guest post: Kenneth Patchen

Biography of Southern Rain
--Kenneth Patchen

Rain's all right. The boys who physic
through town on freights won't kick
if it comes; they often laugh then, talking
about the girl who lived down the block,
and how her hair was corn-yellow gold that God
could use for money. But rain,
like memory, can come in filthy clothes too.

The whole upstairs of space caved in that night;
as though a drunken giant had stumbled over the sky -
and all the tears in the world came through.
It was that. Like everyone hurt crying at once.
Trees bent to it, their arms a gallows for all
who had ever died in pain, or were hungry, since
the first thief turned to Christ, cursing.....

Then, out of the rain, a girl's voice - her hand
on my arm. "Buddy, help me get this train."
Her voice was soft.....a cigarette after coffee.
I could hear the clickdamnitclick of the wheels;
saw the headlight writing something on the rain.
Then I saw her face - its bleeding sores - I didn't
ask her if she had ever been in love
or had ever heard of Magdalen and Mary
or why she wanted to leave that town.

Do you see what I mean about the rain?

guest post: Kenneth Fearing

Green Light
    --Kenneth Fearing

    Bought at the drug store, very cheap; and later pawned.
    After a while, heard on the street; seen in the park.
    Familiar, but not quite recognized.
    Followed and taken home and slept with.
    Traded or sold.  Or lost.

    Bought again at the corner drug store,
    At the green light, at the patient’s demand, at nine o’clock.
    Re-read and memorized and re-wound.
    Found unsuitable.
    Smashed, put together, and pawned.

    Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen
     by the light of day;
    Carefully observed one night by a secret agent of the Greek
     Hydraulic Mining Commission, in plain clothes, off
     duty.
    The agent, in broken English, took copious notes.  Which he
     lost.
    Strange, and yet not extraordinary.
    Sad, but true.

    True, or exaggerated, or true;
    As it is true that the people laugh and the sparrows fly;
    As it is exaggerated that the people change, and the sea stays;
    As it is that the people go;
    As the lights go on and it is night and it is serious, and just
     the same;
    As some one dies and it is serious, and the same;
    As a girl knows and it is small, and true;
    As the corner hardware clerk might know and it is true, and
     pointless;
    As an old man knows and it is grotesque, but true;
    As the people laugh, as the people think, as the people
     change,
    It is serious and the same, exaggerated or true.

    Bought at the drug store down the street
    Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always
     night, or day;
    Bought to use as a last resort,
    Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
    Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o’clock.
    Borrowed or bought.  To look well.  To ennoble.  To prevent
     disease.  To entertain.  To have.
    Broken or sold.  Or given away.  Or used and forgotten.  Or
     lost.

guest post: William Carlos Williams

Tract
--William Carlos Williams

I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral--
for you have it over a troop
of artists--
unless one should scour the world--
you have the ground sense necessary.

See! the hearse leads.
I begin with a design for a hearse.
For Christ's sake not black--
nor white either--and not polished!
Let it be weathered--like a farm wagon--
with gilt wheels (this could be
applied fresh at small expense)
or no wheels at all:
a rough dray to drag over the ground.

Knock the glass out!
My God--glass, my townspeople!
For what purpose? Is it for the dead
to look out or for us to see
how well he is housed or to see
the flowers or the lack of them--
or what?
To keep the rain and snow from him?
He will have a heavier rain soon:
pebbles and dirt and what not.
Let there be no glass--
and no upholstery, phew!
and no little brass rollers
and small easy wheels on the bottom--
my townspeople what are you thinking of?

A rough plain hearse then
with gilt wheels and no top at all.
On this the coffin lies
by its own weight.

                   No wreaths please--
especially no hot house flowers.
Some common memento is better,
something he prized and is known by:
his old clothes--a few books perhaps--
God knows what! You realize
how we are about these things
my townspeople--
something will be found--anything
even flowers if he had come to that.
So much for the hearse.

For heaven's sake though see to the driver!
Take off the silk hat! In fact
that's no place at all for him--
up there unceremoniously
dragging our friend out to his own dignity!
Bring him down--bring him down!
Low and inconspicuous! I'd not have him ride
on the wagon at all--damn him--
the undertaker's understrapper!
Let him hold the reins
and walk at the side
and inconspicuously too!

