Antic View

156

2012-01-30T01:37:00.001-08:00

JH: Your mining analogy is a description of poem series as well as style. What is the relation of poem series to recurring characters? I cannot foresee that I will again write poems in any of my series, but I can imagine writing poems that include any character in my past writings. For me, a poem series is a matter of form rather than character. I don't consider my Virginia poems, for instance, as part of a series, though Virginia has appeared in at least two of my series. "Reminiscence" includes characters that may reoccur in future poems. The Creaky Wink may also reoccur. Speaking of recent poems, here is your "Probably So", a superb poem that makes excellent use of enjambment and prose/line interaction:

He’s

throwing his bullet wounds at us,”

said George Harrison. Could

you do the same, Absolute Reader?

Turning verbs to use nouns in the picture, and the end zone falters with completion. The idea in life makes a great prop. Charity cannot exist, but new Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine period. We must discuss the efforts of those counted for more than one. And

God said, “I will provide a train station.

AHB: I guess a general come what may attitude persists. I’m writing an autobiographical book. It roams about in time, because the logic of chronology is no logic at all. So we, writers, go for what interests us, proves useful. George Harrison really did say what I quote him saying (to Peter Fonda), at least according to the story. The image struck me as dynamic. And of course I let the bubbling currency of “news” (from radio or newspaper) seep in. A sort of reverse of Jung’s picture of the unconscious influencing the conscious. I don’t know why such a line as the last one would exist, which is exactly why I like it.

155

2012-01-14T05:24:00.001-08:00

JH: Style may be likened to a characteristic manner of speaking. One often changes one's way of speaking depending on circumstance. In writing, each poem is approached differently by the only way a poem may be approached, by words (the only visual/audible, verifiable approach to a poem, I should clarify). Is it true that each and every poem is approached differently? There is speaking, and there is the speaker. How different can a speaker be? A poet's style may be appreciably different than it was ten years ago, but is it likely to be much different from ten days ago? This ten-day difference may happen a few times over a poet's lifetime, but probably wouldn't happen every ten days over a poet's lifetime.

AHB: I suppose if you are mining the earth for whatever ore you first find the precious. As you dig, perhaps you find greater concentration. As you continue, you find that the concentration diminishes as the lode pays out. I think writers tend to approach each poem the same, like with the previous.in repetition of this writing act, we find something different.

So speaking of which, you supplied Wryting-L with the following different sounding piece. No Greek, and kinda flaky:

Reminiscence

The masque at the Creaky Wink, it was some affair! Me and Het Rancifer, were we the Red Death, the Yellow King? You'd think. We, venerable, inveterate to the Wink, masqued as Gravestone and Madness Creek, newcomers to the Creaky Wink. Some pair!

154

2012-01-02T10:29:00.001-08:00

JH: Few of my prose poems exceed five sentences. Can I say that I don't intend to write short poems? Brevity accompanies the lyric, and although I know there are many kinds of poems, I hold poetry and the lyric as synonyms. Regardless, I don't deliberately write short poems. Is cleaving to a type of poem a definition of style?

AHB: I do not feel like I cleave to a style. I write how I can. I think about style, as an object of originality, about as much as I think of my fingerprints in the same light. Sometimes I consciously put limits and dimensions to my writing, but in all cases the writing discovers itself. It does seem like it takes a certain confidence to know that the one sentence that you have written is ‘done’. I mean, a certain momentum exists in the act of writing. And see, I have written a short reply.

153

2011-12-24T07:10:00.001-08:00

JH: I never had mentors outside of books. It is indeed no easy task to become a better writer of sentences. To me, a prose poem is a poem that just happens to be in prose. What is the structure of prose poems if not the words themselves? One exception could be punctuation, which can provide the space that line breaks provide in verse. Another exception could be paragraphs. Often, your prose poems are several paragraphs long. How would you compare stanzas and paragraphs? Also, is there structure without space (separation) as there can be structure without repetition?

AHB: John Ciardi, or someone like that (someone much quoted as an authority but not so much someone we look to for the poetry itself), said (effectively, ie, I'm just about making it up) poetry snaps into shape whereas prose can be constantly whittled. I form paragraphs both semantically and visually. If it feel like the thought has changed, I move to the next paragraph. I also break if the appearance of hte word block looks too imposing. I have no problem with endless prose blocks but some pieces want air space. There can be structure without space but that can really be imposing. I'm thinking of ancient Greek and Roman writing with no spaces, which often can be rendered in multiple meanings. The reader, allowing for a modicum of interest, will find a structure. You, by the way, having been writing poems of single sentences.

152

2011-12-19T15:42:00.001-08:00

JH: Welcome to the Billiverse is indeed genius! To comment on "Familiar Actaeon", and to answer your question "What's this with nails and wings", I present my most recent poem, "Shepherds' Council":
Hands that to roods have nailed paws lupine, and have nailed paws leonine, nail to cypresses wings cygnet, as Artemis holds cygnets dear, chaste Artemis Who disdains display even for vengeance, and holds vengeance dear solely upon discovery: this is had from Her nymphs when they hymn of Actaeon by Artemis imbruted, which change surely befell shepherds of late vanished to us.

* * * * *
Unlike with Virginia, I did not intend to write more Actaeon poems. After I wrote my first two Virginia poems, I knew I would write many more Virginia poems. It is not only characters that can influence one's future poems. A poem can influence its poet's future poems, sometimes to the extent of altering how that poet writes poems. Has there been such a poem for you? For me, that poem was "And now refers only to Lethe's diverting ripple",
And now refers only to Lethe's diverting ripple
which struck me as having a natural use of the line. I wanted to see if I could write natural lines at will. This led me to a consideration of the line. In a poem lacking measure and form, how to end the line? Eventually, I began writing prose poems. I came to realize that unless the poem calls for lines, whether naturally or by formula, there is no need for lines. Sentences can make a poem as much as lines.
You write mainly in the prose poem. What caused you to write prose poems?
AHB: While in college, I suddenly started writing lines across the page, underhanging the next line below the last letter of the previous. It was a breakthru for me.When Robert Grenier, my teacher saw the poem, he got excited enough to publish it in This 3. In that poem, let us say, I accepted what Olson wrote about the open field of composition.

I do not recall a breakthru that said Write poems in prose now. Certainly it meant something to me to read, say, Baudelaire's Poemes en Prose, for the license (tho those poems are largely stories). I think semantics concerned me. That is, I understood the sense of line musically (thanks to Creeley especially, him and his enjambments), but I found line breaks getting in the way of the sense I wanted to make. For a long time, commas were the only punctuation I used. Which means endlessness. I'm going afield in my answer but I think it's all apposite. When I kept a journal,rather than fuss sentences and punctuation, I used dashes. These could be end stops or brief pauses (periods or commas). So I got a sense of freedom and structure, both, in using them. And as I became a better writer of sentences, no easy task, I heard the rhythm and sound better. And finally, I recognized that I could be straightforward, at least in delivery. Poetry as we find often loses itself in the mystery of invention. We do, after all think, in consciousness, in sentences. I think poetry without structure is gibberish. That a poem is a structure. Random words mean nothing until the brain discovers a structure (whether intended by an author does not matter).

I mentioned Grenier earlier. Have you a had a mentor? I mean someone you knew personally who helped your writing. Obviously I claim Grenier, tho I never stayed in contact after that one year.

151

2011-03-06T04:25:00.001-08:00

JH: I agree that fluidity -- rhythm -- is essential to poetry. Rhythm points to something else, and, via rhythm's recurrence and variation/error, this pointing is itself evocative, and evocation is another essential of poetry. Is poetry an essentializing machine? After writing the word "machine", I wonder if it should be replaced with "entity" or "process". I prefer a word such as "entity" or even "machine" to "process" when describing poetry. Does poetry essentialize myth and history? If so, are they essentialized only within poetry?
I wrote my first Actaeon poem in 2007. It wasn't until 2009 that I wrote another Actaeon poem. In 2010, I've written quite a few Actaeon poems. It seems like the Actaeon poems will never end, but there have been several characters who recurred in my poems who now occupy the area between hiatus and cessation: Virginia, William Wormswork, Aglaia, etc. I'm more aware, more self-conscious, of Actaeon's presence in my poems than I've been of my other characters. I don't know if this is due to Actaeon (or Artemis) or to my current stage as a poet.
You also have had characters that appear in several poems, and you have written Welcome to the Billiverse. Could you speak of this excellent work, please?

AHB: Yes, we both use characters in our work, which seems to be uncommon. Your Virginia and your Actaeon clearly have a wide and personal meaning for you. For myself, I guess I like the locus of otherness that a character supplies.

I have used Fu Manchu and his nemesis Sir Denis Nayland-Smith (from the novels of Sax Rohmer) extensively, and Tarzan and Jane. Additionally, I come up with names that just interest me, like Captain Element and Professor Radiant. These names seem implicative without being specific.

I am not sure that I can speak of Welcome to the Billiverse, altho I say that in prelude to speaking about Welcome to the Billiverse. The main character(s) derive(s) from someone I knew, but took on a life of its/their own.

I just let the weird stuff out, basically, in writing the stories. I allowed myself to serve slapstick humour. I wrote the thing nearly 20years ago, then maybe 15 years ago, when I was not writing much poetry, decided to see the work as a whole, not just a bunch of stories. For maybe 10 years it was lost to me, because it was in Word Perfect format and I no longer had access to that program.

I am wickedly unsure about the thing as it stands. A writer friend wrote to say it was genius, if only I could cut it down to size. I actually have cut it enormously, but I see the point. I just haven’t had the focus to work on it.

I guess I consider the book my Confederacy of Dunces, albeit without the tragedy attached to the author of that work. Dunces has flaws, for sure, the plot becomes tiresome, but the main character is so splendidly presented that one reads on. I feel like the central characters of Billiverse offer a similar extended human weirdness.

But anyway.

Your Actaeon embraces of multitude of concepts and implications, both personal and cultural. Cultural, certainly, because that mythic character is ‘well known’. But also personal, as your involvement is not expressed but intimated. Here, then, is yet another appearance of your Actaeon:

Familiar Actaeon

The wings of cygnets were attached -- with cygnet, often, and without -- and by nail always; one nail per wing, one wing per cygnet -- cypress by cypress, but it takes deity to attach a deer to a vanished man.

* * * * *

The imagery is surreal, yet reasonable also in a mythic, dreamlike way. What’s this with nails and wings, etc. The last phrase booms. It telescopes the ‘familiar’ myth into something personal as well as archetypal. It is a transmutation.

150

2010-11-20T05:32:00.001-08:00

JH: A poem's arrival, often named inspiration, is swift. The composition of a poem is likewise swift, though the revision may take some time, such as hours or even days. If almost all of my revisions of "These gargantuan hounds" and "This dawn" were omitted and the page of each poem were to include only the first appearance of the poem (the first draft) and the final (finished) version of the poem, not a lot of words would be removed or added. Why aren't the first appearance and the final version of a poem always identical? Are they identical, just not in the world? Can we regard differing versions of a poem as being the same poem reflected in different surfaces? How then to find the most accurate mirror?

I too often think of poetry as oracular. If poetry is oracular, what isn't oracular? Is the revision of a poem oracular?

"These gargantuan hounds": The hounds are much larger than the hounds of the Actaeon myth and my Actaeon poems, while Actaeon is not enlarged. Once again, a poem's space brings Actaeon and the hounds to the same place, allows them to move together in the same place, the place where, in the myths and previous of my poems, Actaeon was killed by the hounds. In a poem, space and place are superimposed.

"This dawn": Actaeon imbruted, Actaeon metamorphosed into a hart, has, figuratively, a new dawn, a dawn as new as an infant's. The infant Oedipus was also defenseless in the wild. In a poem, the figurative can be underscored by an additional figure, which can more strongly contrast the figurative with the literal: "This dawn of Actaeon will be dragged from the skies by hounds."

AHB: I think my interest in fiction stems from the collision of figurative and literal. And this interest... I want to speak a little about fiction and poetry.

As a reader growing up, I liked stories and I liked biographies. That is what writing meant to me, tho not in the sense of me putting words to paper. I liked the resolutions and completions, however false, that such writing offered.

When I started writing myself, those resolutions and completions were not available to me. And what interested me was indeed 'real' things and 'imaginary' things jostled together.

I find that I allude and refer often to historical events and persons. This would be a direct and conscious understanding received from Charles Olson and his sense of history. I just recently finished reading, for maybe the 3rd time, Son of the Morning Star by Evan Connell, about the events at Little Bighorn.

The massacre, to apply that term, has become a fascinatingly immense icon of some great complexities of this world. People take plenty of meaning from it, yet that meaning is fluid and far from set in stone. That fluidity seems essential to poetry. By the same token (I think) 'your' Actaeon shares space in the literal world with a figurative sense that is 'yours', you as the writer of the poems.

With both movies and novels, I merely put up with the resolutions that seem to be the intrigue of plot. The resolutions do not satisfy me because they are from the figurative world, yet read from the literal. That is, to achieve these resolutions, a lot of fakery goes on. I think I combat that fakery by simply not concluding what seems to be plot.

