Wrong

John Baldessari, “Wrong,” 1966-1968

Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?
Fourteen washrags, Ed Van Ess?
Must be going to give em
to the church, I guess.

He drinks, you know. The day we moved
he came into the kitchen stewed,
mixed things up for my sister Grace—
put the spices in the wrong place.

        —Lorine Niedecker, out of New Goose (1946)

—

Sextus need
not offend Pythagoras

calling his
‘wrong moment
foolish for
sobering frenzied
youths with
a righteous
spondean' (instead
of quitting
their dive)

        —Louis Zukofsky, out of “A-19” (”A” 13-21, 1969)

—

the white wrong numeral on the wall
can't take it off with the clock
                      down with the clock it . . .
                            way
on the board-couch with brass, kindergarten clench joints
backed violet rip into the gas valve
it hemmed & snowed

          the wrong way
                remnant face
                      rubber
          the pucker

        —Clark Coolidge, out of “Fed Drapes” (Space, 1970)

—

. . . but what of the details of common perception language endeavours when written to devour? ‘Wrong words, how can we tell but we can.’ Little slips of the pen become spells calling demons (nomadic) from the spillage constantly threatening religious and secular authority. Excessive mistake or mystique? The pen stalks letters or pens talk or they did until as children were warned in the 1950s Biro’s invention killed the art of fair writing an example perhaps of the fall as broken enchantment re-enacted. ‘Theoretically starlings could compose in counterpoint’ shows how theory might reveal the way things used to be. An alien voiceprint, let’s suppose, which records that speech was the only substance the visitors identified on earth and no more connected with the practice the locals call ‘writing’ than painting a picture or blowing through a tube. Not as such to be considered as a sign as of commandment. Here as elsewhere the letter Y makes supplication . . .

        —Alan Halsey, out of Dante’s Barber Shop (De Vulgari Eloquentia) (2001)

—

There is sometimes a miniscule playing card on the floor, it is
                facedown & blue with stars
And you will never turn it over. To complain of money will ruin
                your conversation; if you do not
Complain of money there is probably something wrong with your life.
                Perhaps you should
Call money “green zinnias.” “For a few hundred more green zinnias
                I can fly to Rome at
The end of June.”

        —Alice Notley, out of “The Prophet” (How Spring Comes, 1981)

—

                                    Summa diligentia;
to the humbug, whose name is so amusing—very young and ve-

ry rushed, Caesar crossed the Alps on the “top of a
      diligence.” We are not daft about the meaning but this familiarity
with wrong meaning puzzles one. Humming-
      bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn, nipping the linen and saying

that you have a badger—remember Xenophon;
      only the most rudimentary sort of behaviour is necessary to put us on the scent . . .

        —Marianne Moore, out of “Picking and Choosing” (Observations, 1924)

—

. . . the water breaks up into seas, lakes, rivers, runlets,
a few noticeable configurations, short of perplexing multeity:

the mind rides the cycle from all things enchanted and
summoned into unity, a massive, shining presence, to all
things diffused, an illimitable, shining absence, confusion

the wrong zone of intermediacy, a lack of clarifying extremes:
the week of windy cold comes and removes the last hangers-on
from the trees and heaps them against hedge, fence . . .

        —A. R. Ammons, out of Sphere: The Form of a Motion (1974)

—

One goes on asking questions. That, then, is one
Of the categories. So said, this placid space

Is changed. It is not so blue as we thought. To be blue,
There must be no questions. It is an intellect
Of windings round and dodges to and fro,

Writhings in wrong obliques and distances,
Not an intellect in which we are fleet: present
Everywhere in space at once, cloud-pole

Of communication. It would be enough
If we were even, just once, at the middle, fixed . . .

        —Wallace Stevens, out of “The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract”
        (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954)

—

Yet even where things go wrong there is more
drumming, more clatter than seems normal. There is a remnant of energy
no one can account for, and though I try
to despise my own ways along with others, I can’t help placing
things in the proper light. I am to exult
in the stacks of cloud banks, each silently yearning
for the upper ether and curving its back, and in the way all things
seem to have of shaping up before the deaf man comes . . .

        —John Ashbery, out of “In My Way / On My Way” (Hotel Lautréamont, 1991)

—

. . . You sap. If we imagine the facts otherwise than as they are, certain language games lose some of their importance, while others become more important. Butterflies churn the air. The meaning of a word like the function of an official. Modal rounders. One could be wrong intentionally, but without deceit. The sharp shadows of a low sun, the light smack against the white housefronts. Each day there’s the bridge. Every word is either current, or strange, or metaphorical, or ornamental, or newly coined, or lengthened, or contracted, or altered. The salute of the fireboats. Weathercock, scrimshaw. Panama Exposition . . .