Then briefly as to yourselves:
Walk behind--as they do in France,
seventh class, or if you ride
Hell take curtains! Go with some show
of inconvenience; sit openly--
to the weather as to grief.
Or do you think you can shut grief in?
What--from us? We who have perhaps 
nothing to lose? Share with us
share with us--it will be money
in your pockets.

                  Go now
I think you are ready.

D_ Likes the Brandy; S_ Is Pretty Sure You Spiked It

Both Silliman and Davie believe that pure syntax can serve to power poetry, over and above referentiality or traditional verse techniques (what Davie calls "audible rhthyms of versification" and Silliman calls "formal constraints"). But they seem to diverge when it comes to the goals of this power. For Davie, "poetic syntax" delivers "pleasure." Whatever the five syntactical varieties, the goal is this poetic "pleasure." But what is Silliman's goal?

He likes the idea of foregrounding language, of linguistic machines. Maybe it's innovation or the simpering "revolutionary" spirit of mid twentieth century postmodernism. Like when he talks about Jakobson, he explains modern signifier/signified drop off in a pretty fist-raised, power-to-the-people sort of tone: "..the signifier, freed suddenly from its servitude to an integrating hierarchy of syntactic relations, finds itself drained of any signified" (76). And the Frederic Jameson quote that follows is further in line with rah-rah, down with privileged expression etc. Silliman gets even more blatant when he mentions the "tyranny of the signified" on the last page. Yikes. Hold me. I'm scared.

I think this goal idea is important. When Davie goes to describe the five varieties of syntax, he is trying to figure out what delights him about poetry--he wants poetry to delight him. Silliman, ever the engineer, doesn't privilege his needs, seeks instead to analyze them. But I get the feeling that Silliman's is a pleasure soaked in underdog politics. And I don't mean "political" in the casual sense of the "current political scene," but in a broader reference to how ideologies always try to win out and how things assemble into hierarchies. Even--if I'm allowed to be totally lame--New Sentence implies the glee of revolt. Or, you know, indignant protest.

Why is this important? Well, I'm not sure. Let's think about it. Notice that Davie and Silliman both give early examples of how syntactical tweaks, beyond verbal or logical techniques, can direct feeling.

Davie's example:

Socrates is wise
Wisdom belongs to Socrates

Silliman's example:

Someone called Douglas over.
He was killed by someone called Douglas over in Oakland.

What's the difference between these two examples? First, Davie is quoting I.A. Richards, while Silliman just made his up. But that's not really important. I think the choice of example reflects concern. Unconscious concern. What are we concerned with? What is driving us to puzzle through, to figure things out. What is the urgency? Or is it not like urgency; is it delight? When Davie ponders Socrates, tries to figure out how the different sentences ripple differently, it seems to me like an abstract sort of consideration, planted in the realm of "thought game" and outside, say, modern social concerns. But Silliman's Douglas and Oakland story is violent, even up-to-date, if we consider all the connotations arising from the mention of a city like Oakland. Other examples of this latent concern with, I don't know, poking norms: Silliman's urge to remove the family unit from the Watten example, his disapproval of the arrogance behind a narrative "I," his sneer quotes when referring to "some 'higher order' of meaning." You get the idea.

Is the New Sentence an example of syntax like mathematics? You would think so, what with Silliman whipping up a list of eight qualities that are solely compositional (91). But when I read Carla Harryman or Lyn Hejinian, I get a strong whiff of syntax like music, that swimming through a feeling without describing it, pure feeling translation, unconcerned by definition with making sure the audience knows all the subjects involved, where the feeling comes from, all that. Likewise, the New Sentence could rock the objectivity. The Douglas example, maybe: the (somewhat) innocent Douglas interpellation is suddenly surrounded by all this harsh news, the way gangs (or police) surround a beating victim, the way the media (and we) vulture a subject. Yet I don't think the New Sentence could serve subjective syntax or dramatic syntax: too much reference, too much necessary "I," too much privileged feeling.

