Poem Board

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I have come far enough
from where I was not before
to have seen the things
looking in at me through the open door

and have walked tonight
by myself
to see the moonlight
and see it as trees

and shapes more fearful
because I feared
what I did not know
but have wanted to know.

(from “A Form of Women”, Robert Creeley)

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The psyche recalls circling its body, saying “I have walked tonight/ by myself/ to see the moonlight/ and see it as trees.” To walk by one’s self, past or around it, observing. And where one set of eyes sees the moonlight, the other sees only the moonlight in the eyes of the first, or more precisely the reflections of trees that bear in turn the reflected light of the moon, itself a reflection. How utterly complex is seeing any object by moonlight, how lovely the compacted testimony of so many mediums.

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We do well to see, always, “shapes more fearful” than the ones met and actualized—always the “things looking in…through the open door”, informing, mediating present concern but not yet, in any definite sense, revealed to the self. I suppose we never really know where we are, what we are seeing, only that we are someplace removed from where we have been, what we have seen, places and people we know intimately by their disappearance.

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A new place, its shape: a new body, literally, to live there. Where the old one has gone is for those who knew its specificities to wonder; it belongs to them now, however intangibly, launched upon a path separate from its successor. The living self, the evolving form, goes about inhabiting psychic terrain through and throughout the constant flux of knowing and forgetting. And yet another duality emerges, the idea of the self stepping away from its form, its container, observing, and still not knowing how to assuage the body’s losses.

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Applied to poetry, we might say that there is writing poetry with particular attentions, and then there is writing attentive poetry. The subject, ever complex and elusive, resists being written about, and is not above changing itself into something else to avoid its own revelation. The subject is faster than the poet, more intelligent, and discovers the poet’s attention while the poem is being written, launching into a metamorphosis he can only pray to document. In this sense, a good poem evidences the chosen content’s avoidance of the form imposed upon it, the result being that the form reflects the natural dynamism, the uncontainable, chimerical quality of the content itself. “Form is never more than an extension of content.”

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Creeley reiterates elsewhere, “the plan is in the body, the plan is in the body”. The particularities, the joints, of language, foregrounded as possible, are, in the poem’s case, that body. What will be said, and what will not be said. The idea that the language—English, yes, but not necessarily—possesses within it the wisdom, by where it will go and where not go, and how it will go there, to inform and direct the vary actions it also documents. Syntax itself is cardiovascular, distributing the energy that keeps the body vital.

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As for the classroom itself: if one is to know the particular mind and body he or she has been given, it becomes always necessary to fight against the homogenizing force. We misunderstand ourselves most frequently and most gravely in thinking we hold things in common with others. That said, attention to the imperatives of ‘sense narrative’ is more than an interesting experiment. The one addressed is so often the lover, and therein the need to communicate directly sees finally its ultimate iteration. Irony that the lover is gone, must be, always, in the moment of the poem’s company.

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The idea of faith, faith in the love of some thing not oneself. And knowing it will go away. To love poetry, for example, is a comfort—that such a love will exists amid the rest of life, happening, happening, regardless. To step away and say, even that may go, even the purest of faiths, because in the end there is only complexity, changes, endings. Even the faith in love, the love of faith—that these two may also die, and we live on without them. Our bodies of course remain, eating, fucking: and what fun are these without their respective faiths?

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And yet there is also nothing sublime, to my knowledge, about relinquishing faith and care for all persons and objects. Tangible things, too, can have a sustaining, otherworldly mystery. Such mystery lies in our own habitation of an object outside our body, in our thinking that it might become us, or us it, and that one of the two would be improved by the alteration. Poems habitate. And there are always the two sets of muscle and bone living in the sad hut of a poem, the one that thinks to get rest and the one that wishes to journey on, to move past the exhaustion.

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Learning is always a process of interpretation. In the classroom, Creeley spoke of whatever he wanted, whatever occupied his thoughts most immediately, which was rarely poetry as poetry. The first line of his syllabus always said, “all roads lead out of Rome, rather than into, in this instance”. And of course we all “fear what we did no know but have wanted to know.” Fear alone draws us into the black hallway, groping about anxiously for the light. We want to know nothing is there. And if something is there, better to confront it and get the macabre scene over with. Nothing is worse than awaiting the desperate terms of slow horror.

