New Formal Homologies

poetry

{ courage , power , hope }

::

{ curiosity , knowledge , faith }

philosophy

Form and/or Grammar

There is nothing more human (that is, less mineral, vegetal, animal, and even angelical) than grammar.

Jorge Luis Borges



I am a grammarian.
We will or we will not cry together.

Getrude Stein



What I'm desperate for, from myself and others, is a poetry & poetics that pushes its innovative & expressive powers, and new forms, towards the invention, or construction, or even the fabrication, of things like courage & hope.

Tony Tost

The Philosophical Image

Kasey's recent post made me think of this footnote to an old poem of mine.

We lift images from appearances and apply them to surfaces never the other way round. A surface is that to which an image may be effortlessly applied. An appearance is that from which it is lifted without strain. To imagine is sometimes to see and sometimes to do. The image may equally well be seen or done. The same image is equally compatible with surfaces and appearances. There are not some images that go better with surfaces than with appearances. But we must keep in mind that we cannot impose an image on an appearance; we must lift it from there. Nor can we lift an appearance from a surface, we must put it there. Thus, we lift an image off the appearance of the closed door and apply this same image in opening its surface. This whether in imagination or in experience. That is, the door appears closed as we run into it, and it surfaces in its openness as we pass through it. Note here that the door's openness is nothing to the door but belongs to you and me (the subject), i.e., that which is in motion. Its closedness, on the other hand, is the door’s imposition on our motion (and is objective).

The key passage in Kasey's post is this:

These poems do not "use" or "contain" images so much as they are images, images formed by language shaped into a "rested totality," as Zukofsky puts it. The attempt is to simulate the contours of a mental/perceptual experience through words, drawing on those words' referential function as well as the irrationally evocative sub-qualities of their morphemic and phonemic makeup (it is probably impossible not to do both at the same time in some proportion). The challenge facing the poet is then to translate a personal, subjective experience of language/reality into a textual message that will communicate itself, however incompletely, to another reader, by means other than simple reportage. This challenge is always doomed to at least partial failure...

This advances my understanding of poetry, philosophy and imagination. The step I want to take from here is to reject the challenge: why begin with "a personal, subjective experience" and then translate, convert or transform it into a "message" that can be "communicated" (though the phrase "that will communicate itself" indicates a bit of answer, an immediacy)?

To take two examples. Is there any (useful) sense in which "Message to the Department of the Interior" (Glenum) and "Social Life in Western North Carolina" (Mohammad) translate their authors' personal experiences of language/reality into messages that are then made more or less available to readers? It seems to me that these poems begin with the imagery already formed in an impersonal "outside". These poems will communicate as "imperfectly" with their creators as with any other reader, which is to say, they are perfectly, resolutely imaginary.

Obit Imitating Art?

When Albert Camus died, the literary journal X (I, 2, March 1960) ran an obituatry by Michel St. Denis. He writes:

The theatre was not for him a distraction: he used to say, in his warm and cheerful way (I knew him as a theatre man), that he loved sharing in group work, simply as a member of the team; his solitude as a writer, concerned with the plight of man, was fed and helped by his daily contact with the difficulties, failures and achievements, passions, generosity and pettiness of a company of actors. What to others is trouble and unbearable agitation was food and excitement to him. He wrote that the stadium and the auditorium of a theatre were the only places in the world where he did not feel guilty. (113)

In his 1956 novel The Fall, Camus did in fact write what St. Denis says he wrote. Here is the relevant paragraph:

To be sure, I occasionally pretended to take life seriously. But very soon the frivolity of seriousness struck me and I merely went on playing my role as well as I could. I played at being efficient, intelligent, virtuous, civic-minded, shocked, indulgent, fellow-spirited, edifying ... In short, there's no need of going on, you have already grasped that I was like my Dutchmen who are here without being here: I was absent at the moment when I took up the most space. I have never been really sincere and enthusiastic except when I used to indulge in sports, and in the army, when I used to act in plays we put on for our own amusement. In both cases there was a rule of the game, which was not serious but which we enjoyed taking as if it were. Even now, the Sunday matches in an overflowing stadium, and the theatre, which I loved with the greatest passion, are the only places in the world where I feel innocent. (87-8)

Now, those words may of course have been as true of Camus as they were of Clamence. But it seems to me that this is an unhappy coincidence in an obituary on the life of the author of The Myth of Sisyphus (an essay on the absurd). It would be a bit like using words originally (or even just also) "written" by Charles Kinbote or Humbert Humbert in an obituary for Nabokov. Wouldn't it?