In your poems, especially these Actaeon ones, I see an effort to dismay the literal with disjunctive jumps that the reader must make. The literal remains, yes, but not at the sacrifice of the figurative. I believe that different ways are sought in poetry to relieve the literal from its control of language.

The crappy poetry that I see fails most for mindlessly proffering figurative expressions as literal, i.e.: whipping up a load of malarkey.

149

2010-08-08T02:05:00.001-07:00

JH: Everyone's place as a poet is wobbly, due to the multivalence of poetry. Poetics and poetry are two different things. Poems and the idea of poetry often influence poetics; poetics sometimes influence poems; poetics never influence poetry. Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, wrote Milton. The antiquity of poetry (“antiquity” in place of “timelessness”) can make for feelings of belatedness. Poetry wasn’t with anyone’s beginning, nor was anyone at the beginning of poetry. Who was born mindful of poetry? Whose first poem was poetry? Thus, no one is late to poetry, nor is poetry a lost Arcadia. An example of your punctual gift of poetry (a gift bestowed upon you, a gift proffered to us) is “Those Jerks in the iPhone Commercial”, recently posted to the Wryting-l list:

There is a poem presented in glass form, chills of summer. A whisper
of father and mother makes increment, glistering patois. Shades of
Apache clouds cling to New England willow. People are not panicles, no
matter how planted. Last thought is first thought.

* * *

AHB: The poem is a collection of phrases and sentences. That, sometimes, seems the whole story. Plus the noise of the television inspired the title. An emotional current runs thru because words are conditioned that way. I can never remember if it was Williams or Creeley that wrote, he wants to say something but is saying it anyhow. Without supercharging the idea of poetry, I must say that poetry often feels oracular. In the writing if not the reading. My poems are brief events that I do not return to often. My wife posted a poem of mine on Facebook. When I read it, I liked it, but I did not recognize it as mine. Your own poetry seems oracular to me. I may be using oracular incorrectly. I mean the language flows thru you, the writer, not exactly bidden, not exactly contained. NOT like Edgar Cayce, whatever that story is about, but shepherded or… Here are two brief poems that you recently posted to Wrytings-L:

These gargantuan hounds

The stars their cockleburs, what quarry do these gargantuan hounds course? In other words, who opposes you, Artemis? As the devotee walks between your temple's columns, so Actaeon imbruted walks among the legs of hounds outsized.

* * *

This Dawn

The brain of Actaeon imbruted is the brain of infant Oedipus deserted. This dawn of Actaeon will be dragged from the skies by hounds. * * *I had to look up imbruted, These works come from somewhere, seem related, and hold mystery…

148

2010-07-26T16:01:00.001-07:00

JH: How old is a poem when it arrives to a poet? How old is any worded thought? Poetry, which doubles, re-routes, and shadows words, may underscore archaic words, including mythological names, as a result of language's dusty bloom. A poem is anachronistic. Nothing outside of a poem occasions that specific poem. A death may call for an elegy, a marriage an epithalamium, but not a specific elegy, nor a specific epithalamium. Yet the poem calls for a specific poet. What does this say of the poet's place in time, in history? Perhaps a poet doubles, re-routes, and shadows the person who is known, if only to that person, as a poet. Then, the poem and the poet meet in the person who composes the poem.

AHB: Your words above are poetic and poetry. I find my place as poet wobbly to say the least. This can be asseverated by how infrequently I have been replying to your Antic View installments of late. The person who composes the poem, I mean in this case ME, struggles with the other world, of usefulness. I have to attend to the business of life, which is somewhat at odds with poetry. Not fully so, because poetry instructs me, even as I hone my writing for practical purposes. To write well in any genre and to any purpose is never a betrayal of poetry, but in doing that, I am not explicitly writing poetry. So much of my 'career' has been fueled by quantity, which is an Olsonian word. Now I hunt an endeavoured quality of directness and accuracy. You identify an essential in the separation and merger of poet and poem. Poems are always new. I feel old in the clutch. I learned too late that a large local poetry reading would occur next week in the Boston area. On my birthday, even. Yet I am excluded, having not attached myself appropriately to the movers/shakers hereabouts. The person who composes the poem must tap a shoulder and presume. I am at a loss that you are not A Famous Poet. I am amazed that the magiserties of Days Poem are not commanding the day. I am a fan of your multi-valence time machine of words. Speak further, Poet.

147

2010-03-21T04:23:00.001-07:00

JH: I don't think of purity when writing a poem, though when writing lyric poetry I try to follow the poem's unfolding as a poet while contributing little to nothing as a writer. The less writer and the more poet in a poem, the more that poem gestures toward purity. In "Of The Coronation", the word "the" was not called to the first sentence, but it was called to the second sentence. The words "the" and "this" are called as much as "Scylla" and "Actaeon". The names "Scylla" and "Actaeon" are instances of expansive reference, which is a reference to mythology, history, or literature, fields where a name or phrase attracts many other names, phrases, treatments, and commentaries. This, like the polysemy of words that aren't proper nouns, allows an inclusiveness that would thwart purity were multivalence not a facet of poetry. A poet's receptivity to poems can resemble method, a poet's approach to poems. Style is a poet's receptivity. Style is immediacy, the way some people can read English at a glance and others cannot. One can write, through habit or will, a certain kind of poem for years and then, in a day, receive one's style from a very different kind of poem. Was style present, unfinished and inaccurate, among the sentences or lines of one's poems outside one's receptivity? If so, is this seen only in retrospect, or does detection precede receptivity? Indeed, your poems are without excesses of manner. An example of your stylistically exact, which is to say pure, poetry is "Stage One", recently posted to Wryting-l:

Robert Grenier is a relevant undertow, and Robert Lowell is a causation while limp. Or pine is a memory of non-pine, on a beachhead, with news from Elizabeth Bishop. Meanwhile, a telltale romance develops with numerous words organized as hash marks in the stadium. Definite impulse, throne room, a buttress or two. We read these maps, camouflage.

You are the flock that stays, says Lowell to Bishop.

***

Could you speak of this poem, please?

AHB: I was much mastered by the reading that I did. This is not unusual in the young writer, but it took me a long time to free myself from those explicit sensations of impact from other writers. Robert Grenier, my teacher (for one year), is indeed a relevant undertow for me. He was whence I learned of the writers that would influence and inspire me. Thru him, Olson, Creeley, Stein, etc. And I struggled to obey the instructions from those writers. But the point is not adherence to their rules, it is to find my own. I feel that I have.So if my work really seem without excess of manner, it is because I learned not to value manner. Hence, I suspect, my antipathy towards Robert Lowell. On my blog, I give thought to Lowell’s manner. I think his poetry depended on manner.

Someone who could have seemed mannered, but never did, was HD. Her invocation and evocation of ancient Greece is so immediate. Which is exactly how I feel about your poetry, which lately has hearkened muchly to Greek myth. So much so that the reference to The Sorceror’s Apprentice (and its suggestion of Mickey Mouse) natheless sounds a pure seeming ‘ancient note’.

This Actaeon

A lyrist makes of absence a hound. His pack of hounds increasing, is this Actaeon more accurately likened to Marsyas or The Sorcerer's Apprentice? What challenge in sight, what lyric -- exultations, these, or queries?

I do not know how you capture this ancient sense.

146

2010-03-02T17:11:00.001-08:00

JH: The poem "On Eileen Tabios' Novel Chatelaine" comes from Eileen Tabios' novel as come, to take one example from the poem, "red roses / from immense crystal vases." The idea of issuance is probably what inspired me to write the poem. "Neglect oranges / a vineyard." is by way of variation -- the sentence could be re-phrased along the lines of "Orange comes from neglect". I've written two other poems on works by living poets: Seamus Cain and Lanny Quarles Theatre is one of three elements in literature that have occupied me lately. The other two are coincidence and, to put it quickly, milestone. Of coincidences, their appearance and also their refusal to appear: are coincidences more common with the literary? It's common for me to think of a book or a text and have it appear, or at least the name, soon after. Is coincidence the manifestation of memory as a map unfolding? Would the study of coincidence be the study of memory? Is coincidence analogy? Is there a relation (I almost wrote "coincidence") between coincidence and motif? There are milestones that are identified (as milestones) either at the time or soon thereafter, and there are milestones that are identified years later (and there are also lost encounters that are identified years later, and would perhaps be as ephemeral as though they had never happened). One milestone in my life that wasn't identified until years later was the encounter with reading Greek and Roman drama—the start, imperceptible at the time and some time after, of a fascination with Greek and Roman mythology—if it is the mythology fascinating me, and not the names which I must commemorate. Any such milestones in your life? If the personal is duplicable (by returning to themes in one's writing, or to habits in one's life), how personal is it? Is the aleatory, the milestone unacknowledged and unclaimed, more personal? AHB: I think I would answer yes to most of your questions, perhaps on the theory that doing so presents the most possibilities. I have just started reading a bio of Robert Lowell, by Paul Mariani. I do not care for Lowell’s work (I am trying to decide how fair my antipathy, longstanding, is fair), and I thought Mariani’s bio of WCW was a crock, but Lowell is interesting for his forceful sense of milestone. His poetry depended on important moments. That is fine but he goes awry, I think, and I think a lot of writers do likewise, by making a milestone. He had a practice of creating importance, which is of a falsity that wearies me, however much I myself am guilty of it. I think I have eschewed that tendency. I know that your own work is not so troubled. I am frankly fascinated by the restraint and direction of your work. Do you think in terms of purity? I know such a word is loaded, but I think your willingness to follow the strictures that you have discovered, that are implicit in each poem’s development, suggests purity. Just recently, you posted to Wryting-L this poem: Of the CoronationDoubtless, says Cephalophore, this head fell from a bough and I hitherto headless gathered it up: in a grove nothing is out of place. The world making sylvan study, Scylla has her hounds as surely as Actaeon. This crown that betimes gnaws me I name Absalom. * * * * *I love the phrase “in a grove nothing is out of place”. It seems like Poetry’s purest possibility. The names within this piece all seem earnestly invited. In that, I would hearken to HD. You do not seem to be investing the writing with the outer rind, id est, self -consciousness. You invite. I know that you use aleatoric techniques. I also know that you do not use them exclusively. Here is an impression, which I ask you to discuss. I feel like in my writing, I have worn off the excesses of manner, I have learned to avoid the sort of traps that Lowell could stumble into. Your method, in contradistinction, aligns with a ceremonial or ritualistic process that cannot step wrong. Is there any validity to such a sense? Do you, sir, write crappy poems at all?

145

2009-10-09T16:26:00.001-07:00

JH: Sometimes a poem will arrive while I'm thinking of poetics and structure, which may be a coincidence, as the thinking is lengthy. Ditto my reading. A poem is often the illustration of a definition of a word. As a definition has its own words apart from the word it defines, so an illustration (an instance, an example) has its own words apart from the definition it is to illustrate. The examination of a word is larger than any one poem or poet, which permits poetry's perpetuation. Will a word ever be used completely? If ever a word is entirely representative of its language, because a poem encloses it beyond interpretation, does the language die? This brings me to "Colloquy". There is the possibility that all of "Colloquy" is what The Translator hears/translates, if Signum is mistaken about The Translator being out of earshot, yet correct about The Translator translating words into English immediately or near-immediately upon hearing them. If so, the pauses between sentences and speakers could be instances of The Translator hearing, or translating, an untranslatable word as silence. Would this possibility be lost in a performance of "Colloquy"? What does writing a poem in the dramatic or even the colloquy form do to the reading of the poem? Are performers to be envisioned? When reading a sonnet, do you see pictures as you would a novel (if indeed you see pictures when reading a novel. Sometimes I do. I read such pictures as peripheral sightings, as I would take note, out of the corner of my eye, of a physical fact such as a tree or another book)? Whether or not performers are envisioned when reading a play, a colloquy, or poem written in dramatic form (or using terminology found in theatre, or alluding to drama), the idea of performers may be noted, providing another facet, or hedgehog quill, to the poem. In such texts, another existence is projected, one as independent of a reader's knowledge as the dictionary definition of a word. I once had a fascination with theatre that lasted for about two years. I read almost as many plays and theatre histories as I did poetry. My interest in avant-garde writing was spurred by reading plays and performance texts of the surrealists and dadaists rather than by experimental poems. I have never acted, though. Have you? I have seen few plays and no operas or ballets. The perishability of performance, memories of a performance seeming more like personal memories than memories of letters, and the conjuring of a performance in the reading of a play are all things that drew me to theatre. Here is a recent poem of yours, posted to Wryting-L, titled "Scraps Guilt Pprocess":

Dense marvel child, thought is weight. Thought is Walt Whitman
Incorporated, along a smooth river in green tempo. Variance occurs on march, walking to process while alert, firmed, dilate. Now we read
hence, here, the momentous. There was a crash of young person, wishing to be. Event of crashing young is a noun. Event of crashing young is noun falling down. Event is young noun falling crash of event. So much for that phrase lodge. We talk of tempo bout look, magnitude sand puns. puns shape language with diversion. The apples of this fall are ready. Are you full of time like the rest? You stop and read the margins, then inward, until a sentence is filled. Stop when you are done. Do not smack the sat one, last in essence, last in judgment, last in how we weigh. A crash of taught magnifies and spells a thrifty sort of doom, numbers then and now.