        —Ron Silliman, out of Ketjak (1978)

—

      . . . I still fear to mention the blue
flowers. They scared me most and I
prolong other talk. There were fields of
them around the place, all blue, all
innocent. The artificial is always innocent.
They looked hand-made, fast-dyed, paper.
They nodded ominously in the sun, right
up to the edge of the concrete ramp, a
million killing abstractions, a romantic
absence of meaning, a distorted prettiness
so thorough that my own eyes rolled up
in fear for their identity and I involuntarily
cried at the thought of tiny mirrors where
the object is lost irretrievably in its own
repetition. Is this how beauty accompanies
fear so it can escape us? Do you think these
flowers could be auctioned tintypes or souls
outside hell? Is blue what they mean by
“shun posterity” and “the price of fame” and
“fear of death”? Have I learned it wrong?

        —Frank O’Hara, out of “A Letter to Bunny”
        (The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, 1971)

—

. . . Boots, plows, cheese, burls. As for we who “love to be astonished,” the night is lit. Remarkably to learn to look. My father would say I’ve a “big day” tomorrow. Words are not always adequate to the occasion, and my “probably” sounded hopeless. It’s real, why, so, it’s wrong. I mentioned my face because I am made that way wonderfully like a shadow I do not despise. But if I don’t like the first dress I try on, I won’t like any . . .

        —Lyn Hejinian, out of My Life (1987)
        “When one travels, / one might ‘hit’ / a storm”

—

Deer polish their antlers
on fruit trees, like a girl
polishing apples on her hair.
Don’t be a fly wringing his hands
as though worry could save the world.
What’s wrong with the world?
Human hair hung from the lowest limb
will keep out the deer.
This is the animal kingdom, where
danger is clear and the tree grows
out of itself like an antler
butting the air—
huge, inexpressible growth!
Boys, girls, say sincerely
what you would like to become:
thighs shining like braided bread
in the grass,
or crickets scraping away
when words fail you?

        —Mary Ruefle, out of “The Beautiful Is Negative” (The Adamant, 1989)

—

Shank of the afternoon, wan weight-light,
Undercard of a short month,
                                                      February Sunday . . .
Wordlessness of the wrong world.
In the day’s dark niche, the patron saint of What-Goes-Down
Shuffles her golden deck and deals,
                                                            one for you and one for me . . .

        —Charles Wright, out of “Deep Measure” (Black Zodiac, 1997)

—

By itself wrong spreads nearly five pages
in the OED, and meant in its ancestral forms
curved, bent, the rib of a ship—neither
straight, nor true, but apt for its work.

The heart’s full cargo is so immense it’s not
hard to feel the weight of the word
shift, and we might as well admit it’s easy
to think of the spites and treacheries
and worse the poised word had to bear

lest some poor heart break unexplained, inept.


It’s wrong to sleep late and wake like a fog,
and to start each paragraph of a letter with I . . .

        —William Matthews, out of “Wrong” (A Happy Childhood, 1984)

—

. . . And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway. Where was I . . .

        —Samuel Beckett, out of Molloy (1955)

—

I plough the earth
till ruts are ramparts

havoc of every host

Comic on a tragic stage

ambiguous chants
and gestures


“Hierarchy, hierarchy!”
John-a-Dreams
counterclockwise
in a wood again
addressing a crowd
from the wrong rostrum.

        —Susan Howe, out of “Cabbage Gardens” (Frame Structures: Early Poems, 1974-1979, 1996)

—

Or that the rules
were wrong, an
observation they
as well as I
knew now—

They were imagination
also. If they
would be as the
mind could see them,

then it all was
true and the
mind followed and
I also.

        —Robert Creeley, out of “They” (Pieces, 1969)

—

Many errors,
                        a little rightness,
to excuse his hell
                                and my paradiso.
And as to why they go wrong,
                                      thinking of rightness
And as to who will copy this palimpsest?
                  al poco giorno
                                            ed al gran cerchio d’ombra
But to affirm the gold thread in the pattern
                                                            (Torcello)
al Vicolo d’oro
                          (Tigullio).
To confess wrong without losing rightness:
Charity I have had sometimes . . .

        —Ezra Pound, out of “Canto CXVI” (Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII, 1968)

—

The Wrong Door

Gi’ me a reefer, Lawd
cause I wan’ to think different
I wan’ to think
all around this subject

I wan’ to think
I wan’ to think where I is
an’ I wan’ to think my way out
of where I is by a new door

        —William Carlos Williams, out of The Collected Poems
        of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962 (2001)

—

I was just born at the wrong time, to the wrong family, of the wrong gender. I mean who would ever want to be treated like a woman in a hospital? Certainly no rose-breasted grosbeak.

        —Bernadette Mayer, out of “Fixation” (Scarlet Tanager, 2005)

—

. . . words hang unwasted, hold formation, scale in a bevy downvalley just above the rusty willows and the river ripe with messages in corked vials (an old one of mine for Kansas still kicking—hope it makes it through the dam), veer along that hacksaw ridge, through a floppy pack of crows, and up into the vedas, the agrapha and jive, huh’s and sleeptalk, stupid questions, wrong directions, goodbyes at the stations, over slang slicks, past the Cellini cluster (the well-oiled flurry in a dark alley that paralyzed thieves), suitcases and silos full, hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo stirring gravel in kames, burps after passenger pigeon, sounds only Mavis Staples makes, last words, casual dismissals, calling dogs, summing ups (the hairball got ’em). . . .