Poetry Reading: Ascending to Reality like Condoleeza Rice

WEDNESDAY, February 7, 5 pm
Atheneum International Bookshop
Nørregade 6
Copenhagen K

This reading will draw attention to the work of six American poets. Themes will cover the full range of poetic images: swans, clouds, hats, eggs, knives, snow, and deer. Their poems have been called "angry, even when they are asleep", "grotesque ... domestic ... war-torn", "rigorously articulate", "aphoristic and electrified", "remarkably fresh and exciting" and, yes, "spooky". These poets have located the human condition somewhere between an advanced alien technology and an intense political audacity. Having discovered how we feel, they write that emotion down. Here's an opportunity to find out how we're all doing.

Thomas Basbøll will read selections from the work of Ben Lerner, Lara Glenum, Tony Tost, K. Silem Mohammad, Drew Gardner and Gary Sullivan.

Borgesque Blurb

My 1981 King Penguin paperback edition of Borges' Labyrinths has the following remark on the back cover.

The twenty-three stories in Labyrinths include Borges's classic 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius', a new world where external objects are whatever each person wants; and 'Pierre Menard', the man who re-wrote Don Quixote word for word without ever reading the original.

I find such inaccuracies enormously depressing for some reason. It is no consolation that Borges himself, in 'Partial Magic in the Quixote', tells us that Shakespeare 'include[d] on the stage of Hamlet another stage where a tragedy more or less like that of Hamlet is presented.'

This Application Supports the Other

for Sara

If you experience problems,
please select one of the
Details of Interface.

There are three different
Token Rings. Step 2:
connect the Other. But this
feature does not work
reliably. Stop time
or hours worked can be
solved based on the
other three parameters
through a twisted pair
and the emerging subject's

continuous communication
between the process manager
and the optimal process,
rather than the other
way around. An environment
for the rapid construction
of visual elements to
be added to the graphs
constructed in sophisticated
editing of the 400 different
other disappointments.

Originally designed to
discriminate people, the data
are stored in the formats.

Case Notes 1

The portion of the story that remains after the other components have been dissolved by churning. The woman attends the night game to watch the snow fall near the lights. Only the body of the protagonist is undergoing change. A whistle sweeps the town of meaning.

Ben Lerner
Angle of Yaw, p. 25.

"Dusting for Prints" was probably the first Kate Greenstreet poem I read. I read it in Diagram (4.6) on or around December 10, 2005. About a year later, I read it again but this time in her new book case sensitive. As it turns out, Kate wasn't making her author note in Diagram up:

A woman is driving coast to coast. She is listening to a book on tape, a murder mystery. The poems she's writing in the motels each night combine mystery matter with observation and memory. Later some of those poems will become a chapbook called Where's the Body? A collection of this character's chapbooks form the manuscript case sensitive, my attempt to make the kind of mystery I'd like to read, with all the stuff that I don't need (the murder, etc.) removed.

So there is the natural question: what is the relationship between the "woman" in the first sentence and the "I" in the last. "She" is writing the poems, but so, presumably, is Kate Greenstreet. Where, indeed, is the body?

We know that Where's the Body is collected in case sensitive. So we are to imagine that a fictional chapbook was fictionally published. However, case sensitive also includes the poems "Learning the Language" (in the chapbook/section Book of Love) and "Bridge" (in Diplomacy). These also appear in Kate Greenstreet's very real chapbook Learning the Language. which does not appear in the present "collection of this character's chapbooks." Did Kate Greenstreet steal these poems from her character and publish them as her own, or did her character steal them from her?

Question: did Kate Greenstreet ever drive coast to coast listening to murder mysteries on tape and writing poems in motel rooms? What was she doing? Research for a poem?

Here's another detail. Perhaps it is insignificant, perhaps it is crucial. Like the other "chapbooks" in case sensitive, Where's the Body has endnotes. The first line of the first poem, "Begin with who was killed and why," is attributed to Gillian Roberts' You Can Write a Mystery (1999), which seems to be a real book. This may be perfectly innocent. But there is something else: the endnote informs us that the line has been "used with the kind permission of Writer's Digest Books." Did she really need permission? Since she has even provided her source, wouldn't it be "fair use"? Even if she hadn't provided the source, would a line like that really constitute plagiarism if it had been simply appropriated? She puts the line in quotation marks and endnotes it. But the rest of the book is full of unreferenced quotatations. Why offer a reference here?