* * * * *

The wonderfully-balanced opening sentence of six words is halved by a comma, opens with "Dense", and closes with "weight". The word "thought" adds to both "Dense" and "marvel". Many more marvels in this poem! Could you speak of this poem, please?

AHB: I can say straightaway that I was not being clever with Pprocess, it is pure, if such they can be, typo. Which brings the question of the author’s purpose and influence on a work. Errors such as that occur, and the author gets to choose whether or not to accept.
I do not have a lot of experience with theatre. Mostly what I have seen is amateur (6 or 7 Shakespeare plays, for instance), tho I've been to the ballet a number of times. I like dialogue and have written dialogues since I first began writing. I say dialogues rather than plays, because mostly they have been without story. I have not attempted to tell a story, but I like how speech (which Robert Grenier hates) can function in a not wholly contexted way. Thru out Days Poem, for instance, there are 'speeches', usually sentences attributed to someone (Tarzan, Jane, Fu Manchu). A narrative is implied but not exalted. The implication of performance, and the variability possible is interesting.

Well, speaking of such implication, you posted an implicative poem to Wryting-L, derived (in some fashion) from the work of Eileen Tabios, her tiny novel. Speak of this, please. Unlike many of the classical and classic authors that bubble up in your work, Eileen is quite alive.

On Eileen Tabios' Novel Chatelaine

A silk pocket
(Unattached? Perhaps!)
blue as a watering can
jettisons
an iron key.
Neglect oranges
a vineyard.
Are jettisoned, slowly, and,
despite poesy,
mortal as vines:
red roses
from immense crystal vases.
O hart,
from your horns: light once more!
From zero
bubbles no remorse.
From a pocket
blue and silk spumes
a key iron
as any iron sea.

144

2009-09-05T17:47:00.001-07:00

AHB: You say that the word porphyry came to you unbidden. With procedural work, there is the sense of the writing event, that you prepare for it. Maybe you are not even ready with pen or keyboard close by, but you think of ways to proceed. Is there an anticipation of the imminent poem as you ponder these writing structures? I ask because when I write, I begin, often, with a phrase, the poem’s first words. No more than that, elsewise I wear out the possibilities even before I actually write. Or, barring that starting point, I begin with just an inclination to write. Mayhap I err in thinking these approaches differ in some useful to decipher way.

This leads me to “Hold my Hand All the Way”, which is in fact an occasional poem. I attended a memorial service, and wrote the words before the service began, within that feeling and necessity (the title is from a song used in the service). It is, then, the surprise of what would surface then. Your procedures are play, in the serious sense of that word.

“Dunderhead Heaving” is just a bunch of phrases that were in my head. The phrase Stream of Consciousness is wielded frequently and awkwardly, implying automatic writing, or some ignorant stance towards the creative act. I think Joyce meant the continual voices and articulations one hears in one’s mind when one bothers to notice. Meditation practices focus exactly on these voices, in an effort to substantiate who we really are. Tom Raworth and Clark Coolidge are writers who have explored or exploited that stream. Sometimes when I am patently not writing, I mull phrases such as in this poem. The specific case of this poem, I began with real names (of those who could interview me) (not me, actually, I was ‘inspired’ by Nada Gordon writing that she would like to be interviewed), then the names became these noun phrases.

So now you may comment on the unusual piece that you posted to Wryting-L:

Colloquy

SIGNUM: See that figure there, across the water? In profile? Seated. The reader. That's The Translator.
ONYMA: Translator of what language?
SIGNUM: You have to ask? You haven't heard of The Translator?
ONYMA: Not this one. Is there a story?
SIGNUM: This translator, whether by decision or cause, I don't know, neither speaks nor writes any living language.
ONYMA: Dead languages, then?
SIGNUM: Only one. English. It could even be said that The Translator hears only in English, since words are translated immediately, or with near-immediacy, into English as soon as they are spoken. The Translator has said this, and also says this of written words.
ONYMA: Impossible.
SIGNUM: Honestly, I heard it from none other than Talu.
ONYMA: Then perhaps The Translator is untruthful.
SIGNUM: If not truthful, The Translator is guilelessly misstating or willfully misrepresenting. It could be a matter of miscommunication, since someone who knows English is the rarest of rarities.
ONYMA: I know a few words.
SIGNUM: Veracity aside, as a premise The Translator's condition is thought-provoking. For instance, would The Translator hear an untranslatable word as silence?
ONYMA: Hear as silence, or translate as silence?
SIGNUM: Would an untranslatable word be replaced from a store of deliberately falsely-translated words?
ONYMA: The notion of a store of deliberately falsely-designative words could serve as a definition of language.
SIGNUM: Or a history of language. Does The Translator incorporate untranslatable words, or any kind of foreign word, into English? How true is The Translator to the spirit of English?
ONYMA: English! What if I were to cry the word "poesy"?
SIGNUM: I...
ONYMA: Poesy! Unyielding impassivity -- surely, hearing an English word is worth something.
SIGNUM: The Translator is out of earshot, I believe. "Poesy"? Isn't the word "poetry"?
ONYMA: I understood it to be "poesy". "Poetry" must be a porphyrogene youth of yet another epoch.
SIGNUM: Within a dead language, what of anachronism, and what of archaism? Does The Translator change our native language, say, into Chaucerian English? Is what The Translator hears -- or, a comprehensive, converting Echo, instantly repeats -- a melange of English epochs?
ONYMA: Different epochs for different days! Different hours! Months! Years!
SIGNUM: Is it, as with the possibility of incorporating untranslatable and other foreign words into English, a matter of context and consistency?
ONYMA: Does The Translator know all living languages, not an impossible task, and hears English with every word?
SIGNUM: Like I said, food for thought. Let's move on.

* * * * *

Colloquy indeed. This piece is more directed than much of your work. You had a purpose…

143

2009-08-21T17:50:00.001-07:00

JH: An excellent definition of poetry, your "A poem is a surprise in the words you live with"! Is surprise, or perplexity (perhaps a facet of surprise), the same height as reading, hearing, or interpreting a poem? Is the divide between a poem's poet and public illustrative of the ideal plurality of reading (or hearing) a poem? Is surprise one of the responses that brings a poem into the light after it is written? Is the poem an obscurity that no light can illuminate? What is observed when one encounters a poem? Only the poem, recognized as being a poem, and any allusions, personal or historical, one adds to the poem. Recognition and ventriloquism, and recognition through ventriloquism, this is what is observed when one encounters a poem. Recognition and ventriloquism lie atop a poem, what lies beneath? AHB: A poem is an obscurity that no light can illuminate, indeed. Within that obscurity is the life of words, primeval, primordial, prime. In this picture, surprise is energy of involvement, of noticing the actions of words and our confrontation with them. Words as microbes, or something. Well, this seems to bring me to a recent poem of yours.

For Us Tempunauts

William Collins' Ode To Fear, to dissuade John Wilkes Booth
Youth And The Bright Medusa, to allay Lizzie Borden
Helen of Egypt, to daunt Cesare Borgia
Winesburg, Ohio, to dissuade John Wilkes Booth

Lycidas, to hinder Elizabeth Bathory

Baudelaire's Poe, to deter Gilles de Rais
The Case Of The Negligent Nymph, to allay Lizzie Borden
Would Une Semaine de Bonté turn aside Cain's hand?

The Ballad Of The Sad Café, to daunt Cesare Borgia
The Left Hand Of Darkness, to dissuade John Wilkes Booth
Milton's Lycidas, to hinder Sawney Beane

The Age Of Innocence, to daunt Cesare Borgia

Baudelaire's Poe, to deter Charlotte Corday
John Milton's Lycidas, to hinder Gary Gilmore

* * * * *
I have read me some Philip K. Dick, but did not recognize the reference to a story of his in the title. What is familiar to me is placed in unfamiliar (surprising) relationship here. The collisions and intersections here are invitingly baffling. And presented in something like a sonnet form. I want to present another of your poems that appeared on Wryting-L.

Porphyry

Issuance, pathless you had been
Unlikeness, pathless you had been
Nightingale, pathless you had been
Allurement, pathless you had been

And from whose hand, imposture, your voice?

Of fable, my words, and of my words, no fable
Of Virginia,my words, and of my words, no Virginia
Oh, for a verse to height sable Virginia with fêtes!
Of fêtes, my words, and of fêtes, no expectation

Reverie heights hours rich with imposture, cypress heights a shade
And from whose hand, nightingale, your voice?
Polis heights error, wilderness (heart or nail) heights voyage

First, you use the word porphyry more than I ever have, I am sure typing the title was the first time I ever writ the word. Beyond that, the weird rhythm, as of a rite, for instance The Tibetan Book of the Dead. You may now explain the procedure behind or beneath this gem.

142

2009-08-02T17:23:00.001-07:00

JH: The sonnet "Five Unicorns And A Pearl" has three lines that are repeated three times each ("Gertrude Stein, Three Lives", "Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers", and "John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers"), two lines that are repeated twice each ("Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales" and "William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain"), and one line that appears only once ("Henry James, The Portrait Of A Lady"). I chose the titles that are half of the lines in order to name their lines. The "My" of "My Mark Twain" implies "one", certainly, bringing the polyvalence of language into the poem ("My" also refers to the lyric "I"). The title of the poem, "Five Unicorns And A Pearl", is also the title of a diary in Carl Jacobi's story "Revelations In Black" (first published in Weird Tales in 1933). The impetus for this poem was my wanting to write a poem whose lines equaled a one, a pair of two, and a trio of three. These numbers add up to fourteen, thus the sonnet form, which also allowed me to vary the placement of the lines. Aside from the mimicry of the sonnet form, what, other than patterning, is the reason for the lines being in their respective places? I have been wondering about the difference between procedural poems and patterned poems. A procedural poem implies a source text (or texts) and a specific (formal?) process that creates a new text from the previous text (or texts). If there are literary references (for instance, surface literary references such as titles and authors' names) instead of quotations, and no other linguistic material, is this a procedural poem? The alternation of lines in "Five Unicorns And A Pearl" implies movement, but there is no reason for the movement, such as in my GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE (see Antic View #83) or The Recital (see Antic View #115). What is the importance of movement to the procedural poem? Is pattern, in the absence of narrative, static?

AHB: A pattern poem may be ‘mindless’, in that the pattern might outweigh other energies of the work. Mindless in the sense of going forward mechanically. When writers are too betrothed to patterns, metre and rhyme, say, our interest as readers diminishes because the pattern is just repetition. Emily Dickinson’s subversion of the strict tempo patterns is the locus of most interest for me, and I suspect for others. Rhythm is pattern, and that’s interesting musically (or more richly, Terpsichoreanly), Bo Diddley beat or double jig, but I do not think the logopeian thrill resides in that rhythm. Procedure seems to be a sort of translation, or let me say transmogrification, because it has more syllables. Procedure activates in a text and a dissatisfaction or hope, finding ways to open text(s) to unexpected possibilities. In “Five Unicorns”, the reader recognizes that you have gathered (in you mind) these particular texts, and saw them connect somehow. There is a pattern to what you have done, but the pattern is not the engine of its motion. In the making of your work, you actively process your reading. All writers process their reading, but you do so consciously, and your interest is not to collect modalities that you can use, but, perhaps, to release found modalities into their own activities. I like that you cite Weird Tales, which certainly is a locus of weird possibilities. I play with procedure, but am awkward in the process.

I do not think the use of procedure versus the sort of practiced unleashing that I endeavour is a large differentiation. A poem is a surprise in the words you live with, however that may come about.

141

2009-06-28T16:25:00.003-07:00

JH: A poem clarifies a mystery by stating it (and opening new mysteries that usurp the previous mystery's empery). A poem is the mystery of language, a mystery that cannot be clarified by any language outside poetry, nor any language outside a particular poem. A poem can ask questions, inferred or ending with the standard interrogative punctuation, that go unanswered within the poem, but, unlike aesthetics, can leave nothing unfinished. In a poet's oeuvre, words recur from poem to poem, and a reader may make a case for the recurrence of themes, but one poem does not complete another poem. In the past two years I've near-consistently written poems with Grecian and Roman names that would have themselves persons. I didn't set out to do this. This particular ancient world and its poetries are part of the definition of any one of the names of the figures in my recent poems. "Helena" is comprised of excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe's "To Helen" and from the first scene of the fifth act of Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus". In an earlier poem, "Helen", I combined excerpts from Poe's "To Helen" with excerpts from H.D.'s "Helen", and introduced a word, "languors", not found in either poem:

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home, remembering past ills and past enchantments, the enchantments of all Greece, the languors of old Rome. The agate lamp within thy hand. The lustre as of olives where she stands. How statue-like I see thee stand, remembering past enchantments and past ills.