        —Merrill Gilfillan, out of “Mouth of the Whosis” (Selected Poems, 1965-2000 2005)

—

. . . We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem—and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others. A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer. The words around the immediate shrivel and decay like flesh around the body. No mummy-sheet of tradition can be used to stop the process. Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it.

        —Jack Spicer, out of After Lorca (1957)

—

I remember daydreams of a doctor who (on the sly) was experimenting with a drug that would turn you into a real stud. All very “hush-hush.” (As it was illegal.) There was a slight chance that something might go wrong and that I'd end up with a really giant cock, but I was willing to take that chance.

I remember wondering if I looked queer.

        —Joe Brainard, out of I Remember (1975)

—

I am living with a very good fellow indeed, a Mr. Rice. He is unfortunately labouring under a complaint which has for some years been a burthen to him. This is a pain to me. He has a greater tact in speaking to people of the village than I have, and in those matters is a great amusement as well as a good friend to me. He bought a ham the other day, for say he “Keats, I don’t think a Ham is a wrong thing to have in a house.”

        —John Keats, out of a 6 July 1819 letter to Fanny Keats
        (Selected Letters of John Keats, 2002)

Field Marks

Black-bellied Plover (Pluvialis squatarola)

Off yesterday to Magee Marsh in Ohio, a patch of marshland along Lake Erie good for birding. Twenty or so different species of warblers. Somewhat fewer shorebirds, with good looks at some black-bellied plovers and a wheeling sharp-winged dynamo of a flock of dunlins. The rusty identificatory eye—the need to recall the pertinent field marks each yearly outing. The Peterson’s guide—the unrevised one (c. 1947), with outdated nomenclature (“myrtle warbler” versus the newer “yellow-rumped”—why change the names of things?)—tucked under my belt. How I thrilled—aged thirteen or so—to Roger Tory Peterson’s slightly fusty (“This lad had a book”) remarks in the preface to the famous Guide (lacking in the newer editions):

      Those of us who have read Ernest Thompson Seton’s semi-autobiographical story, Two Little Savages, remember how the young hero, Yan, discovered some mounted ducks in a dusty showcase and how he painstakingly made sketches of their patterns.
      This lad had a book which showed him how to tell ducks when they were in the hand, but since he only saw the live ducks at a distance, he was usually at a loss for their names. He noticed that all the ducks in the showcase were different—all had blotches or streaks that were their labels or identification tags. He decided that if he could put their labels or ‘uniforms’ down on paper, he would know these same ducks as soon as he saw them at a distance on the water.
      Many of us, later on, when the sport of bird-study first revealed its pleasurable possibilities, tried to locate a book—a guide—that would treat all birds in the manner that Yan and the ducks had suggested. We found many bird books, but although descriptions were complete and illustrations authoritative, the one thing we wished for—a ‘boiling down,’ or simplification of things so that any bird could be readily and surely told from all the others at a glance or at a distance—that, except fragmentarily, we were unable to find.
      We would study a colored plate of Warblers, thorough in its treatment of dull-colored juveniles and autumn plumages, but confusing in the similarity of them all. We would select some point on each bird as being perhaps the diagnostic feature, though we could not be certain. Fancied differences were noted, while the really distinctive characteristics were overlooked. This shadow of uncertainty that darkened many of our earlier finds of ‘rare’ birds marred our enjoyment of the study.

“Hence,” Peterson concludes, “this handbook—designed to complement the standard ornithological works, a guide to the field marks of Eastern birds . . .” Admittedly, the Earnest Thompson Seton books I subsequently sought out thrilled me little. Here’s the opening of the Two Little Savages (1903) chapter, “How Yan Knew the Ducks Afar,” with its talk of sketching, putting “uniforms down on paper”:

      One day as the great Woodpecker lay on his back in the shade he said in a tone of lofty command:
      “Little Beaver, I want to be amused. Come hyar. Tell me a story.”
      “How would you like a lesson in Tutnee?” was the Second Chief’s reply, but he had tried this before, and he found neither Sam nor Guy inclined to take any interest in the very dead language.
      “Tell me a story, I said,” was the savage answer of the scowling and ferocious Woodpecker.
      “All right,” said Little Beaver. “I’ll tell you a story of such a fine boy—oh, he was the noblest little hero that ever wore pantaloons or got spanked in school. Well, this boy went to live in the woods, and he wanted to get acquainted with all the living wild things. He found lots of difficulties and no one to help him, but he kept on and on—oh! he was so noble and brave—and made notes, and when he learned anything new he froze on to it like grim death. By and by he got a book that was some help, but not much. It told about some of the birds as if you had them in your hand. But this heroic youth only saw them at a distance and he was stuck. One day he saw a wild Duck on a pond so far away he could only see some spots of colour, but he made a sketch of it, and later he found out from that rough sketch that it was a Whistler, and then this wonderful boy had an idea. All the Ducks are different; all have little blots and streaks that are their labels, or like the uniforms of soldiers. ‘Now, if I can put their uniforms down on paper I’ll know the Ducks as soon as I see them on a pond a long way off.’ So he set to work and drew what he could find. One of his friends had a stuffed Wood-duck, so the ‘Boy-that-wanted-to-know’ drew that from a long way off. He got another from an engraving and two more from the window of a taxidermist shop. But he knew perfectly well that there are twenty or thirty different kinds of Ducks, for he often saw others at a distance and made far-sketches, hoping some day he’d find out what they were. Well, one day the ‘Boy-that-wanted-to-know’ sketched a new Duck on a pond, and he saw it again and again, but couldn’t find out what it was, and there was his b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l sketch, but no one to tell him its name, so when he saw that he just had to go into the teepee and steal the First War Chief’s last apple and eat it to hide his emotion.”
      Here Yan produced an apple and began to eat it with an air of sadness . . .