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In short, there is a responsibility in saying anything at all, and it is the particular duty of the poet to accept and fulfill every obligation associated with saying, being the sayer. Elsewhere, of course, language is about deception, about disguising who is talking. High school essays and business memos and government reports—webs of passive syntax hiding the action and subject of every sentence. Inanimate, powerless, or dispensable objects are foregrounded, as if they were responsible for the confusion, for the new policies, for the fuck-ups and disasters. Language, as always, is in danger of losing the people that produce it, in danger of becoming self-generating, redundant, and dead. Words want us, need us, to come into being, and though they possess wisdom themselves, we have the bodies that say them, that write them, that are written upon.

Several NYU folks are reading at the opening party for Adam's Books in Park Slope. It might be fun to go watch them. Here is the announcement and schedule of readers:

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Now that Adam's Books has been open awhile, and opening wider each day, the time has come to celebrate. For example, this Sunday, November 12: THE ADAM'S BOOKS GRAND OPENING CELEBRATION PARTY.

If you haven't visited the store recently, you might be surprised at how grand it has become. The shelves are full. The books are sorted and alphabetized. There are soft, comfortable chairs. There are more and better and grander books than ever before.

So: SUNDAY NOVEMBER 12: all afternoon and evening, from 12 to 10 pm, the GRAND OPENING party to celebrate ADAM'S BOOKS. There will be balloons.

Also: short readings by several of the neighborhood's finest writers. (See below for schedule.)

You can dance if you want to. This will be a party.

ADAM'S BOOKS is located at 456 Bergen St., between 5th Avenue and Flatbush.
That's north Park Slope, Brooklyn, just around the corner from the Atlantic Yards landgrab.
Steps from the 2,3 Bergen St. subway; a short walk from the MNQBRW2345 Atlantic Ave subway hub.

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12 pm – 3 pm: COFFEE & MUFFINS
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12:00 – 1:00 : Rick Pernod, Andrea Baker, Bronwen Tate
1:00 – 2:00 : Jenn Guitart, Tisa Bryant, Lynn Xu
2:00 – 3:00 : Christopher Myers, Erika Howsare, Jackie Delamatre

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3 pm – 6 pm: BEER & PRETZELS
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3:00 – 4:00 : Will Hubbard, Jess DeCourcy Hinds, Amber West
4:00 – 5:00 : Eve Packer, Holly Tavel, Fred Schmalz
5:00 – 6:00 : Mac Wellman, Erin Courtney, Scott Adkins, Jonathan Ceniceroz

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6 pm – 10 pm: WINE & CHEESE
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6:00 – 7:00 : Anika Haynes, Gareth Lee, Brenda Iijima
7:00 – 8:00 : Luisa Giugliano, Jennifer Hayashida, Christopher Stackhouse
8:00 – 9:00 : Bonnie Emerick, Amy King, Adam Tobin

Steve Evans examines the POETS FOR BUSH

and

Galway, Phil, and Alice Quinn get on SPLENDIDLY

Another poem we never got to in workshop. Comments, criticisms greatly appreciated.
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POEM



Felt previously for you
what only in the moment knew
was a particular sort of fear.
What I held above was neither

your body nor any perception of it
but another woman you allowed
to sleep there, her physical force
such that I had neither strength

nor will to defend myself. Then
with a mere reversal of light
you return alone to a male form
now merely in attendance

as when from window nearest yours
I heard the sharp rises of breath
that meant you both knew
exactly what body you were in.

My sestina for craft, as I forgot to photocopy it for everyone.
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Sestina Americana


Once upon a horse
I rode through the Sabbath
So far the land seemed London,
But the bars still played Hank Williams
And in the air narcolepsy
Had the electricity of a poem.

I sat to a poem
As if breaking a horse
With a history of narcolepsy.
On some honky-tonk Sabbath
I imagined seeing Hank Williams
At a peep show in London.

Where but in London
Can you write a decent poem
about Hank Williams?
The drunks in the White Horse
Are equating the Sabbath
With a savage narcolepsy.

O! The bliss of narcolepsy,
The sensation that London
Is heavy beneath a great sabbath
Of light, the Queen reading a poem
That will be branded onto the horse
Given to Hank Williams

For a photo-shoot entitled “Hank Williams,
Singer, diplomat, victim of narcolepsy,
Cowboy poet.” Every horse
In every formal square of London
Is reading a desperate poem
Lamenting the eternal Sabbath

Of marble and bronze. ‘Sabbath’
Meant very little to Hank Williams,
Who once wrote a poem
That implicated the narcolepsy
Of God himself in London’s
Burning, and worshipped a horse.