The agate lamp within thy hand. The still eyes in the white face. The lustre as of olives where she stands. The folded scroll within thy hand. Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face: white ash amid funereal cypresses. The enchantments of all Greece, the languors of old Rome. How statue-like I see thee stand. The still eyes in the white face remembering past enchantments and past ills. Greece sees, unmoved, the agate lamp within thy hand. Thy Naiad airs have brought me home. The lustre as of olives where she stands. White ash amid funereal cypresses.

This is writing with pre-existing phrases instead of pre-existing words. Arrangement, selection, and repetition are where I as another writer am seen, and if the mythological references are read as corresponding to a preoccupation with antiquity and mythology in my previous poems, then my hand is more distinct, though still unidentifiable. Your poems are expansive toward names, including figures also appearing in mythology, history books, and articles about celebrities. One example is "Helen's Door", which was posted in March to Wryting-L:

this is a new poem, a button insistent on the start of 'things'. a poem is a language, fieldstones in the field of Troy. workers unite, telling Trotsky hilarious. the years prove fiendish, and someone kills Trotsky. Trotsky is not a poem, he was associated with a man. when he wrote poems, the stars lit a framework upon which the exacting nature of words could be made brilliant. stars are sharp. Jennifer Aniston was the moonshine near Brad Pitt. we need that area of a poem, even thinking that a clicking monstrance like Jennifer collides meaning in a way. something vital in play, then, as we read thru the script. Jennifer Aniston is stipend, residual check (of course), and a hairstyle choice. Helen—you know, of Troy—got some stupid for a pattern. well, we walk into that, the armies meet for 10 grueling, then playful gods show half interest nothing tells a better story. when Angelina—you know her—spent the chance, it was grand occasion. the threads of language left Agamemnon and Menelaus, cool umbels over the seed of Greek lit, and portaged to a stuck prepositional rebroadcast. meanwhile, centaurs of activity raided the hamstrung rendition. we are tired when we forget. A new poem is just the last poem marked up. then Troy falls, and Odysseus shadow dances for James Joyce. all that in comp lit captivity, for you, dear Reader, to unweave. the good career move will always surprise. Jennifer as unction is always next door.

Could you speak of this poem, please?

AHB: I bet I could speak of this poem. I will first say that you supply a copy of what I sent to the list. This copy reveals my haste. I am inconsistent on capitalizing the initial letter of a sentence. Decisions such as that are part of the process, however mundane they may seem. I was comfortable with no capitalization of the initial letter, but now I am rethinking that, and I have yet to train my fingers to follow thru. Even issues like this are important, as the poem is made. The poem is an indication of what is around me. I have read at least four translations of The Iliad (Fagel, Fitzgerald, that scholar that Pound knew, and Pope), but the instigation of the poem is the movie Troy, and furthermore the unavoidable tabloid intrusion of Jennifer Aniston with every visit to the supermarket. I am not fascinated with her, but with the apparent fascination that she receives. Is she then Helen? I do not know, but she is hard to escape.

I feel that I remain receptive as I write, and allowing Aniston and Agamemnon to cohabitate the poem’s space is a sort of duty, a presentation of my inscape. This inscape is not edited, or at least I am comfortable with silly conjunctions and the burbling of the popular clutch.

Bottom-lining, you and I found our ways to a resonant place. I have absorption of popular culture while you seem more involved with the classical text (as evidenced by the text: I have already indicated that I have studied the classical texts, am not wholly relying on pop culch). Ok. Your latest poem to Wryting-L is an oddity of sorts, but seems to relate here.

Five Unicorns and a Pearl

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain
John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers
Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales Henry James, The Portrait Of A Lady
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers
Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers
John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers

My wife read it to me, I had yet to read it, and delivered it straightforwardly. The rhythm caught me. The conjunctions seemed pregnant, but I cannot fulfill their promise. The titles bear numbers, mostly. The James and Howells both imply one. At least in line count, the poem looks like a sonnet. I do not know your procedure, and have publicly guessed wrong on your work (what I thought was procedurally written was written brain to hand to paper). It would—you would agree?—be the reader’s task to decipher the procedure, why each line is implanted as it is. I do not know how you ‘chose’ the works here, but there is some sense of absorption, the works were available to you. To ponder procedure in cases like this is an involvement. Jackson Mac Low described his procedure carefully because that was part of the work’s invitation. N’est-ce pas?

140

2009-06-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

JH: A poem having few words allows concentrated interaction among the words. The array of relations (including contradictions) is less than in a long poem. This limitation, which occurs upon comparison with an appreciably longer poem, is literal and not poetic: the poetic is boundless in its references and mysteries whether a poem is one sentence or a thousand cantos. In poetry, a flambeau and a pharos alike are will o' the wisps. Is length chosen by the author or the poem? One could lengthen one's short poem and condense one's long poem. One could by accident or design edit out the poetic in one's long poem, and one could, with one's short poem, stop before the poetic appears or edit it out. This editing could happen after the poem is written or during the writing of the poem, whether willingly or unknowingly. Why would anyone willingly remove the poetic from one's poem? How, practically, could this be done? Would this entail removing certain words and phrases, either leaving nothing in their place or replacing them with other words? Would the remaining original words noticeably interact independent of the replacement words? Could the remaining original words somehow indicate the removed words (indicate not the removal alone, but the words that were removed)? A poem is complete unto itself, but with the removal of even one word it would no longer be the same poem (thus no longer complete unto itself), and in the instance of the removal of the poetic it would not be a poem at all. The poem in the absolute is free from revision but manifests itself, a manifestation complete or partial, via the poet. The poetic in a poem is what is commensurate to the poem in the absolute, the poem as it reveals itself to the mind of the poet who is to write the poem. The poetic is not solely what of the poem in the absolute is transcribed or recited by the poet, but also what is fabricated by the poet to resemble (a trompe l'oeil for whose eye, a mockingbird's song for whose ear?) the poetic, as some of the poem in the absolute may (must?) be lost to the poet in its appearance or in the poet's writing or recital, lost through the poet's misapprehension, ignorance, forgetfulness, haste, lingering, etc. This fabrication is a correspondence (in all the meanings of the word "correspondence") with a part of the part of the poem in the absolute, a correspondence brought about by the meeting of the poem in the absolute and the poet in their shared language.

AHB: You write acutely that "the poetic is boundless in its references and mysteries whether a poem is one sentence or a thousand cantos." That is apt and accurate. The poem is a mystery word landscape of endlessness and possibility. In writing, one follows the instigation: in rewriting, one aims for that reference and mystery.

I think of Williams’ savvy assertion, that you cannot get the news from a poem, but people die every day for lack of what is found in a poem. Poems are empires of thought and language activated into unique distinctions that clarify mysteries by the act of enacting them. Does that make sense? Because we write with an eye to surprise ourselves, as well as the reader. Here is a recent piece that you posted to Wryting-L:

Helena
I might have unto my paramour that heavenly Helen which I saw of late. Ah, Psyche, too simple is my wit to tell her praise. The agate lamp within thy hand. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter when he appeared to hapless Semele. How statue-like I see thee. Ah, Psyche, from the regions which are Holy-Land!

The agate lamp within thy hand. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium? In yon brilliant window-niche brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter when he appeared to hapless Semele. The agate lamp within thy hand. Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face. Be silent, then, for danger is in words. Too simple is my wit to tell her praise whom all the world admires for majesty. How statue-like I see thee in wanton Arethusa's azured arms. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Ah, Psyche, the agate lamp within thy hand. That heavenly Helen which I saw of late. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter when he appeared to hapless Semele. Be silent, then, for danger is in words.

It just occurred to me that this poem, and others of yours, makes me think of H.D. Her writing was an envelopment of a poetic world, Greek poetry. Does that in any way describe your own work? This poem, like others of yours, seems constrained b y an indicated language, and yet parlours (with the French verb parler behind it) of conversation and intelligence seem to be infused within its seemingly severe borders. And you have written sentence long poems, likewise spreading in their embrace. What is the inkling of such writing? That Helen Doolittle was a patient of Freud is a note worth contemplating. I mean that there is a sense of release into the torsion of her imagination, at the same time the self-consideration of Freudian analysis. I guess I can conclude with the question of your relationship to the words, when you write so strangely

139

2008-12-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

JH: Why do I not write a poem daily or yearly? Writing one poem a month is not a plan of mine. Once I write a poem, I spend time reading it by itself and in relation to other poems of mine (especially poems closely preceding it). The next poem I write isn't necessarily influenced by the previous poem. I don't begin a new poem until my thoughts of the previous poem are no longer in the forefront. The rhythm of this permits, so far, about one poem a month. When writing a series the poems follow each other more closely, chronologically and otherwise. My Virginia poems are not part of a series in this sense. I don't have a plan for the Virginia poems as a whole. In the last two years, I've only written six Virginia poems. It may be I am taking longer to read the figure that is Virginia. "Beneath The Ray" may be compared to "Mimicry In Ruins" (see Antic View #130 and #131). "Beneath The Ray" possibly quotes individual words, "Mimicry In Ruins" possibly quotes phrases. How to relate certain words within "Beneath The Ray" to each other to make an interpretation or a reading (is the difference between an interpretation and a reading a matter of degrees, with a reading occurring upon a person's seeing and/or hearing a text, and an interpretation requiring posteriority to a reading?)? The double meaning of "lyrist", one who plays on the lyre and/or one who composes lyrical poetry, in the second sentence is not invalidated by the appearance of "lyre" in the fourth sentence. If "lyrist" in "her lyrist" means an author of lyrics, it is possible that, if the second appearance of the word "her" refers to "Virginia" and not "rose", Virginia's mentions were authored by another. If "lyrist" in this case refers to the player of a lyre, this doesn't mean the lyrist isn't also a lyrist, or that Virginia's mentions weren't authored by a third lyrist (if indeed there are words accompanying the lyre). In "Beneath The Ray", the words "higher", "brighter", and "brightest" imply a hierarchy of lyrists. How to return to every single word in a poem ("O, the constancy of the rose, and how like imaginings!")? Within a poem, the first appearance of each recurring word is a lost Arcadia.

AHB: I learn from your method, which is not so much foreign to me as unthought of, or not yet incorporated in how I work. Periodically I look thru my archives, and by that I mean the last 9 years (since I met my wife, uncoincidentally: I almost never consult work before then), I find individual poems and working themes, that I ‘take back’, accept now. But I do not have a plan, nor have I the time to delve the mass (I await the MacArthur Foundation’s check). Each poem is a particular event (I started to use seems like as the verb but indeed I

know), derived from previous events, each being a poem. I can see how you would say that your Virginia poems are not a series, still, they represent a consistency of your attention. I would love to see your work en masse, collected. Charles Olson did not just write Maximus poems, and he discarded a number that I think belong in them (I guess we have to trust George Butterick in this matter, and I do, but still…). The Maximus Poems highlight and asseverate Olson’s field of attention, or I mean focus. In sticking with the igniting energy as you do, you allow a fulfillment of the line of your thinking. I have long wished to find my Maximus/Cantos/A/Leaves of Grass, etc. Days Poem(makes a great gift!!!) is a microcosm of that possibility, it was each day’s attention span. It was also a wearing effort that I could not sustain in that form. I want to try staying with a poem in the way that you do. My writing is constantly an experiment, in a very plain sense of the word: a test to see if the present articulation provides a path. As usual, I am talking about myself, but I do want to remark on the short pieces that you have lately writ. ‘Mere’ sentences, which look so sparse and hopeless of endeavour, yet the Donne-like twists of their syntax and waywarding is lovely and new. Do you have a sense of these pieces in their brevity expanse, I mean in the concentrating poetic which endures in them? Oh, I imagine that you do…

138

2008-12-19T17:53:00.000-08:00

JH: Your poems are well worth the wait! Since the past year, I write approximately one poem a month. The intervening days aren't a worrisome expanse. I've published all my non-collaborative poetry, and eagerly anticipate the publication of collaborative work. Each reader can decide which of my poems was worthy of publication. Once a poem is written, publication places it out of the reach of its poet. This freedom is the penultimate stage in the human perception of a poem's self-sufficiency (the final stage is a poem's resistance to exegesis. Is the first stage a poem's resistance to being written, or its refusal to appear to a poet?). A poem is self-sufficient despite what anyone perceives, but what of the poet? Does the poet think of the poem in relation to the public, and so either brings the poem into the public or deliberately withholds it from the public? A poet is also of the public, and thinks of the public in addition to, if not in relation to, poetry. My artistic production is solely the writing of poems. You have mentioned that you've written novels and stories. I am one of many who would love to read them! Are there any other writings you haven't shared with the public? Here is an Allen Bramhall poem that, thankfully, was made public, via the Wryting-L list:

Passacaglia Pathway

Words are slivers, in the destiny of that sentence proved by marsh and reed. Our gestures are terms of present arrangement, gifted pressure of Pachelbel. There rose a night of beaming, close moon, scattered tithing stars. Evidence luxuriated in the rhyme fest, gracious bending flower that rose, again. As tides gather in moonlight, as we swear to the tillage and fall, our gift remains, melodic basso ostinato. The season is fidelity, tho sentences are mocked by the nature of one last word. A period does not end a marsh or bend a reed, but wind over the proffered instills reference. Collegiate logic rounds the corner of intuited posture. How we stand in the mud means more, which is in effect as words spell array. What light in the graded year presents more satisfaction than this difficult haze of being? Love is a strict measure, kept filled with a sortie to limit. Limit is a multiple, pleased to be our meaning. Our love is the extent that life lives us. The cannon’s effort masks a dogma of intent, yet sails are beaming harbours, every day toward any horizon. Everything strange is made to be loved. Love is our clasp of nature indeed. A poem, then, will enter the harvest, bustle with snowstorm, collect a diatom of reverie, and delight you, me, and any other. Such is the cannonade, comrade.