The original edition of Seton’s Two Little Savages—subtitled Being the Adventures of Two Boys who Lived as Indians and What They Learned—here containing a plate of drawings comparing various ducks (“Far-sketches showing common Ducks as seen on the water at about 50 yards distance. The pair is shown in each square, the male above . . .”—a kind of proto-Peterson arrangement), each with a short list of references to the “blots and streaks that are their labels” (“Black Duck or Dusky Duck (Anas obscura). Dark bill, red feet, no white except in flight, then shows white lining of wings.”) Fons et origo of Peterson’s method.

—

Field marks. Sketching. Home to read out of Jean Cocteau’s Journals two “testimonials,” resplendent, particular, notational, apt. One of Marcel Proust, “thin, cadaverous, wearing the beard of Carnot in his casket”:

      Proust put on and took off that black beard of a caliph as fast as the comedians who, in the provinces, imitate statesmen and orchestra leaders. I remember him with a beard, and I have seen him clean shaven as he appears in the painting of Jacques-Emile Blanche, an orchid in his buttonhole and his face looking like an egg.
      Proust used to receive me in that closed room. He would be on his bed, dressed, wearing a collar, a necktie, and gloves, in fearful terror of a perfume, a breath of air, an opened window, a ray of sun. “Dear Jean,” he would ask me, “didn’t you hold the hand of a lady who might have touched a rose?” “No, Marcel.” “Are you sure?” And half serious, half joking, he would explain that the phrase from Pelléas where the wind passes over the sea was enough to start up in him an attack of asthma.
      He lay stiffly across the bed in the wrong way, in a sarcophagus of remains of souls and landscapes and all that had not served him in Balbec, Combray, Méséglise, in the Countess de Chevigné, in Count Greffhule, in Haas and Robert de Montesquiou. He lay just as he did when we looked at his remains for the last time beside the pile of notebooks of his novel which continued to live at his left, like the wristwatches on dead soldiers.
      Each night he read to me from Swann’s Way.

Another of Guillaume Apollinaire:

      I knew him when he wore a pale-blue uniform, when his head was shaved and a scar on his forehead resembled a starfish. A device of leather and strips of cloth made for him a kind of turban or small helmet, which seemed to be concealing a microphone through which he heard what the rest of us could not hear and by which he kept in secret contact with a magic world. He transcribed its messages. Some of his poems do not even translate the code. We often saw him listen. He closed his eyes, hummed, dipped his pen in the inkwell. A drop of ink formed at the tip. It wavered and fell. It made a star on the paper. Alcools and Calligrammes were markings of a secret code . . .
      The unusual word (and he used many) lost, in Apollinaire’s art, all picturesqueness. The banal word became rare. The amethysts, moonstones, emeralds, carnelians, and agates in his poetry, he mounted, no matter where they came from, as a winnower winnows, seated on a café chair. No street artisan was more humble and more alert than this soldier in blue.
      He was large without being fat, his Roman face was pale, his mouth with a small mustache over it articulated words in a staccato voice, with a slightly pedantic and panting grace.
      His eyes laughed at the seriousness of his face. His hands of a priest accompanied his speech with gestures which recalled the gesture sailors affect when they drink and when they urinate.
      His laughter did not come from his mouth. It rose up from every part of his organism, like an invasion him. Then followed a silent laughter in his eyes, and his body resumed its balance. Wearing socks, without his leather leggings, his knee breeches tight over his legs, he crossed his small bedroom on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, climbed a few steps to the tiny study where we saw the de luxe edition of Serres Chaudes and the copper bird of the Beni . . .

Jean Cocteau, 1889-1963

Notebook (Louis Zukofsky, Edgar Allan Poe, Frank O’Hara, &c.)