Hmm, what about feeling? Davie has a lovely quote from Coleridge about feelings and fleeing. I find the first part of Davie's summary sentence pretty eloquent: "This fleeing in a circle, and being overtaken by the feelings from which the poet flees ... " True stuff there, right? Silliman, in the voice of the engineer, analyzes sentence joints, sentence constructions, yet in the New Sentences of Hejinian, oh wow: how beautifully she winds around feelings, roundabouts feelings, carves the circuits to nab the electricity. Harryman too, in the "For She" poem that Silliman quotes and now I'm going to quote:

"In spite of the cars and the smoke and the many languages, the radio and the appliances, the flat broad buzz of the tracks, the anxiety with which the eyes move to meet the phone and all the arbitrary colors. I am just the same. Unplug the glass, face the docks."

Okay, I would have to carefully suspend my heart to think about that solely in terms of construction. But I suppose we do, sometimes. Right? When we are contracted to build effective electric chairs or cribs? O'Hara, again, with the idea that your feelings for the person shouldn't get in the way of your feelings for the poem. And Davie I imagine in isolation, his cap of brandy, mmmm-ing with great pleasure over some obscure Coleridge poem, eyes deliberately confined to the garden (in that dangerous suburban 1950s way). And here is Silliman, full of political zeal, nothing outside of ideology, digging under revolutionary content and looking for a revolutionary structure, a revolutionary skeleton. Yet trying, almost like Davie, to keep his language neutral, scientific. Since feelings have really loud ideological implications, that means ignoring feelings. Davie, moving his feelings to dusty attics, keeps feelings and ignores ideology.

So I don't quite buy Silliman's assertion, made while quoting Stein's point about emotional paragraphs and non-emotional sentences, that emotions exist only in orders "higher" than the sentence. That he's not concerned with such higher orders. Remember the sneer quotes of "higher meaning?" Makes you wonder. My favorite New Sentence stuff does a hybrid sort of thing: intellectually untangles the tyranny of narrative, unpacks the formal feeling with revolutionary zeal, but actually exposes in its feast of sentence forms and sentence joints a feeling goal. Not a delight goal, definitely a political goal. The way a montage frees you from having to care about a story.

Maybe like a potluck where you don't know what anybody else brought. You are still charged with politics: who am I going to offend if I don't like their pickled beets? But you are also liberating yourself from politics, not fleeing them, but feeling a little more free to announce "I hate these pickled beets and I don't care what that means to my complicated relationship with everybody in the world." You get at the single feelings with more clarity, with more bravado even, aware that you are a flawed and subjective and offensive taster and that everything is charged with connotations, but almost able to get at that pure taste again, where you don't have to worry. And why is a pure taste important? Is that a sophistic goal? I don't know. But something's going on there. I don't think New Sentences, or any syntax like music or mathematics, stays on the level of "cool syntax! new syntax! i like your syntax!" We are wanting something. And maybe, hmm, there is a guilt?

Don't Keep it Hid

Thanks to high school, I missed the line about coffee-spoons. Did you? At the end of Wednesday's class, we all groaned about our high school poetry explication experiences. For sure: high school skews and skewers poetry. Or, really, poems. After my AP English class mucked with Prufrock, I thought the whole poem was just Eliot's half-ass Horatio monologue. I tuned out. But we never talked about Howl, so that stayed fine. Poetry kept a pulse.

Later, when I actually read Prufrock, I felt the brunt of that killer coffee-spoon line, or other lines like "There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." I had (me) let my stance toward a "school lesson" ruin my ability to receive a cool poem. I had used school as an excuse to take my feelers out.

Let's not blame me, though. I cry. Easily and often, like Yellowstone. Let's say this: despite the existence of great educational texts like Koch's Sleeping on a Wing, most 7-12th grade pedagogical philosophies still tell us that we "win" the poem if we find, I don't know, juxtaposition. Or, like, discover that, um, this line uses the imagery of a sailboat to convey the innocence (the while sail?) of, like, life, and the absurdity (the whole, um, ocean thing) of death. Can I go now? It's high school. I have awkward relationships to calcify. I smell like a chimney full of jockstraps. Etc.