* * * * *
Could you speak about this superb poem, please?

AHB: What inspires the once a month poem? When I was younger, the point was to write, and I was quite assiduous, writing daily, often at a regular time or times. I have not read Martin Gladwell but I believe (2nd or 3rd hand report) that he posits the idea that one doesn’t become the artist (or whatever) that one is to become until 10,000 hours of work. Surely he pulls the number from his intellectual derrière, but I acknowledge a breakthrough point. At which the poet (in the current case) is prepared to write a poem when a poem needs to be written. You seem to be at that point, and I feel that I am as well. Do you have a similar sense, or even get what I mean?

Anyway, the idea that publication places a poem out of the reach of its poet is interesting. I have lots of work unknown to the public. Most of it belongs to my extended juvenilia. In the 80s I began writing stories that turned into novels. All of these things owed something or other to A Nest of Ninnies, by Schuyler and Ashbery. I had this world of characters, and I wrote with a distinct disdain for plot. I think 2 of these works are worthy of publication (and acclaim!!!). Unless it is just fata morgana for me, but I do not think so, last time I looked at them. I have been so intent on producing, now I must present.
As to Passacaglia, I guess it is an ode to Pachelbel’s Canon. I know that it is a warhorse piece, but I love its measured resolution. I also associate it with my mother’s death, or it associated itself in that way. The act of writing is a serial welcoming of each word, which sounds like hooey, I know, but that is how it feels. That is how it feels now, it used to feel like a rush and blur, and maybe something came of it. The poem associates Pachelbel’s Canon, and the marsh I walk by everyday, and anything else around at the time. The writer is in the words that arise in these things, the writing arises from them: thus the poem as it came to me. I guess I must come back to the idea of one poem a month. Is the poem that you write an event of expectation (you sit down to write) or does the poem come to you in an off moment? Here is one of your Virginia poems, which perhaps you could comment on in the context of your once a month, as well as your practice. Do you have a plan for them all?

Beneath the Ray
A star, Virginia, glacial as its swaddling of farthest night, spoke -- oh, but they were songs fairer than any rose -- to me of a crown brighter and higher. Will Virginia share her lyrist -- but, oh!, is forgetful that ray, fleeting as doubt of surest crown? -- when I conclude rose was in her mentions the cipher for a star? O, the constancy of the rose, and how like imaginings! Virginia, had I the crown that charms the star, no discrepancy of breast from lyre could be found, though beneath the ray of the brightest crown.

137

2008-12-14T07:11:00.001-08:00

JH: I think one thing we have in common as poets is a responsiveness to words that carry large definitions. My poems often contain names from Greek and Roman mythology, each name a word that has a story (with variations) as its definition. Worcester has a vast collection of stories as its definition. Concerning our recent discussion on inspiration, a poem presented in our mind may not be introduced to the page unless it calls a name other than ours. Names familiar to us, or bearing familiar enticements, are welcomed. Can words other than these familiars be heard? If so, are they heard after the poem is written? Are these words the poem itself speaks, along with anyone who recites the poem via reading, speaking, or hearing? Is the recital of a poem the only true mimicry a human can perform? It occurs to me that in Antic View #136 I didn't address the interaction of novel titles and drama quotations in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue" (& etc), so I'll close with a few remarks on this topic. In "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue" (and other poems in this series), it can be proved that the words after a line's final quotation mark come from the second speaker, but some of the poem's words that follow a line's final quotation mark might be found elsewhere in the Corneille drama (or in any Corneille drama, in other authors' dramas, in other texts); since the phrase that contains them is invisible within the poem, their every instance in the Corneille drama is indistinguishable outside of context. Perhaps this allies with the possibility of the drama phrases being found in the novels assigned to them: the words after a line's final quotation mark could be from the novel assigned to them, and the words quoted from other lines within the poem could possibly be found in the novel newly assigned to them. If a novel's title obscures/replaces a drama's title, what does a drama's excerpt obscure/replace? Note the title of the poem. Speaking of which, there are seven other instance of the poem's title within the poem. The poem's title is an unlineated couplet - "of" could be seen as enjambment spelled out). A "false" (i.e., "inappropriate") title is the first line of a couplet, for a space would separate it completely from "its" (actually, the drama's) phrase. The couplets allow comparison and contrast between a drama's phrase or word (if not the entire drama) and a novel's contents, as well as comparison and contrast of the two genres. The titles within the poem are a display of visibility and immobility. A title is sometimes a word, sometimes a phrase, echoing one or another element of the couplets' second line.

AHB: Intriguing thoughts about your work. Speaking of which, are you writing much? I have not been writing much poetry, not for lack of wanting to. This quiescence has been documented by the lack of posting to Antic View: all my fault. I have not seen much of your work pass thru Wryting-L, our home away from home. I probably have queried this before, but do breaks in your workflow bother you? I am inured to them myself. I feel a sense of maturity that I do not go bonkers when I cannot write. An additional question is are there works of your that you do not show? I can see one’s that are not satisfying to you, but how about any that you like but still wish not to present publicly. Two years ago I did an art showing, just me (part of my Masters project). Of course I wanted to show the pieces that I liked, but in going thru my work, I decided to show pieces with which I was not happy. I am not a trained artist so I cannot save paintings with technique, therefore, I had some really amateurish work on display. Regarding them as they are, in context with my oeuvre, made sense, and I think this value came across, tho I still was embarrassed by how poor so many pictures were. One should not be embarrassed by one’s experiments. In all cases, I was groping towards something. Now, I do not mean to limit my question just to whatever amateur work you have created. Is there a realm of your work that you will not reveal? Is this question even answerable???

136

2008-05-24T18:41:00.000-07:00

JH: In "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue", the first line of each couplet is the title of a Eugène Sue novel. In the second line of each couplet, the first word in quotation marks is followed by a sequence of words from the first instance of speech in a Pierre Corneille play, and the second word in quotation marks is followed by one word from the second instance of speech in that Corneille play, as is the semicolon. Capitalization in the play's lines, except for proper nouns, is reduced to lower-case, and punctuation marks found in the play have been removed. The chronology of word order in a "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue" couplet is the same as that of the Corneille play - the word following the semicolon doesn't precede the word following the final quotation mark.

Each word in quotation marks is from another couplet's second line. A word after a line's final quotation mark is quoted at the beginning of another line. The second quoted word is from the phrase between another line's quoted words.

couplet one partakes of couplet seven and four.
couplet two partakes of couplet five.
couplet three partakes of couplet six.
couplet seven partakes of couplet four and one.

schema of the above:

couplet 1. couplets seven, four
2. five
3. six
4. one, seven
5. two
6. three
7. four, one

I garnered words from Theatre choisi de Corneille (Editions Garnier Frères, 1961):

couplets
1. Horace
2. Suréna
3. Rodogune
4. Nicomède
5. Le Menteur
6. La Mort de Pompée
7. L'Illusion comique

No word outside of quotation marks is used twice, nor does a line share a word with a title. The pair of words after a line's final quotation mark mirror the instance of words in quotation marks. So far, I've written two other poems in this series, "The Jean Racine of Georges Simenon" and "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne". The selection of words for these poems are invisible: the Verne, Simenon, and Sue titles that were not chosen are invisible, and all Hugo, Racine, and Corneille titles are invisible; the words in the Hugo, Racine, and Corneille plays that were not selected for inclusion are invisible. The selection of words within these poems are visible: the words not placed in quotation marks are visible.

I intend to write more poems in this series, which is part of a larger series containing poems like "The Ducks of Cotton Mather" (see Antic View #84) and "The Edward Gibbon of Phillis Wheatley" (see Antic View #103). This series allows for development. For example,

Otoliths.

"The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne" mimics "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue". Five of the couplets in both poems share words:

Couplet one. "séduite" is quoted in both. "encor" appears and is not quoted in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne", and is quoted in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue".

Couplet two. "jaloux" is quoted in the same position in both.

Couplet three. "vainqueur" appears and is not quoted in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne", and is quoted in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue". In both poems, "Memphis" appears and is not quoted (in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne", it is before the semicolon; in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue", it is after the semicolon).

Couplet five. "jaloux" is in the same position in both. "madame" is quoted at the beginning of this couplet's second line in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue", and appears (capitalized, as it is in the source edition of Hugo's "Angelo, Tyran De Padoue", where "Madame" is the last word of a sentence; in the Corneille source edition "Suréna", "madame" is not capitalized) and is not quoted at the end of this couplet's second line in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne".

Couplet six. "vainqueur" is quoted in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne", and appears and is not quoted in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue".

(The source edition for the second line of "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne" couplets is the 1964 Pléiade edition of Victor Hugo's complete plays.

couplets
1. Hernani
2. Lucrèce Borgia
3. Irtamène
4. Ruy Blas
5. Angelo, Tyran De Padoue
6. Amy Robert
7. Marie Tudor)

One need not know the language to read the poems in this series (which it has in common with many of the poems in my series GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE - see examples in Otoliths issues four and five). Readers could approach these poems like the Zukofskys approached Catullus, and the form would remain the same. In these poems, can the dictionary definition of the words be anything more than coincidental with the form, such as, in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue", "encor", "murs", "plus", "séduite", etc.? What do the coincidental (with the form) meanings of these words do to the meanings of the other words? Do the quoted words bring their phrases with them? Do they bring their Corneille plays with them? Speaking of the Zukofskys, you mentioned one of them in your superb poem

"Unpwned Momentum on Worcester", posted to the Wryting-L list:

accept these jet skies. remain unpwned but
surround a topic with servile pleas, for instants.
the dam seeps sanely. a whiff of common
ground seems like poem. no one relies
on Louis Zukofsky except
when the dread of melting seems
most dire. we relate in penned
moments, and come again. this sex
that stills the waters also ignites them.
those waters, sour when the rain is old,
charges us supremely.
we wr ite of daffy fiends, nuclear almonds,
cousinly trapdoors, and more than
enough. enough is a surcharge yet
when we exceed, primroses, pure as
water. water went the way, into the
breath of Worcester. we write
poems as staggering targets, gullies
for freshets, lapsed pining in the daily
reward program. such reefs and poems
that we assay, trying times but love
intends. it has this hold, it is
our boat. we right in deed and that's our
place. place is the name. such, that is,
that Worcester, least of all, can
hold. Zukofsky rips a
new one there, every day.

---

You've written many Worcester poems. Could you speak about them, please, in addition to "Unpwned Momentum on Worcester"?

AHB: There is an obsessive necessity in your methodical details, which fascinates me. And that your work indicates the boundaries, or possibilities, of the thing there. That thing being the presence, or present, of a poem.
Regarding my poem, I wonder if I meant jet skis when writing it. Maybe not. I feel real edgy in using the negative of pwned, pwned being a word I got from my son’s vast experience of internet communication and gaming. I began writing about the Worcester series for you but that was only descriptive of what I had done so far, not useful, so I dumped it. I realized that I didn’t know why I was writing the series, what was pulling me. I can reveal that the poems are, modestly so far, a collaboration. I have been instructed to call my collaborator “an unnamed correspondent”. This person is en scene, and inspires and informs what I have written. I have taken words therefrom, as well. The Worcester poems, still in progress, continue in their way from my Brockton Poems, which were written full 8 years ago, in the early blush of my late blooming (I sort of rebecame a poet in 1999). I should explain that Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Benchley (Benchley being a surprisingly strong influence on my writing) all lived in Worcester, as did rocketman Robert Goddard, and John Adams taught there. And when Freud and Jung visited the US together, where did they go? Clark University, in the 2nd largest city in Massachusetts. Shades of Guy Davenport. It is a basis, let us say, Worcester is, for poetic cogitations and divagations, if not method. Thus I have Zukofsky in its midst, and so forth, as can be seen. This all directly goes against your own more considered methodology, I know, but I think we arrive at similar places, i.e., the poetic.
As I wrote about the Worcester series, in what I discarded, I relished the specifics of my method and interest. Which are participles of the work but are more rumours than dynamic instances. This is problematic for me. My anecdotal evidence of a working means does not seem useful to others, or is so only in haphazard. I find a keenness in your description of your method. My Worcester series stems from an eagerness. I think clarity would come the more I work on it, and the more I intrude my correspondent’s input. I should add (because it may look suspect) that the correspondent is a real person not a literary device, and it was this person’s choice to be referred to thusly.