Louis Zukofsky, 1904-1978

Cold, with cold’s staid and primeval light. Men scraping vehicles in May. Chores and errands thwarting yesterday’s intended sweet aimlessness. Zukofsky, out of “Peri Poietikes”: “What about measure, I learnt: / Look in your own ear and read. / Nor wrest knowledge / in no end of books.” Pound, in a note (18 November 1930) to Zukofsky: “Look into thine own ear and reade. All ballz and a great deal more are talked about prosody. If it dont ‘read’ good whasser use of it. Obviously the ole bokos that have a theory and read it ti tump ti tump ti TUMP / do NOT understand anything.” And Zukofsky, rehashing (out of the 1950 essay, “A Statement for Poetry”): “No verse is ‘free,’ however, if its rhythms inevitably carry the words in contexts that do not falsify the function of words as speech probing the possibilities and attractions of existence. This being the practice of poetry, prosody as such is of secondary interest to the poet. He looks, so to speak, into his ear as he does at the same time into his heart and intellect. His ear is sincere, if his words convey his awareness of the range of differences and subtleties of duration. He does not measure with handbook, and is not a pendulum . . .”

—

Zukofsky’s gleanings out of Poe’s Marginalia (out of Bottom: On Shakespeare):

‘All that the man of genius demands for his exaltation is moral matter in motion. It makes no difference whither tends the motion—whether for him or against him—and it is absolutely of no consequence “what is the matter.”’

XLII

‘. . . the naked Senses sometimes see too little—but then always they see too much.’

LXXXVI

‘. . . in speaking of “moral courage” we imply the existence of the physical. Quite as reasonable an expression would be that of “bodily thought” . . .’

LXXXVII

‘. . . something in the vanity of logic which addles a man’s brains. Your true logician gets, in time, to be logicalized, and then, so far as regards himself, the universe is one word. A thing, for him, no longer exists.’

CXII

‘I believe it is Montaigne who says—“People talk about thinking, but, for my part, I never begin to think until I sit down to write.” A better plan for him would have been, never to sit down to write until he had made an end of thinking.’

CXLVI

Noting Poe’s processual mien. Countering the clampdown of logic, wary of the systemic. Zukofsky (out of Bottom): “Reading Shakespeare has become for me partly a philosophy of suspecting philosophy and what I have called its Logical Fortunes. I mean ways of talking that are already granted a rather sublimated love. It loves its propositions which rarefy an existence that at one time drove them to propose. It is the look away from the intimacy of love.” Considering that, along with Poe’s “naked Senses” that “always . . . see too much”—out of a longer note beginning, “Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term ‘Art,’ I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist’ . . .” and ending, “I have mentioned ‘the veil of the soul.’ Something of the kind appears indispensable in Art. We can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it. The naked Senses sometimes see too little—but then always they see too much . . .”—I recall Frank O’Hara’s serious (and cheeky) bravado in “Personism: A Manifesto”:

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.

The fleet look, half-veiled; the bounty of love marshaled by the particular; the whole pottage in singular stir (“sustaining . . . while preventing”); a poetics of “continual composition and decomposition” (Zukofsky quoting William Hazlitt).

—

William Hazlitt (out of “On Shakespeare and Milton”):

Shakspeare’s imagination is of the same plastic kind . . . “It glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.” Its movement is rapid and devious. It unites the most opposite extremes; or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats, “puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.” He seems always hurrying from his subject, even while describing it; but the stroke, like the lightning’s, is sure as it is sudden. He takes the widest possible range, but from that very range he has his choice of the greatest variety and aptitude of materials. He brings together images the most alike, but placed at the greatest distance from each other; that is, found in circumstances of the greatest dissimilitude. From the remoteness of his combinations, and the celerity with which they are effected, they coalesce the more indissolubly together. The more the thoughts are strangers to each other, and the longer they have been kept asunder, the more intimate does their union seem to become. Their felicity is equal to their force.

Notebook (Louis Zukofsky, Ezra Pound, Théophile Gautier, &c.)

Théophile Gautier, 1811-1872

Night showers linger into morning and the rain knocks down the rosy petals of the crabapple trees, staining the streets. Appropriating the rightness of the random turn of the page. Zukofsky, out of Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963), quoting some lines of “D’Albert, a poet,” out of Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835):

‘I cannot check my brain, which is all the difference between a man of talent and a man of genius . . . When I write a phrase, the thought which it represents is already as far distant from me as though a century had elapsed instead of a second, and it often happens that in spite of myself I mingle with it something of the thought which has taken its place in my head . . . To come upon a thought in a vein of your brain, to take it out rude at first like a block of marble as it is got from the quarry, to set it before you and, with a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, to knock, cut, and scrape from morning till evening, and then carry off at night a pinch of dust to throw upon your writing—that is what I shall never be able to do. . . .’

(I think of Charles Olson’s 1950 “Projective Verse” essay, with its fierce exigency that a poem “be a high-energy construct”: “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. . . . keep it moving . . . one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!”) Some of what Zukofsky cut out of the Gautier:

‘I cannot check my brain, which is all the difference between a man of talent and a man of genius; it is an endless boiling, wave urging wave; I cannot master this species of internal jet which rises from my heart to my head, and, for want of outlets, drowns all my thoughts. I can produce nothing, owing not to sterility, but to superabundance; my ideas spring up so thickset and close that they are stifled and cannot ripen. Never will execution, however rapid and impetuous it may be, attain to such velocity. When I write a phrase . . .