The answer must be that it accomplishes a specific literary effect. But we must now ask: did she really ask for the publisher's permission? Like I say, she probably didn't need it. But perhaps she would get in trouble for claiming to have done so if she really hadn't. So she asked for permission in order to accomplish the literary effect of appearing to have asked for permission?

It's all very strange. Suspicious.

Elsewhere in case sensitive, she (who?) says, "A story has to leave out nearly everything or no one can follow it" (p. 29). This is a bit like Ben Lerner's "churning" (see epigraph, where it is used without permission.) The process is not so much that of plot development: "Only the body of the protagonist is undergoing change."

One last detail before the chapter ends in suspense: the endnote does not provide a page reference. Google turns up only this.*

Note: no endnote.

I think this story knows it's being followed.

_________
*Update: the original link went dead, but I found another online version of the poem, which was originally printed in Conduit 15 (Fall 2004). Also, while Google did not return Roberts's book back when I wrote the post, it does now tell us that the quote appears on page 36.

Postmodern Baroque

But Josh, what if Las Meninas does not situate us "impossibly in the mirror"?

All the people in the painting are standing in front of a mirror. The painting is the image as seen by Velazquez. (The Infanta's face is the dead give-away for me, as is her maid on the right, who is enviously comparing herself to the royal child.) The mirror is at a slight off angle to the floor and wall, which accounts for the vanishing point not being in the middle of Velazquez's head (for people who need to know that). The King and Queen are hidden behind (i.e., standing in front of) the canvas (with their backs turned to it) right beside Velazquez. The fact that the canvas depicted in the painting is the same height as the canvas we are looking at is also an obvious clue that this is how the painting should be read.

See also "Borges, the Prado, and I".

Factory, Laboratory, Museum

Tony, you give us a nice set of images to work with. But I'm not sure I understand the confrontation you are arranging between Pound's "machine art" and Stein's "motor automatism". Your insertion of Kracauer's typists, however, as what Wittgenstein might call an "intermediate case" (PI§122), is pretty much brilliant.

One important distinction, at least at first pass, seems to be that Pound is thinking about how to improve factory production, while Stein (if I understand this correctly) is basically engaging in laboratory experimentation. We could of course imagine experiments to test Pound's ideas (a kind of acoustic Taylorism) and we could certainly imagine taking Stein's reading and writing practices into use. The idea that Pound's factory could be re-interpreted as a museum, however, strikes me as odd; especially if you want to say that Stein's proposal is somehow immune to this. Surely her approaches could be cultivated in some highly idealized settings, while having no impact on reading and writing in general.

What Pound was saying, I think, is simply that we could think about sound in very practical terms. The musician here serves in the same role as a painter might for Albers. He is an expert at producing sound, and his contribution to the world is making it sound better. So there is a kind of pragmatist aesthetics here (in Dewey's sense). Some arrangements of sounds or colours improve the way the environment sounds or looks. More generally, how the environment feels. Other's improve the ear or eye that perceives them. Pound was saying that what the musician hears could be applied to improving what the factory worker hears. But the factory will never be something we would want to listen to in order to improve our sense of sound, i.e., for its own sake.

In a similar way, though I'm not exactly sure how to make the comparison, Stein is trying to improve our sense of language.

Tostian Media

This looks promising. I think poetry has an important role to play in the appropriation of the potential of the new media. I'm not sure Pound was as "blind to his historical moment" as Tony thinks, but I'm basically just looking forward to hearing more about these ideas. Also, it looks like I'm going to have to read some Stein.

This is funny.

Fear as a Mode of State

'Das Wovor der Furcht, das Furchtbare...'

Several points must be considered.

1. It shows itself.

2. The target is a definite range of what can be affected.

3. The region itself is well known. It has something 'queer' about it.

4. Something that threatens us.

5. It can reach us, and yet it may not.

6. This enhances it.

5 Little Things

I appreciate Jack's gesture, but picking up a meme is not my thing. (Do love those captions, by the way.)

She Took Time Off

She took time off from touching
due to tendonitis, twice removed.

But she never stopped singing. She raised
two sons. One of them she titled "Night",

and with an eventful year under her belt,
she started touching again in January.

Procedural Notes

The basic move is to pick it up
and look at it. To close your eyes,
form its image, and put it down.

Another way is to look at it
and pick it up. Then open your hand,
form its image, and look away.

If you feel sleepy, get up, walk
around, shake your arms,
roll your head, talk to yourself.

There is the method of pushing
and of glancing. In reaching for it,
there is an application of longing.