In the sense that a poem is also a sabbath,
So too is a horse the ghost of Hank Williams’
Narcolepsy dragging itself around London.

Thanks to everybody who has gotten involved with the blog so far. Please get your compadres to email me at whubbard [at] gmail [dot] com to receive an invitation. Also, please sign your posts with your real name if your username is not your real name--we all want to know who made that brilliant comment about Anglo Saxon caesura.

Below are the opening paragraphs of Olson's 1950 essay "Projective Verse", which served really as the foundational document for the poets gathered in and around Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology of 1960. The questions of form the essay raises are still unresolved, in mind at least, and I'd be interested in hearing comments about Olson's very particular concept of the poem as 'kinetic' transfer. Any other impressions are likewise welcomed. A link to the rest of the essay is included at the end.

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Projective Verse

(projective (percussive (prospective

vs.

The NON-Projective

(or what a French critic calls “closed” verse, that verse which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got, despite the work of Pound & Williams:

it led Keats, already a hundred years ago, to see it (Wordsworth’s, Milton’s) in the light of “the Egotistical Sublime”; and it persists, at this latter day, as what you might call the private-soul-at-any-public-wall)

Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings. (The revolution of the ear, 1910, the trochee’s heave, asks it of the younger poets.)

I want to do two things: first, try to show what projective or OPEN verse is, what it involves, in its act of composition, how, in distinction from the non-projective, it is accomplished; and II, suggest a few ideas about what that stance does, both to the poet and to his reader. (The stance involves, for example, a change beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may, the way things look, lead to new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of drama, say, or of epic, pehaps, may emerge.)

First, some simplicities that a man learns, if he works in OPEN, or what can also be called COMPOSITION BY FIELD, as opposed to inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the “old” base of the non-projective.

(1) the kinetics of the thing. A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is a third term, will take away.

This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is specially confronted by. And it involves a whole series of new recognitions. From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION— put himself in the open— he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined. (It is much more, for example, this push, than simply such a one as Pound put, so wisely, to get us started: “the musical phrase,” go by it, boys, rather than by, the metronome.)

(2) is the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over the composition, and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into being. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. (Or so it got phrased by one, R. Creeley, and it makes absolute sense to me, with this possible corollary, that right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand.) There it is, brothers, sitting there, for USE.

Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER! So there we are, fast, there’s the dogma. And its excuse, its usableness, in practice. Which gets us, it ought to get us, inside the machinery, now, 1950, of how projective verse is made.

If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, ahead. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that the verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressures of his breath.

Read the rest of "Projective Verse" here.

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Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

That’s for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and somebody’s mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don’t say, "Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do may after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.

But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete).
Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you’re experiencing is "yearning."

Abstraction in poetry, which Allen recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé).

Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poési pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it’s all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That’s part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. His relation is no more astounding than Dubuffet’s to painting.

What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn’t it?) Everything, but we won’t get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.

-Frank O’Hara
September 3, 1959

John Ashbery: A Blessing in Disguise (poem I memorized for class)

Frank O'Hara: Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean Paul

Ted Berrigan: Excerpts from Memorial Day

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When I was a kid
because I read a lot of books
I thought I should think that
there was no such thing as happiness

Then later I suspected that
happiness was not impossible
only impossible to notice
until after it was gone

But when I had none of it
I thought if it ever returned
I would know what happiness was
and enjoy it for a while

And soon enough it did return
long enough for me to know
and left just as soon as I knew
it didn’t want me to.

The Name


Be natural,
wise
as you can be,
my daughter,

let my name
be in you flesh
I gave you
in the act of

loving your mother,
all your days
her ways,
the woman in you

brought from
sensuality's measure,
no other,
there was no thought

of it but such
pleasure all women
must be in her,
as you. But not wiser,

not more of nature
than her hair,
the eyes
she gives you.

There will not be another
woman such as you
are. Remember
your mother,

the way you came,
the days of waiting.
Be natural,
daughter, wise

as you can be,
all my daughters,
be women
for men

when that time comes.
Let the rhetoric
stay with me
your father. Let

me talk about it,
saving you such
vicious self-
exposure, let you

pass it on
in you. I cannot
be more than the man
who watches.


-RC from FOR LOVE (1962)

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