That “wave urging wave” seemingly akin to Zukofsky’s “Leaf around leaf” or “leaf on leaf” in “A” (“Leaf around leaf ranged around the center . . . / The leaves never topple from each other, / Each leaf a buttress flung for the other”), a formula surely mimicking Pound’s repeated “ply over ply” in the The Cantos.

—

Oddly enough—thinking of Zukofsky’s compounding of sight and music (“The music brings up a vacuum thru which light / travels . . .”)—Pound, too, uses the line to trace both phenomena of sight—

Ply over ply, thin glitter of water;
Brook film bearing white petals.
The pine at Takasago
                  grows with the pine of Isé!
The water whirls up the bright pale sand in the spring’s mouth
“Behold the Tree of the Visages!”
Forked branch-tips, flaming as if with lotus.
                  Ply over ply
The shallow eddying fluid,
                  beneath the knees of the gods.

—and sound—

Filled our tanks, sailed 5 days along shore
Came then West Horn, the island that closes its harbor
And by day we saw only forest,
                  by night their fires
With sound of pipe against pipe
The sound ply over ply; cymbal beat against cymbal,
The drum, wood, leather, beat, beat noise to make terror.

—

Some of Zukofsky’s uses of the repeated “leaf” in “A”:

Natura Naturans—
Nature as creator,
Natura Naturata—
Nature as created

                        He who creates
                        Is a mode of these inertial systems—
                        The flower—leaf around leaf wrapped
                                                            around the center leaf . . .

Spinoza’s “Natura Naturans . . . Natura Naturata” surging against Gautier’s “I cannot check my brain” (“He who creates / Is a mode of these inertial systems” surging against the Poundian “leaf around leaf.” And:

                                                                 . . . we talk, leaf
After leaf of your mind’s music, page, walk leaf
Over leaf of his thought, sounding
His happiness: song sounding
The grace that come from knowing
Things . . .

And, out of Zukofsky’s resounding, contrapuntal, and ludic lines (originally in the 1931 Objectivists number of Poetry under the title “‘A’: Seventh Movement: ‘There are different techniques’”):

But they had no eyes, and their legs were wood!
But their stomachs were logs with print on them!
Blood-red, red lamps hung from necks or where could
Be necks, two legs stood A, four together M—
        They had no manes so there were no airs, but—
        Butt . . . butt . . . from me to pit no singing gut!

Says you! Then I, Singing, It is not the sea
But what floats over: hang from necks or where could
Be necks, blood-red, red lamps (Night), Launder me,
Mary! Sea of horses that once were wood,
Green and, and leaf on leaf, and dancing bucks,
Who take liveforever! Taken a pump
And shaped a flower . . .

Extravagaria of the sawhorses in the street. Out of Bottom: On Shakespeare, Zukofsky’s quoting out of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin: “‘I have a perfect comprehension of the unintelligible; the most extravagant notions seem quite natural to me: I can find with ease the connection of the most capricious and disordered nightmare.’” (Cut without ellipsis by Zukofsky. In lieu of the colon, read: “and I enter into them with singular facility.”)

Zukofsky’s Musickings (Stray Notes)

Louis Zukofsky, 1904–1978

Louis Zukofsky, out of Bottom: On Shakespeare (1963): “Music implicit in the movement and pitch of the words is accessory to the desired order of sight.” One of Zukofsky’s musickings, out of “A”:

The music is in the flower,
Leaf around leaf ranged around the center;
Profuse but clear outer leaf breaking on space,
There is space to step to the central heart:
The music is in the flower,
It is not the sea but hyaline cushions the flower—
Liveforever, everlasting.
The leaves never topple from each other,
Each leaf a buttress flung for the other.

Hyaline: glassy, vitreous, smooth, clear (Milton’s “the cleer Hyaline, the Glassie Sea”). Musical notes, unseen, “buttressing” one the next in sequences, “arranging” a seeing (Zukofsky: “No air stirs, but the music steeps in the center— / It is not the sea, but what floats over it.”) Out of “A”:

The blood’s tide like the music.
A round of fiddles playing
Without effort—
As into the fields and forgetting to die.
The streets smoothed over as fields,
Not even the friction of wheels,
Feet off ground:
As beyond effort—
Music leaving no traces,
Not dying, and leaving no traces.

“Music leaving no traces, / Not dying, and leaving no traces.” Akin to Zukofsky’s insisting (Bottom: On Shakespeare) that “Shakespeare’s writing argues with no one: only in itself. It says: Love’s reason’s without reason . . . Flaming in the . . . sight . . . Love hath reason, Reason none. This writing exists as its own tempest . . . where thought is free (or necessary—the same difference after a while) and music is for nothing.” (“A”: “You are not to throw out your music / Grafted to the adequate, / Seen as the heart’s beat for more hearing . . .”)