Peel it off the appearance, stick
it onto the surface. After
the fact, before the act. The image.

Your blonde guitar, my plaster Buddha

When Wittgenstein described himself as "someone who cannot quite do what he would like to be able to do,"* he probably meant that he couldn't write like Kate Greenstreet.

The first issue of Absent is here.


-------
*In Culture and Value, p. 24. It's the same remark in which he says "philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition."

The Flowers of Emergency

for Asmund and Søren

Horse Holistics, i.e., Bush Flowers, are to be
taken during an emergency or crisis. They
help with trauma, anxiety, injury and/or
any emotional crisis or individual
responsibility. This is Emergency Essence.
I.e., Angelsword, Crowea, Fringed Violet,
and Dog Rose of the Wild Forces.
Negative condition: panic, distress; yes,
but you must really fear a positive outcome:
ability to cope, navigation, documentation.
Then there are, of course, the Flowers of
Emergency Childcare Services. This is a short-
term, recreational emergency and needs are met
by gift baskets, Godiva chocolate,
fruit baskets, Teddy bears and pad rations
packaged neatly and completely with a snack mix.
Essences for dogs and cats only: a natural
herbal remedy for accidents, stressful
situations, trauma, fear. Gift emergency:
a blissful bouquet of white and blue flowers
will tell your loved one they make you $79.99
(as shown). Emergency Sandbag: rainbow, crystal,
clay, expanded, and technically sandless.
Facial mask: blue healin' love monkey.
Emergency Music: Hoping Flowers Bleed Horace
Horse Tranquilizer. This emergency plan has
been designed for Charles and will be updated.

These Purely Formal Questions of Arrangement

For some reason Nicholas Manning's comment to my last post has been hidden from view. Here it is in full:

What's so interesting about this model for me is that it makes me think of a probably important distinction between two different types of collage that up until this point we haven't really explictly made.

For on the one hand there is this type of collage, which is purely about choice and formal arrangement, (though interestingly Lynch does not at all consider here the role of choice: the bits of paper are considered "random" and the choice of the material apparently "unimportant"), and on the other hand, collage which includes the introduction of "original gestures" on the part of the artist: that is, the cubist painter or Rauschenberg painting over collaged surfaces with marks which are recognisably his or her own, marks which must have, I think, a different statute to that of the found and arranged material.

For it seems to me that these marks, though still governed by such rules of arrangement as Lynch outlines, are still to an extent different, and make the confrontation and interaction between more-found and less-found materials (in order not to say "found" and "original") infinitely more complex than these purely formal questions of arrangement imply.

For it is almost like the confrontation of two entirely divergent theories of art and artistic creation (inspiration and techne perhaps, or Plato and Aristotle), and it is this, I feel, over any formal devices, which leads to the often stunning complexity of collages' aesthetic statements.

I wonder if the most important distinction here is one between pure collage and hybrids of various kinds. This also goes for Flarf, where there is no rule against "writing over" the collaged the materials with "original gestures". The point, for me, however, is that collage focuses the writer on "purely formal questions" precisely by setting the problem as one of arrangement ...

... and selection, I should add. Nicholas is right to point out that Lynch's exercise does not include this aspect. But I did leave out Fig. 51d: the finished product called Cliff with Cloud in which he adds a piece of paper obviously either made or selected to that end.

In any case, my questions are largely formal. What I like about collage/flarf is that it approaches form as the selection and arrangement of materials, instead of something that is violently imposed on content. This strikes me as a more sane approach to both the origin and the terminus of the art work.

How to Make Collages

[This post is excerpted from John Lynch's How to Make Collages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1961), pp. 68-71]

Fig. 51a


Fig. 51b


Fig. 51c

In figure 51a four simple white shapes have been torn from a sheet of heavy paper and dropped at random onto a sheet of gray cardboard. The shapes are not complicated or particularly interesting in themselves. Their relationship to one another in this accidental arrangement is dull. Why? Because the indispendable elements of tension and interaction are lacking.

In figure 51b a more interesting contrast has been created between the two left-hand pieces in relation to one another. The straight edge of the thinnest piece is in opposition to the jagged edge of the piece above it, and a certain amount of tension is felt in the resulting space between the two pieces.

In figure 51c the arrangement has been amplified. These four variations on a rectangle are aligned in such a way that the contrast has an abstract interest. Two opposing factors are involved--the shapes themselves and the spaces between them. They begin to suggest something--a cliff, perhaps. Their placement makes the gray cardboard part of the composition rather than a neutral background, which it was in figure 51a.