metonymy. As a primer, here’s Wikipedia on Metaphor vs Metonymy:

“Metonymy works by the contiguity (association) between two concepts, whereas metaphor works by the similarity between them. When people use metonymy, they do not typically wish to transfer qualities from one referent to another as they do with metaphor: there is nothing press-like about reporters or crown-like about a monarch, but "the press" and "the crown" are both common metonyms.”

So now we’re ready. Here goes:

From Dissonance (if you are interested). U of Alabama. 2005.

COMPOSITION AS EXPLANATION

In the beginning there is Gertrude Stein, for whom composition is explanation. I could also say, in the beginning is Aristotle: “the fable is simply this, the combination of the incidents.”

*

I don’t even have thoughts, I say, I have method that make language think, take over and me by the hand. Into sense or offence, syntax stretched across rules, relations of force, fluid the dip of the plumb line, the pull of eyes . . . . No beginnings. All unrepentant middle.

*

And none of these forms are “organic form.” None rely primarily on metaphor, though from the Romantics on poetry has been more or less identified with it.

*

Olson has called this vertical tendency of metaphor “the suck of symbol.” Metaphor as hotline to transcendence, to divine meaning which casts the poet in the role of special being, a priest or prophet. We know these ideas very well. They have dominated the thinking about poetry from Romanticism to the present.

*

Now it happens that these two emphases, on metaphor or on metonymy, are not simply differences between two styles, but coincide with the two dimensions of every speech act, selection and combination . . . . Words always have a double reference: (1) to the code and (2) to the context.

*

. . . literary language tends to divide according to an emphasis on one axis or the other. In rhetorical terms, an emphasis on metaphor or an emphasis on metonymy (also in the large sense: any relation by contiguity). Some writers are more concerned with finding “the right word,” the perfect metaphor; others are more concerned with what “happens between” the words, with composition, exploring the sentence and its boundaries, slidings, the gaps between fragments, the shadow zone of silence, of margins.

*

I say “more” concerned because it’s a matter of emphasis. Of course we are always concerned with both. And what makes our moment now so interesting is that we seem in a period of tension between the two emphases.

*

COMPOSITION AS PROCESS; OR, SHALL WE ESCAPE ANALOGY

Implications

If we now look at the current pull away from organic form that began with Stein, toward an emphasis on combination, the implications are very different:

(1) Nothing is given. (Though all the elements are: there is nothing new under the sun.) Everything remains to be constructed.

Creeley: “a world that’s constantly coming into being . . . [the poetry is] in the activity” (in analogy to action painting).

(2) The poet does not know beforehand what the poem is going to say, where the poem is going to take her.

Barbara Guest: “The dark identity of the poem.”
John Cage: “The importance of being perplexed.”

The poem is not so much “expression” as a cognitive process that, to some extent, changes even the poet.

So the poem is not so much a mirror as “a window, opposite direction, lean out, not thrown back on yourself. A window, a lens gathering language [as the Objectivists meant it], a focus to burn. Conjunction and connotation.

Form/composition is not an extension of content (Olson/Creeley), but is, on the contrary, primary. It is the form that generates the content.

(3) The aim is not unifying (the one right word, the one perfect metaphor), but to open the form to the multiplicity of contexts.

(4) The transcendence is not upward, but horizontal, contextual. It is the transcendence of language with its infinite possibilities, infinite connections, and its charge of the past. In other words, no split between spirit and matter.

Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961) - Selected Poems

Kenneth Fearing
Continuous Performance


The place seems strange, more strange than ever, and the times are still more out of joint;
Perhaps there has been some slight mistake?

It is like arriving at the movies late, as usual, just as the story ends:
There is a carnival on the screen. It is a village in springtime, that much is clear. But why has the heroine suddenly slapped his face? And what does it mean, the sequence with the limousine and the packed valise? Very strange.
Then love wins. Fine. And it is the end. O.K.
But how do we reach that carnival again? And when will that springtime we saw return once more? How, and when?

Now, where a moment ago there was a village square, with trees and laughter, the story resumes itself in arctic regions among blinding snows. How can this be?
What began in the long and shining limousine seems closing now, fantastically, in a hansom cab.
The amorous business that ended with happiness forever after is starting all over again, this time with a curse and a pistol shot. It is not so good.

Nevertheless, though we know it all and cannot be fooled, though we know the end and nothing deceives us,
Nevertheless we shall stay and see what it meant, the mystery of the packed valise,
Why curses change at last to kisses and to laughter in a limousine (for this is fixed, believe me, fixed),
How simply and how swiftly arctic blizzards melt into blowing trees and a village fair.

And stay to see the Hydra’s head cut off, and grown again, and incredibly multiplied,
And observe how Sisyphus fares when he has once more almost reached the top,
How Tantalus again will nearly eat and drink.

And learn how Alph the sacred river flows, in Xanadu, forever to a sunless sea,
How, from the robes of simple flesh, fate emerges from new and always more fantastic fate.

Until again we have the village scene. (And now we know the meaning fo the packed valise)
And it is a carnival again. In spring.

Aase Berg - Remainland

Remainland: selected poems of Aase Berg
trans Johannes Göransson

It’s all a matter of tone, that elusive tone that winds through Aase Berg’s poetry, or through her poetry as translated by Johannes Göransson. It continually recedes from me as I approach. It fascinates me. The cartoonlike horror (most pronounced in With Deer, from which "In the Guinea Pig Cave" is taken). The broken language, welded together that runs through all her work.


In the Guinea Pig Cave


There lay the guinea pigs. There lay the guinea pigs and waited with blood around their mouths like my sister. There lay the guinea pigs and smelled bad in the cave. There lay my sister and swelled and ached and throbbed. There lay the guinea pigs and ached all over and their legs stuck straight up like beetles and they looked depraved and were blue under their eyes as from months of debauchery. My sister puked calmly and indifferently, it ran slowly out of her slack mouth without her moving a single nerve. And the cave was warm as teats and full of autumn leaves and beneath the soil lay the arm of a mannequin. There lay the guinea pigs and ached and were made of dough. There lay the guinea pigs beside the knives that would slice them up like loaves. And my sister with lips of blueberries, soil and mush. In the distance, the siren bleated inhumanly. That is where the guinea pigs lay and waited with blood around their mouths and contorted bodies. They waited. And I was tired in my whole stomach from meat dough and guinea-pig loaf and I knew that they would take revenge on me.





from Transfer Fat




Cut the keel
in harebroad pool
cut fin in fat
fishtailborn




Let time rock calmly in hare
let carry and hold the calm hare
let skull rock calmly in the skeleton bowl




In the shell runs the nerves’ thin ghost
In the shell the nerves’ thin ghost clears time for fat
it will take many thousand years to raise fat