Music, like love, “hath reason” without reason. That is, it is. Out of Bottom: On Shakespeare:

. . . that will be precisely the value of reading Shakespeare—or for that matter anyone who is worth reading—that is, the feeling that his writing as a whole world is, compelling any logic or philosophy of history not to confuse an expression of how it is with that world is. The thought that it is has, of course, no value, is rather of a region where thought is free and music is for nothing—or as eyes see and go out.

Eyes that “go out”—sight’s capture and quench—akin to musical notes’ sounding and extinguishment. (“A”: “The music brings up a vacuum thru which light / travels . . .”)

Music and seeing compounded. (Zukofsky’s integral “Lower limit speech / Upper limit music” is well and thoroughly quoted. One tiny addendum—how Dante “writing of the common speech” is Zukofsky’s fons et origo for the distilling. In the 1946 essay “Poetry / For My Son When He Can Read” Zukofsky proposes a definition of poetry thus:

. . . that matters worthy of the ‘highest common Speech—all that flows from the tops of the heads of illustrious poets down to their lips’—properly embrace the whole art of poetry which is ‘nothing else but the completed action of writing words to be set to music’—music being the one art that more than the others aims in its reach to speak to all men. Beside this definition of poetry, all other definitions of poetry would appear niggardly.

Personal preferred Zukofsky music: “Music, itch according to its wonts . . .” (Akin to Verlaine’s somewhat command in “Art poétique”: “De la musique avant toute chose, / Et pour cela préfère l’Impair / Plus vague et plus soluble dans l’air, / Sans rien en lui qui pèse ou qui pose.”) (In the C. F. MacIntyre translation: “You must have music first of all, / and for that a rhythm uneven is best, / vague in the air and soluble, / with nothing heavy and nothing at rest.”)

Notebook (Ben Jonson, Clark Coolidge, &c.)

Ben Jonson, 1572–1637

Limping here, of late. Reading’s haywire, inconsistent, dilatory, blocked. (I think of William Drummond of Hawthornden’s line concerning Ben Jonson: “he heth consumed a whole night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he hath seen tartars & turks Romans and Carthaginians feight in his imagination.”) Odd irregular forays into stumped “inconcludency” (make it klutzy). Sense of blockage, the brain-bolts torqued to maximum tension. Hence the rare noisy gabble and outpouring of words unsummoned, “misknowen” phrases like little intercom stomp or a satrap’s piastre or plangency’s rebarb . . . Cottonings to surd musickings, wild keeps. (Drummond, of Jonson: “That he stroke at Sr Hierosme Bowes Breast, and asked him, if he was within.”)

—

Clark Coolidge, out of Mine: The One That Enters the Stories (1982):

He had thought that only if the door could be sprung the knowledge would be gained, not knowing that it was exactly the standing of that door was the point. The door that is never to be opened enters the mind.

And:

I’ve arrived at the want of nothing further, so await the stopping of even my waiting and holding further. These paragraphs stay the hopelessness of blocks. The door holds the skin from its innards. This is the history of its errors. But the story you wish already is in its cells. An unraveling of the body in the twentieth century, a quitclaim descendant of continuance ridge. A bee’s eye view of Emily Dickinson as she puts away always her things in drawers. The writing will be snubbed, however dangled, we know this from the start, any flinging down an avenue of dwindled but speeding starts.

And:

I want to tell the story that holds in wait. I am held by the hand that in never quite touching the handle reminds us of how many times that door has been opened, so many times we have forgotten what lies within, so fixed are we by that opening and shutting the contents of our very memories have become a mystery.

Reverbs off Coolidge’s doors. Being exit and entrance. Threshold’s equilibrium. Liminal mischief. The writing scooping the writ. (Coolidge, in “A Note on Bop” (Now It’s Jazz: Writings on Kerouac & The Sounds) refers to “the famous door of Elvin Jones”—the drummer’s limbo and warranty: “The length of my solos doesn’t mean anything. When I go on for so long, I am looking for the right way to get out. Sometimes the door goes right by and I don’t see it, so I have to wait until it comes around again. Sometimes it doesn’t come around at all for a long, long time.”) Pertinent, too, lines out of Coolidge’s Code of Signals entry, “Notebooks (1976-1982)”:

I am jealous of my own doubt.
To say no to everything, what a wonder!
To set in motion, contains its own stopping
point. I glare in at myself to start it all
turning again. I have often opened my doors
to find the small flame of my doubt my only
light. Sometimes I shelter it with the mass
of all my works. I cup it with my acceptance,
blow upon it with satisfaction. I am vitalized
by all it has killed.

—

Keeping doubt—“haywire, inconsistent, dilatory, blocked” doubt—vigorous. (“Exactly the standing of that door was the point.”) Refusal of finish, refusal to finish. Drummond, of Jonson: “he read his translation . . . of ane Epigrame of Petronius / Fœda et brevis est Veneris Voluptas / Concluding it was better to lie still and Kisse then pante . . .”) Jonson’s “Fragment of Petron. Arbiter Translated”:

Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;
And done, we straight repent us of the sport:
Let us not then rush blindly on unto it,
Like lustful beasts that only know to do it:
For lust will languish, and that heat decay.
But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday,
Let us together closely lie and kiss,
There is no labour, nor no shame in this;
This hath pleased, doth please, and long will please; never
Can this decay, but is beginning ever.