135

2008-04-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

JH: I've yet to write a poem from beginning unceasingly to end. If a lyric takes hours to write, how is the poem's inspiration heard by its author? If a sonnet has, for instance, one hundred words, Erato could intone it under a quarter of an hour, though its sonneteer may take hours, in a day or over months, to complete the poem. Another hundred-word lyric may be written nigh-synchronous with its inspiration, and be as powerful as the sonnet in my example. In a poem there is an equivalence of nuance and definition. Definitions of a word lengthen with the shadows, and shade becomes foundation. One faces this when reading, and re-reading, a poem; one faces this when writing a poem. An author may record a poem's first appearance to his or her mind, the first reading, or an author may record a re-reading of this poem. In a re-reading, what happens to the first reading? If new information, minute or momentous, enters, as is inevitable, a re-reading, it is not a copy of the first reading. If by definition a poem is powerful, this is a lot of memory to discard, even if only one element is altered (this also applies to the re-reading of another's poem). What is the author who delays recording a poem's appearance until a given re-reading, whether the second or twenty-fifth, waiting for? Words can be altered once they are written; the literary does not prohibit re-reading.

AHB: I respond after a lengthy hiatus. Not writing is part of writing. The literary does not prohibit not writing. I have been busy but it is not as if I could not have stolen moments to limn a few lines in reply. That wonderful back cover blurb of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems comes to mind, with this picture of FO walking the New York streets, typing lines on stray Olivettis, and never missing lunch. I think this replies to your questions. There is a need to wait sometimes, to go inarticulate, to await the word itself. The poem knows its flowering just as does the mighty daffodil. I think how resistant I was to Pound’s chockablock, but not to Olson’s. Or Creeley, goodness! His work always betrayed the necessity of working within stricture, whether of form, or of thought pattern, or emotional inkling. Yet so much of his earlier work, parlaying rhyme and metre especially, that I could not abide. Only when Pieces showed some new (to me) extension, did I start to pay attention. I have been thinking much about Creeley lately, reading some but also reexamining my assumptions and previous ideas. What you say of the writer goes equally for the reader. What is a reader who delays recording a poem’s appearance until a given re-reading…?

You posted the following poem to the Wryting-L list. One listee wished that you had provided a translation. I get that, but I think he misses a possibility by not accepting the poem strictly on its own terms. Je parle un peu, but what if I did not have un poco Français? How would I to read this poem eh? (A friend of French-Canadian descent spoke of how his grandmother would say, I don’t know, me, more like a transition than translation into English. Just as my New England tongue actually bespeaks ay-yuh without my noticing. I could not ‘do’ a New English accent if you asked me). Your method with this piece, I know, is methodical random selection of lines. Do you have visions of readers approaching the texts like the Zukofskys approached Catullus?

The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue

LA SALAMANDRE
«séduite» approuvez ma faiblesse, «encore» batailles; applaudir

LES MYSTERES DE PARIS
«jaloux» aux murs d'Hécatompyle, «nous» vous; madame

JEAN CAVALIER
«trompée» plus heureux le sceptre, «vainqueur» Parthes; Memphis

LATREAUMONT
«batailles» occaison encor se renouvelle, «grotte» voyais; secours

THERESE DUNOYER
«madame» mais puisque nous voici, «murs» jaloux; malheur

KARDIKI
«Memphis» vainqueur vit ses prospérités, «plus» Pompée; trompée

MATHILDE
«voyais» cette grotte obscure, «faiblesse» inquiétudes; séduite

134

2008-02-22T16:17:00.000-08:00

JH: Poetry, and the poet (in the specific use of the term in Antic View #133, which is how I'm using it in this 134th installment), appears from wherever thought appears, and is as distinct from idea, instinct, emotion, and that thought bears as idea, instinct, emotion, etcetera are distinct from each other; yet, as an idea - of custom, or of what is suitable to reason - may dispel an emotion, and as an emotion may quell an idea, or one may strengthen another, so may poetry, and the poet, respond to and influence varieties of thought. If poetry, and the poet, appears from a source outside the author, such as Muse or Daemon, then poetry, and the poet, is received by thought via the author's sense(s) of sight, sound, smell, touch, taste - singly, totally, or any combination.
In dream visions wherein poems are revealed, the dreamer's senses are depicted within the dream, if not actually put into play by the dream. A poem is as alien to its scribe as much or as little as that scribe's ideas, instincts, emotions, and all else his or her thought bears. We write our own poems to the same degree as we think our own thoughts. Writers of poems think their own thoughts to the same degree as other people think their own thoughts. The amount of thought the poem-writing process requires is prodigious, whether the time and energy an author consciously expends is as torturous as an alchemist's search for the Philosopher's Stone or as gossamer as blinking. Speaking of alchemy, thanks for your kind words on my "The Melting of Salts, or, A Defence of Poetry". The ultimate result of a successful alchemical process is the recipe. The recipe is what the gold, predicted by the lead (the lead is the foundation, without which there is no alchemical gold, no poem on the paper), predicts. What process created the recipe that is "The Melting of Salts, or, A Defence of Poetry"? There is mention of a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay "A Defence of Poetry", an "entire reading", which is an ideal of any who aspire to be an entire reader (who, in turn, could be an ideal of an author such as Shelley), an utmost reading of each word, of the whole text. An entire reading is mythical (and nonetheless possible), and indeed the ambiguous words "may" and "infer" are ambiguously placed: the inference from an entire reading of Shelley's essay is mythological, or all of the fourth sentence of "The Melting of Salts, or, A Defence of Poetry" is mythological, including the entire reading of Shelley's essay (and the essay itself - title, content, and referents - does it survive these Delphic vapors?). Are the words of the first paragraph's four other sentences made mythological by the fourth sentence? Is the second paragraph affected by the fourth sentence? I'm much taken by your poem "Tom Brady lives with us all", recently posted on the Wryting list:

wild poem renders make of death. the gosh of looming windows stills in soon the stuttered sequence. we read the room of filling tune aloft, whilst straining call overtly dooms the moon a preying time. dash the quickened dear till of the football life. the means is quell to the gnostic mention. a love of lists and pools of mountain lump greengage tremble mumbling rill and trill till the soil transit. posit often
cluster, run the moon again. again the staid and dying, again the oxygen refrain, again the dog of when that was. now the post and fueling, now the word unveiled, now the gesture compost. here the rife of fends for all. it is the day of daily parade, taken to a road.

Could you speak on this poem, please?
AHB: well, the New England Patriots won THAT game: I wrote the poem directly after the Pats defeated the Giants to end the regular season. and really, that's all Delphic vapours, whether or not I am a dedicated fan or not, and I’m not. The game itself was closely fought and exciting, so the poem expresses that nature. And yet, it doesn’t express anything, particularly, not directly, as statement. Poetry is often a presentation of unexpectedness. I could have written a paean to Tom Brady, the hero, but the writing event was not a matter of statement or opinion. Instead, I see as I look at the poem (the forethought was unthought, as usual in my writing), there exists a translation. Words are used, let us say, wrong in the poem. The wrongness is weighed by expectation, so that the less the reader expects, the more the reader can glean. Which is the hard won and inconsistently understood lesson of my formative reading (all credit to the Robert Grenier who helped bump me onto the path). So there, I have spoken of my poem, which expatiation allows me to see the workings that I blithely assumed as I wrote. You are more methodical in your process, but do you ever write in a fevered rush? I’ve done things like write non-stop for an hour, that is, as literally as possible keep pen (I wrote by hand) moving.

133

2007-12-24T05:23:00.001-08:00

JH: I haven't felt betrayed by or denied of poetry; whenever I find myself a long-unvisited though previously experienced writer of poems, I get a posthumous feeling that I should enjoy while it is able to be felt. At this time, I don't consider myself long-unvisited. During, and immediately before, writing a poem, the poem and the poet exist simultaneously. Afterward, the author (who is culturally referred to as a poet) is, to the poem, just another reader. The person outlives the poet s/he was while writing the poem. A poet is what mediates the poem and its person. Why is there, often, more than one poem per person? Does the same poet re-visit its person, or is the person's poet a new poet each time? Does the appearance of the poet have phases within its person? If so, after the last phase, the extinction, of a particular poet, does another poet necessarily have to appear within the person? Helpful to consider in the question of phases may be Fernando Pessoa, as well as Artaud's autopsies of Ducasse/Lautreamont and Coleridge (in two 1946 letters, found in English in "Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings", edited by Susan Sontag). The idea of the Muse may be analogous to the appearance of a poet within a person, especially the idea of possession by Muse or Daemon. Why are some people accessible to visitations by a poet (and thus a poem), and some are not? If poetry constantly thinks of the human, and a person is not constantly writing poetry, does this mean a poet has human qualities only when it appears to a person who is to write a poem? Where is the poet when it is not appearing to a person -- does it, during this time, reside in the same place as poetry? Does a poem sometimes make a solitary visit to its person, a poem unknown because a poet has not made a simultaneous visit to that person? Does a poet sometimes make a solitary visit to its person, without a poem making a simultaneous visit to that person? Is this poet sans poem detected by its person? If so, is this because a poet has human qualities? If a poet is what mediates the poem and its person, are words what allow this mediation? If the poet has words, how are these different from the words a person has? Is rhythm what poetry provides? Is this rhythm the structure that moves the written poem from one line or sentence to another?

AHB: Hey, who the heck is writing these poems we see, that 'we' wrote, or someone else did? It is a question that seems both highly charged and overly concerned. How much thought does the process need? In my youth, I was just along for the ride, to take that writing moment and go with it. as I became more conscious of the results, I became more conscious of my process. times when I felt a charge in the writing but in reading over the work I'd wonder where the energy went (knowing it had to go somewhere). that's when one starts wanting to supplicate the Muse (in one conception of the act) or otherwise con sider the way the work is compelled. I wrote for a couple of years before I faced a reconsideration of what I was doing. Robert Grenier, as teacher (reckoning that this was before LANGUAGE poetry became branded), indicated a different attitude towards words and procedure. the lesson wasn't easy for me but I finally got around the inclination to say something. that is, I stopped cornering the work that was given me, at least not so much. so there is that accepting of transport that is the creative act, which is a trust in process. and a sense, as well, of ungripping every lesson learned. and my friend, the new work, or poem, comes along, a visit or implication. easily enough, I can forget this friend, as in: absence makes the heart grow fonder. thus my hard drive is full of works that I have not looked at since I wrote them. is it 10 or 15 minutes of life, the time I took writing, or does their potential live beyond my distance? of course they live on, perhaps to be seen again by reading eyes...

I will now include a poem that you posted recently on the Wryting list (our practice field?). it shows your interest in alchemy. I've tussled with Jung enough to see thru the muddling haze that surrounds the subject, and remembering that Isaac Newton probably wrote more on alchemy than on any subject. a philosophical conception, let us say. I think you hit the nail on the head, tho it is not a nail and it has no head.

The Melting Salts, or, A Defense of Poetry

A substance that passes through the fire (that is to say, the line) becomes metaphorical. As most of the Sulphur turns metaphorical, the incombustible Mercury remains (often still garmented with combustible Sulphur) as a liquid Salt or a celestial Salt, or both. The Salt in the ashes is its fixed counterpart. It may be inferred from an entire reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry that what is commonly referred to as "Spirit of Philosophical Wine"(the delineable metaphor), and also as the "Secret Fire" (the readable metaphor), and also still the "Alkahest" (the destructive, or the audible metaphor) will, by itself or containing the tinctures or Salts of various subjects, when burned, produce this type of volatile Mercurial Salt as an exalted fixed remainder. The volatile is for a health of an entire reading, the fixed is for transmutation of metals.

You, reader, can go about crying in your nakedness for the burning through the line, but the burning through the line is done after the vestal stage of an entire reading, which does not occur before the mortification of the atramentous stage, which is not enjoyed by jumping up and down. Beware the eating of the burning through the line, for where will its Sibylline clouds lead you? Only back to lead; beware, reader; you will poison yourself beyond repair.

132

2007-12-08T04:56:00.001-08:00

JH: Let me pluck a couple more strings of "Mimicry In Ruins". In the second sentence of "Mimicry In Ruins", the opening quotation mark may start at "pass", and the closing quotation mark may be placed after "says", or "den", or "hope". Nature could be the original speaker of "Beauty is body as places". What is being imitated when ones writes of past experience? Is it the act of writing an account that is doing the speaking, and thus the person who had the experience is what is being imitated? What words convey is the imitated and the imitable, whereas words have their own pasts and their own immediate and future contexts. Writing has become a language, which borrows words from another language (e.g., English) or languages (e.g., English, Italian, Latin) to such an extent as to obscure the fact that writing is a language without words, only forms, whether these forms are syntactical or cultural/literary. Is poetry analogous to this definition of writing (and can poetry only be analogous to a definition, and never to the thing defined?), or does poetry borrow from writing in much the same manner as writing borrows from language? Does poetry's borrowing, whatever it is, lead one to think poetry has no words of its own? Writing's borrowing does not lead me to think writing possesses words that are translated into human language; writing is an act. Poetry is dependent on words for visibility, yet is itself linguistically invisible. Writing cannot desert a writer unless soundness of body and brain has previously deserted; poetry can desert its author at any time. Poetry is not an action; it moves of its own impulse; it does not have a knowable constitution. The words of poetry are as its thoughts, and are translated into human language. Are we to suppose poetry thinks of us constantly? By "us", I mean human language and its dealings. If poetry is intermittently, and incidentally, concerned with the human, can any or all of its other concerns be inferred? The surface self-sufficiency of words independent of what they convey may be what attracts poetry to words, or poetry may detect an analogy between this self-sufficiency of words and the isolation of past experience from present experience (which includes the act of writing).