Yeah, poem explication sucks. We knew it sucked. Everybody knew it sucked. You still had to do it. Like washing dishes. Whenever you wash dishes, you sing, daydream, yo-yo your brain, distract yo-self. As a kid, I would pretend to be on a gameshow--HOW FAST CAN YOU WASH!--and do the announcer voices in my head while I sped through the pots and pans. I gave myself points for thorough cleanliness and for not--what's that called?--not breaking shit. Since I had to wipe the stove, I threw the sponge across the kitchen to give myself an extra few seconds. Don't worry: I don't understand that part either.

Somewhere along the line, I got this warped notion that poem explication was, like dish washing, a game. You're not really "figuring out" the poem. What you're doing is lugging in a set of goggles and flashy words (juxtaposition! antithesis!) and diving into the au naturale poem, just as we use perfectly nice fields for baseball. This attitude got the essays wrote. I wasn't "solving" or "winning" the poem. Just sprinting through the text in some dazzling or devious fashion, seeing if I could collect the trinkets that fit my suitcase: "oh, this noun is in present tense, that means, um, the fallacy of history!" Sure, essays have to "make sense." A small goal, really. Maybe baseball is a bad analogy. Did anyone ever play that computer game The Incredible Machine? You have this random set of doo-dads, and you try to make your incredibly complicated doo-dads execute a simple task, like light a candle. You use stairs, ramps, bombs, cats, whirligigs, whatever. Meanwhile, the candle itself the ever cool and self-contained and mysterious candle. No harm done.

So too with Zukofsky, Pound, Davie. Sure, these guys are descriptive and prescriptive. They're only trying to explain "good poetry," but once you read "a good poem is full of melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia" isn't one reaction to gulp and get to work at self-consciously deploying -poeias? So I try to avoid that feeling. I try to watch it like a game. See what loopy courses get built to light candles. Some of this stuff doesn't even seem to get the candle lit--it just dances around. From Zuk:

"Add--the core that covers the work of poets who see with their ears, hear with their eyes, move with their noses and speak and breathe with their feet. And yet lunatics are sometimes profitably observed: the core that is covered, the valuable skeptic knows, may in itself be the intense vision of a fact."

Honestly. If I read that and go "oh shit, so I'm supposed to breathe with my feet--um, wait--okay, be a lunatic? no--wait, cover my core--what's a core? I have a core? is that like--should I make sure to wear underwear while I'm writing poems? or wait, does it mean I shouldn't write about my 8th grade girlfriend--um, wait, how do I move with my nose? is there a jetpack sort of thing I should have? is there a poet store I missed? should poets sew tissues?" -- then I'm going to be seriously effed. But Zuk is still fun to read. His paragraph above is the very definition of "jazzing around." And I would argue that Davies--with his "Is there not" and "it will be remarked"--jazzes around as well, displaying his skill at the Incredible Poem Chatter Machine to basically just display his skill, though surely his motives involve more, some baffled, brandy-tumbler, tea lawn haze of "chastity" and all that.

Actually, yeah, the game notion is a little simplistic. Most extensive explication, game or not, tends to colonize a poem, and may (more dangerously) ruin it for reading. Snuff the candle! And many people who chatter and explicate think they really are unsheathing the poem's secrets. They think they are figuring out the properties of light, to overextend the candle analogy.

But let's not, to retaliate, chuck all the rhetoric and try to always speak in hardcore truth flame. Or not at all! Isn't that boring? Every now and then, in the right mood, with a caffeine hum and nothing to do, nobody to save from drowning, it is fun to hear somebody gnash about poetics. People say cool things: Zuk's cabinet scheme. Fenollosa's horse. Frank O'Hara's tight pants joke. Or, since I am contractually obligated to quote Mr. Frank Stanford in every poetry discussion: "Poetry will put you out of your misery for no charge, and then will do the undertaking cheap and sometimes it rides up out of nowhere .. and gives you a lap to dream in."

That's poetics. And meaningless, on some level. But is it prescription? I don't really think or feel like it. When I read that I want to write more poems. Not Frank Stanford poems. I'm not a big fan of undertaking or horses. But after reading Stanford's letters, I will look at my poetry and think of more things than before, and I will look at the world and think of more things than before, and I will think how many beautiful and silly ways we have to light candles, and that is, I think, swell.