A kind of poetics there: Coolidgean, “thus, thus,” “beginning ever.” “The story that holds in wait.”

—

To note: three new pieces—“Pound and Cudgel,” “Uncanny and Fit,” and “Grief and Slough”—now up at Andrew Spragg’s Infinite Editions.

Notebook (John Ashbery, Jean Cocteau, &c.)

Robert Motherwell, “Nude,” 1947

May morning’s continual whomp of nostalgia and loss, its new greens running the gamut to yellow, its tiny acrobats in the treetops. Apt, thus, again, to offer up a jumble, pre-conceptual, disordered, flung. Renegade japery in human tatters. A field report. (Jack Kerouac, out of Maggie Cassidy: “I was going to grow up to walk in sleet in fields; didn’t know it then.”) Stuck without a salient to go to the end of, I walk it off, dislodging a few words at each reentry.

—

That itch to fill any blank with the poke of a digit, the human finger pointing “off” in tender mockery of the fervency of its own self-apprehending. The way the way is unplugged by sparring, by scrimmage. Nothing’s own prehensile certainty found in excavating the pit, the empty pit. John Ashbery, out of “The System” (c. 1971):

. . . just, I say, as we begin each day in this state of threatened blankness which is wiped away so soon, but which leaves certain illegible traces, like chalk dust on a blackboard after it has been erased, so we must learn to recognize it as the form—the only one—in which such fragments of the true learning as we are destined to receive will be vouchsafed to us, if at all. The unsatisfactoriness, the frowns and squinting, the itching and scratching as you listen without taking in what is being said to you, or only in part, so that you cannot piece the argument together, should not be dismissed as signs of our chronic all-too-human weakness but welcomed and examined as signs of life in which part of the whole truth lies buried. . . .”

—

Nostalgia is never for art, that rake, with its “palpable design,” its “hand in its breeches pocket.” It leaks without gallantry under the door. It feuds with the help, unprepossessed, put off by the canned flattery of attendants. It hikes itself up, aimless in its airings, refuses to hike its skirts. Or it refuses to skirt the high road, consorts with the common lodger in the vestibule. Rubs vehemently against the glaucous “bloom” of dusk. Willem de Kooning, out of “What Abstract Art Means to Me” (1951):

Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity. I do not think of inside or outside—or of art in general—as a situation of comfort. I know there is a terrific idea there somewhere, but whenever I want to get into it, I get a feeling of apathy and want to lie down and go to sleep. Some painters, including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on. It does not even have to be a comfortable one. They are too nervous to find out where they ought to sit. They do not want to “sit in style.” Rather, they have found that painting—any kind of painting, any style of painting—to be painting at all, in fact—is a way of living today, a style of living, so to speak. That is where the form of it lies. It is exactly in its uselessness that it is free.

—

The sunlit slopes, leaf detritus down. Dogwoods and redbuds coming into their own. “At least as alive as the vulgar.” The way it is today un peu partout. Jean Cocteau, in a letter to New York, out of the Journals (1956):

You dislike tradition and the new. Your ideal would be an instantaneous tradition. The new is immediately attached to a school. Its life is over at the time. You classify and name it, and since you don’t allow an artist to experiment, you demand that he repeat himself and you replace him when he tires you. In that way you kill the flies.
      I saw in the Museum of Modern Art an unforgettable scene. In a very clean nursery, fifty little girls were painting on tables covered with brushes, inks, tubes, gouache. They were not looking at their work and their tongues stuck out like those of dogs who have been conditioned to look strained on the striking of a bell. Nurses were taking care of these young creators of abstract art, and slapped their hands if by mistake what they painted represented something and dangerously inclined towards realism . . .

—

Grunts in the morning. Pertinent, too—the post-WWII “can-do” heroics of Harold Rosenberg, writing in Possibilities (1947) of “six American artists”—Romare Bearden, William Baziotes, Byron Browne, Adolph Gottlieb, Carl Holty, and Robert Motherwell—“who feel no nostalgia for American objects and landscapes”:

Attached neither to a community nor to one another, these painters experience a unique loneliness of a depth that is reached perhaps nowhere else in the world. From the four corners of their vast land, they have come to plunge themselves into the anonymity of New York, annihilation of their past being not the least compelling project of these aesthetic Legionnaires. . . . The very extremity of their isolation forces upon them a kind of optimism, an impulse to believe in their ability to dissociate some personal essence of their experience and rescue it as the beginning of a new world. For each is fatally aware that only what he constructs himself will ever be real to him.

Robert Motherwell, “Orange Personage,” c. 1947

Robert Motherwell, “Untitled (Figuration),” 1948