AHB: 1st, apologies for not answering you sooner. “Are we to suppose poetry thinks of us constantly?” it seems only fair that it does, as we claim, don't we, to think of poetry all the time. Writing stays with us, but poetry, its a shifting thing. because of busyness and distraction, I haven't been writing in the same rhythm as usual. I am not blocked, in the sense of having poetry denied me, just having trouble squiring the time and concentration to get to the writing. in The White Goddess Robert Graves personifies the muse, the triple-goddess, towards which the effort of writing goes. I don't entirely buy the picture but I still find the sense of process useful. I mention this because I wonder if you ever feel betrayed by or denied of poetry. I've admitted that I'm not writing so much as has formerly been my practice. I notice that you aren't posting a great deal at Wryting and wonder if you are in a trough as well. and more importantly to this discussion, do you lose the muse ever? I'll say that I went thru a long stretch of dissatisfaction. I was not energized by poetry, my methods (I started using a computer) changed, and such, so that, tho I wrote a lot, it wasn't poetry. as you write, "Poetry is not an action; it moves of its own impulse".

131

2007-10-02T18:31:00.001-07:00

JH: Thanks! The method in "Mimicry In Ruins" is my consideration on what of the poetic is outside a poem, and what may be elicited of this segment of the poetic (which is the same through every poem, or is different despite each poem that is written?). In poetry (that is to say, poems), there is a mimesis of human language and earthly doings. Can poetry provide a mimesis of the poetic? Having mimicry as a character in a poem could help in underscoring the poetic among the poem.

Is the "I" of the third sentence Mimicry speaking of itself - i.e., the narrator quoting (mimicking?) Mimicry, or is the narrator reporting Mimicry as speaking of the narrator? The narrator has addressed him/herself as I ("I'm") before, in the first sentence. There's a possibility the entire poem is spoken by Mimicry; if so, Mimicry alternates between referring to itself in the first person and the second person.

If mimicry is personified, is the mimicry apt, is the personification apt - who, or what, exactly is being mimicked, and who, or what, is Mimicry's subject? Are there more than one subjects being mimicked? Is there but one character named Mimicry in the poem?

Is "there Reason's..." stated by the narrator originally, or as a report of Nature's narrative ("if I'm to believe Nature")? The rest of the poem could be a report by the narrator of Nature's narrative, a continuation of "makes Reason nakedness...".

There's an ambiguity in the use of "I" in the third sentence: if the narrator languish, then Mimicry mimics in the fourth sentence this languishing. Is there mimicry in ambiguity? Thus, a multiplicity -- in mimicry? The fourth sentence allows the question: is Mimicry termed Eagle when in the Thicket (only when there ; especially when there)?

Prince = princeps, one who takes the first part... one, then, who is to to be imitated, prey for Mimicry. Pass - "pass as"/"pass for" versus "pass by" ("Prince, pass" as in the "Horseman, pass by!" of Yeats' "Under Ben Bulben"). Is "Prince, pass" said by the narrator, or Mimicry? Is the second sentence to be read as "Prince, pass, for Mimicry says, 'yours is a suitable den...'" or as " 'Prince, pass,' Mimicry says. 'Yours is a suitable den...' "? Regarding the former, "yours is a suitable den" could be the only words attributed to Mimicry in the second sentence, with "and my treasons..." spoken also by the narrator. Should this "Prince" be capitalized outside the poem? Would it be capitalized if it wasn't at the beginning of a sentence? See Antic View #115 for a discussion of apostrophe and capitalization. Is speech with its human content enough to make personification out of apostrophe?

"That Mimicry termed Eagle languishes in the Thicket seems wasteful of the fox.": perhaps Mimicry is thus termed fox - by whom (could the poet have a say in this?)? If the fox is a character (and a reference to fox as a mammal and not as a figure), does this mean the fox doesn't eat the bird (Eagle) due to ignorance, pity, or because the fox is not fooled by Mimicry's being termed Eagle? Were the poem to continue, would fox become capitalized? In the world of "Mimicry In Ruins", was Beauty, Nature, Reason, or Mimicry, etc. capitalized before the first sentence?

"Prince" could refer, literally or as an honorific, to one of the Principalities, the highest choir in the third sphere of angels. Principalities tend to nations, which lends a reading to the word "den" (as does the word "fox", to which the word "Prince" may refer), and to the word "places". Angels are associated with stars, and the planet Venus was once thought to be a star. "Venus" may refer to the planet, the Roman goddess, the word, or may designate some character outside the poem or previously named in the poem.

Does "Beauty is body as places" refer to ruins? Is there an element of mimicry in ruins? Aurally, "Thicket" and "Mimicry" mimic each other; etc. ... t/reasons, Reason's... the imperfection of mimicry... Lady Macduff defines a traitor as "one that swears, and lies" (Macbeth, IV, ii, 46 - 47).

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a sensation is worth millions. Attempting to unravel four relatively short sentences takes more words than comprise "Mimicry In Ruins". Sensations, in the merest sense, are almost as compact as a poem. Or do sensations fall short of a poem? Aside from sensation and analysis, what else does a poem provide? Speaking of sensational poems, you recently posted to Wryting-L a poem entitled "this, by which we speak, poem":

The simplicity of pond, watchwords, the going rate. Think of intelligent draining of economic constants in the gloom above the cold water. Federation selects this rood of land, with water for offertory and remembrance. Cornstalks saved for decoration, in the imagined gusto of that ended autumn, asseverate a position. Means of replying fizzle thru results, until daybed burns in the solitude of autumn light. After effects realize their broad distinction. People care for carnival, late blooming asters and crocus, and so much depends. Now the pond, nobly engraved in literary matters, produces a squeal. A few mallards have murdered a bench, have interrupted the speech of fences, have created peerages of paths. Wild strange makes a cold bay. Languages piece together but still a stream edge shifts for a picture and latter proof. No dose remains except a pungent arriviste lost for matter. This mighty day concerns many dull moments, and leaving everyone behind. Thus a Thoreau enscribes some rich matter, forest duff. And other proven numbers ply for adding. And the changes magnetize in harsh elements and willful puff. The endgame resists, then stutters then period. It's like we are words, but water too combines with breath. Earth too, fire too. Features of this funny business, this capacious colony of reaching for ideas, isolate in solvents and unsolvable. No philosophy but the days on end. Colourful something in the midst of elsewise, then a poem, legacy train, trailing wind by which we speak...

across the water, et cetera, climate of something, positioned, thrilled, imposed and functioning... after which statement, the business of bees... degrees...

Could you speak of this poem, please?

AHB: I'll just add to your plucky exegesis that Aristotle, in his Poetics, speaks of all art as imitative. You have a unique methodology that does seem to go inside and out of the words that form your poems. Not to sound blurbish. And I sense an attachment to that meditative meandering with which you create your work. I'm not certain that I am saying what I mean. I'm thinking of my own work, which I pretty well forget once I've written. For me, a poem (that I've written) is the remnant of an experience. Perhaps it is an imitation of an experience. Your pre/post-involvement confirms a different relationship, somehow. Your poems arise from an enlightened position in which you set the machine running. I think I contribute myself to the words (that I write), and let them say themselves. I mean all of this descriptively, not judgmentally. I like your work, and I like mine. As to my poem “This, By Which We Speak, Poem”, it is a way of comprising Walden Poem, just as earlier I comprised the porch here. Walden Pond is a few miles away, thus a resource. My wife and I made an effort to visit the pond often, after a few years of neglecting it. The experience of Walden, or any place, is all the sensory info one might absorb. And that sensory info becomes words. My poem is, simply, those words laid out. For the reader. The phrase 'so much depends' comes from I need not say where. I use it as a conscious recognition, just as it was originally used, really. Walden, of course, has a history. Kick a rock, it may be the same one Thoreau kicked on the 5th of July. Et cetera. Personal history exists. 7 years ago, Beth and I sat on the benches that rim the pond, and I read from the manuscript of Days Poem, which was about 20 pages long at the time. Those benches are now underwater, the pond's water level having risen that significantly. The poem is a comprehension of a place and time. I believe the history of poetic time exists just prior to the few minutes of actual writing. Honestly, I trust that conception.

130

2007-09-14T16:19:00.001-07:00

JH: "Poetry is the realization that one reads or speaks poetry" -- is the realization in poetry? Or does poetry stand outside realization, being inconvertible? Is poetry workable, as clay and words? Words may be worked into poetry, but can poetry be worked into words? There's a theory that words are frozen poetry, dead metaphors, etc., but surely this Edenic view derives from coincidence -- words being similar to the facets of a poem. A reader unspools a poem the same way a newspaper article is unspooled, and an auditor receives a poem the same way a radio commercial is received. A poem can go unrecognized, by who would be its poet, as well as its reader/auditor: a poem, then, is not universal, even if written or spoken in a universal language; a poem is individual, integral, and incommunicative to living and dead alike. If a poem could be divided into words, a group of words could be arranged into the shape of a poem; but a poem has no shape.

AHB: Straining language beyond grunting observation is a weirdly embellished metaphysical state. Such writing lunges away from the simple noun-and-verb request for the salt shaker or query where the scissors are. Poems are made from the same material as those utterances but work (if poems work at all) entirely differently. Poetry also or often is made with a Poetic Diction, which changes with the era. I guess we simply identify a possible state called poetry that lives in the relationship of certain gathered words. As you say, a poem has no shape. Atomic particles are really lovely inferences; likewise much of what we know of outer space is supplied to us by hints and where we take those hints. Poetry, thus. Whitman eschewed rhyme and metre (and thank heavens he did, having failed his Tennyson imitations) and called it poetry. Dickinson casually and consistently broke the established poetry rules. This is old news today, we all strike paths of (what we call) invention. The point is that poetry's boundaries aren't easily marked. Our philosophical problem consists in the nature of the communication that occurs between poet and reader and poem. As I think you do, I see the poem as a character, an equal in the triad. It comes to each poet and each reader in a different way. That (whatever that was) being said, I now offer a poem that you posted to Wryting-L.

Mimicry in Ruins

Beauty is body as places, and, if I'm to believe Nature, makes Reason nakedness, there Reason's the very ruin of Mimicry, termed Eagle in the Thicket. Prince, pass, Mimicry says, yours is a suitable den, and my treasons have shrouded me past sight of Hope. Mimicry says, I would be at the side of Venus, and languish in her wake. That Mimicry termed Eagle languishes in the Thicket seems wasteful of the fox.

The diction of this poem is poetic in an old-fashioned way, except that syntax carries more modern jostle. There's some implication of language at its most high-flown, but there's something rattling about it here. I recall being wowed by Christopher Marlowe's Tamerlane for its wildly lofty poetic exclamations. As a play it is mainly an excuse for some really amped Elizabethan language. In fact, the Elizabethans are simply fat with this language called poetry. You seem to drink from a similar fount, where language is a dizzying indirection, a lovely effort to be effortless. Please speak more of your method, which I infer owes much to your involved reading.

129

2007-08-11T18:52:00.001-07:00

JH: Your explanation is far from prosaic, nor is the translation superficial. An instance of poetry is translated into language that poetry is to the poet, yes. I agree with your idea of translation. The words in a poem are the same for the poet and for the reader, yet the language of poetry differs. Different allusions and definitions come to the mind of each of the poem's readers. Part of a poem's immortality (individual rather than cultural immortality) derives from an underscoring, an enunciation, of the incongruity of reading. Writing is a twice-over reading. The poet recognizes, wills, or hopes as poetic what is in the poet's mind, and writes in order to make it readable to a reader who would be otherwise unaware of the poem. Thus, the incongruity of reading poetry starts with writing poetry. A poem overturns language (while keeping the memory of language) by underscoring its pattern, the sound of its words, the introduction of its words (selectively: certain words; completely: the diction throughout the poem), and the introduction of its existence. The word "its" in the previous sentence both refers to "language" and to "a poem". A poem is an instance of language that does not need a person to speak it. By this, I mean a person living or recorded. JH: Your explanation is far from prosaic, nor is the translation superficial. An instance of poetry is translated into language that poetry is to the poet, yes. I agree with your idea of translation. The words in a poem are the same for the poet and for the reader, yet the language of poetry differs. Different allusions and definitions come to the mind of each of the poem's readers. Part of a poem's immortality (individual rather than cultural immortality) derives from an underscoring, an enunciation, of the incongruity of reading. Writing is a twice-over reading. The poet recognizes, wills, or hopes as poetic what is in the poet's mind, and writes in order to make it readable to a reader who would be otherwise unaware of the poem. Thus, the incongruity of reading poetry starts with writing poetry. A poem overturns language (while keeping the memory of language) by underscoring its pattern, the sound of its words, the introduction of its words (selectively: certain words; completely: the diction throughout the poem), and the introduction of its existence. The word "its" in the previous sentence both refers to "language" and to "a poem". A poem is an instance of language that does not need a person to speak it. By this, I mean a person living or recorded. A poem makes language its own. A poem makes itself into a language that closely, as in almost indistinguishably, resembles the language it is written in. If the poem overturns language by underscoring it so that attention is drawn to the lines beneath the words, is the incongruity of reading overturned in like manner?

AHB: I just want to highlight that last bit of yours, to which I think I can add nothing more:
A poem is an instance of language that does not need a person to speak it. By this, I mean a person living or recorded. A poem makes language its own. A poem makes itself into a language that closely, as in almost indistinguishably, resembles the language it is written in. If the poem overturns language by underscoring it so that attention is drawn to the lines beneath the words, is the incongruity of reading overturned in like manner?
I think we, as readers and writers, battle with the idea of a poem. How a poem differs from other writing, how it translates the immediacy of language to some vague yet essential need. I have a particular tack that I take in writing, prose with the dislocations of disjunction, to squeeze it that mundanely. You closely involve a tradition in your writing. Other writers test sound or release or whatever in their work. I mean, so many ways to write poetry exist. Yet we agree that it's all poetry, at least when we are generous. A poem makes its own language. sure enough, tho in the role of schools and partisan writing, this can be disputed. I am thrilled by the concept inside your statement that a poem makes itself into a language that closely, as in almost indistinguishably, resembles the language it is written in. poetry a sort of sidecar to the language that entails us. Is that a weird idea? An important sidecar, howsomever, but why isn't it our always language? It is our partner, tho we treat it as an adjunct or sub category. Yes, the incongruity of reading is overturned as you describe. We (readers) accept reading poems as an effort of concentration. We accept the underlying directive of words and language, as we read poetry. We realize sound exists, and the sight of lines, and the sudden diaspora of thought. It's in Moliere, isn't it, someone's realization of speaking prose. Sans effort, one does. Poetry is the realization that one reads or speaks poetry. That these calm, unabiding words all around us can transform to some intense newness.

128

2007-07-24T18:14:00.000-07:00

JH: The "cares" the wreath mentions is a word that derives from the word "voice", the "charm" the worldly mention(s) derives from "song" and "incantation", and "fable" from "speak". Among other things, "scale" can mean an instrument for weighing (all weighs lightly, soft, after being burned, especially a wreath), and can mean magnitude -- Phoebus announces his intention to walk beneath the wreath's boughs, and announces he will be caverned in this wreath - this would lend the meaning that either the wreath is incredibly large or Phoebus is minute. Phoebus may be living, or he may be an adornment, an artwork on the wreath (that is already adorned by an inscription). The only attributes of Phoebus in this poem are his torches, which are ambiguous in size - "They are the interior form of Aetna, certainly!", yet they also crackle, which would make one think of smaller fires. "They" of "They are the interior form of Aetna, certainly!" may refer to Phoebus along with the torches. The inscription on the wreath (an appended ribbon, or engraved on the wreath if it is an art object) announces as in "reads", and the reader of the poem "Phoebus Wreathed" reads the same inscription, "I hold this clime, Phoebus, as mine", as the poem's "worldly". The poem is the product of an unknown speaker who begins the poem with "Would there a wreath that would reprove fires" (in the sense of "would that there were a wreath..."). The speaker is henceforth identifiable only through the poem's tenses. The various tenses in one narration mirror the multiple meanings of words and the punning phrases in "Phoebus Wreathed" ("disported with other storms" & "any port in a storm", "I hate a lair" & "I hate a liar", etc.). In the first sentence, the colon reveals that the wreath reproves fires via its inscription (perhaps Phoebus is identified with the fires; in mythology, Phoebus Apollo is identified with the sun, and Apollo is no stranger to a wreath, making a laurel wreath from the metamorphosed Daphne. "Phébus" in French literature is a term used for ornate and anachronistic writing - after a 14th century book on hunting by Gaston Fébus, "Miroir de Phébus"); in the third sentence the wreath speaks of the fires - is this inferred by the worldly, or is it an invention of the speaker of "Phoebus Wreathed"? Could the speaker of "Phoebus Wreathed" be a wreath? The fiction behind the poem is standing between the authorial hand and its poem as the quatrain stands between the prose of "Phoebus Wreathed". I love your exquisite poem "stray touch of the summer porch"! Could you write about this poem, please?

This is the bending porch. In time, green is silly: those mock orange blossoms contain mental image pressed into white flowers just to grow. Beyond, the strange important patch of waiting that places all time in writing. Then the rains come, children. Then leaves fall. Then, dears all, snow begs the question. Waiting to a luck of finding out, you, love, you. The mock orange, the sighing ferns, and a planet still in love. No, the trees are not just heavenly, but (pausing in the smell) quiet with the resolve to fill the year. The year waits. The green where people walk is given. Then storms, again and again. The rain of spring is over. The rain of summer builds. Wait for snow, the dying sigh of mock orange blossoms. The angle of the sun creates a blush in trees. You are forgetting the warm soil, friends. Or are you awake when the sentence begins? Quaking middle of the day when the green is lively with
people, common ground. The sights are fine for having. A clutch of mosquitoes and the dog urges eager. Birds are incredible, dated to the pause. When we sit, it happens forever. Even street noise includes our words. The bending porch is tonal and strong. When all waking needs us, we ready our impression. Vast flowers, that is, keep all of us together.

AHB: A recondite quality exists in your poem. What especially interests me is how the seemingly borrowed language (whether you imitate or actually quote) situates the poem's meaning. I could not guess much that you attribute to your poem. If I were better read in the literature you work from, I could hold more. Yet that doesn't matter. Your instigation is the sparkling fuse tat sets the poem's bomb off, if that aint just about the most clumsy metaphor (land sakes alive!!!) It doesn't matter if I don't get the fuse: the bomb went off! Interpretation of a poem isn't archaeology, fitting pieces together to some master puzzle, but an energy transfer. You made a bomb (poem) that went off when I read it. The bomb you intended is not the explosion I experienced (more than likely), but I certainly experienced something. My porch poem, well, it has its own recondite beginnings. We're moving to a new place. This place boasts a porch that looks onto the town green. The porch is perhaps more selling point than it had ought to be, but we love it. My poem is simply an exercise of description, tho description of a more privately wrought sort. For me, the poem is a straightforward description of out porch experience. For anyone else, the possibilities are open. Maybe my explanation is prosaic, so that if you read it with this info in mind, you might feel that the translation were superficial. I can't answer to that. It was a serious event for me to process the porch, and what it entails, into the language that poetry is for me. What do you think of this idea of translation? Do you feel that readers should get your poem in some way as you intended?

127

2007-07-04T04:37:00.001-07:00

JH: I agree that prose is now stronger on the page. The written word is artwork that is coincidentally read. Spoken words are speech. One may more easily superimpose speech considerations, such as pauses, upon a written text than literary considerations upon speech. Speech is lost on the wind, whereas lost literature is a conceit within an existing text. Of its getting lost, speech can only say you will not remember. Lost literature illustrates, to no viewer, the loss of a world - the text and its readers. Upon departure, literature takes its loss along with it. Are thoughts more accurately compared to speech or to text? Does literature reach further back into thought than speech does, or does it elaborate and refine thought?

AHB: I don't know if thoughts are more accurately comparable to speech, but it makes me wonder about improvising texts aloud. Instead of keyboard or paper and pencil, what of you tried doing it via speech,in an audience. Sans audience, I imagine, sans witness, it's like there is no speech at all. There would be you, but would that text exist except if you served it to auditors? An audience could be people listening, or a recording. A transcription isn't the same, is it? I've never heard David Antin's work performed tho I've read a bit of his work. I understand that Steve Benson does considerable improvising when he reads publicly. Speech seems to be chemical, reactive, whereas literature functions differently. I'm not sure how to describe the difference. So anyway, I shall addend a poem that you recently posted to Wryting, “Phoebus Wreathed”. I've been casually reading Robert Herrick. I mean really casually, while brushing my teeth or stray moment. In his work, and typical of how poetry was understood generally at that time and place, one sees a sense of formal occasion. These occasions can be eulogistic, delighting, or simply wisecracking epithets. I'm interested in how poesy can adjust to the impetus of these different moods. You often “use” what obviously is an anachronistic language, to great effect. This is poesy in arch glamour, yet that glamour is but an element of the poetic action. It feels like an intersection of occasions. Please speak of this poem.

Would there a wreath that would reprove fires: I hold this clime, Phoebus, as mine, announces its inscription. The worldly will allow, regarding this scene: Nature charms me as much as fable. The wreath announces of the fires: soft weigh my cares on this scale.

At a stroke the figure of Phoebus,
And the figure of Phoebus was with crackling torches.
Had they but dimmed to a maiden light!
They are the interior form of Aetna, certainly!

I have disported with other storms, announces Phoebus, I hate a lair, but I will be caverned in this wreath and walk beneath its boughs.

126

2007-05-06T18:37:00.001-07:00

JH: Can a caesura be read as similar to enjambment? Caesura is often read as rhythm, or, as when recurring in one place - strict or approximate - from line to line, form (as in pattern). Any space between words has a purpose: to distinguish one word from another, or one line from another. Does enjambment have something caesura does not? More than enjambment, caesura allows for the human voice. The act of sounding each word of a line carries its rhythm into the next line, but each line after the first line is dead (that is to say, impenetrable and uncommunicative) without this animation. This is true of poems with a set rhythm and poems with incidental rhythms that change from line to line. What would a poem be without its first line? If the first line is missing from a stanza that is not the opening stanza of the poem, does it matter? There may be a caesura without a punctuation mark, but enjambment requires a line break. There may be discretion in identifying a caesura, but enjambment dictates its presence to the reader. Does enjambment flourish in the literary, and languish in the oral? Has poetry become, over the years, stronger on the page than in the voice?

AHB: Last question first, I think poetry is much stronger on the page than in the voice. The oral tradition no longer carries the import it did, and the possibilities of visual poetry has extended via technologies. Net art and just the comparative ease now to mess with fonts and colours and such. My own memory is anything but eidetic so I don't carry poems with me as others might. Your questions on caesura are hard to answer. I don't notice it as such as I write or read. I may note the pause, but don't place the idea in theory terms. Of course one has to breathe as one reads, and even reading to oneself, one stops to get around a phrase. Caesura seems most useful in regular metre, where it can prevent the foot from stepping too mechanically. Hence Dickinson's dashes, there to have you see the words as well as the sentence. I often start with a 1st line, and carefully hold myself from thinking any further, wanting to place the words on the page rather than think them prior. To take that line away is a strange containment. Maybe it would be good to throw out the 1st line, like the scoring in gymnastics and skating. In media res. I don't know what it would be like to willfully disallow lines in a plangent way like that. Maybe we need to think like that, just to see if the borders can be changed.

125

2007-04-12T05:04:00.001-07:00

JH: Punctuation allows some decision on the part of the writer, and there are rules about when punctuation may and may not be used. Are there any occasions when a line must be enjambed? In metrical poems, when a line has a certain amount of feet the next line begins. In free verse, what dictates the line break besides the author? Does it matter if a line is broken in two when it should be one line? If enjambment is important, isn't disproportionate enjambment equally important? If space between lines has meaning integral to the poem, does the introduction of extraneous meaning via disproportionate enjambment affect the poem? If so, does it affect the poem adversely? The poem can bear any meaning imposed from without, but it must not have disfiguring fractures if it is to be the poem that it is, which may be to say, if it is to be a poem (printing errors, such as altered letters, altered words, altered enjambment, and dropped or repeated lines, are the same as readings -- with the materiality being incidental). How to ruin a poem in writing it originally? Are there ways to damage one's poem besides disproportionate enjambment? How much damage can a poem take before it stops being a poem? The act of writing can often sway a poet from the act of making the poem appear through writing.
AHB: It's not exactly enjambment, but how Olson and Duncan space their work comes to mind. Or specifically, I'm thinking of the dot that Duncan uses in some of his later work, to indicate a punctuated unit. Williams flirted with the same thing. I find little impact in those dots but no distraction, a least. I can fuss a fair amount with a poem without rattling its equanimity overmuch. Shift words in lines, adjust enjambment, rephrase. Eventually, if I do something drastic, it becomes another poem, just as painting failures, torn up for collage, become new works. I've learned not to approach such rewriting with the metric of Good English too thoroughly in my head. When writing Good Prose, I try to be fairly consistent in, say, eradicating passive voice. With poetry, tho, I find that I cannot think that way. I have to listen to each example and decide. You can be fairly slavish to the rules of Good English when writing prose (qua prose, I mean) but with poetry, something gets lost if one proceeds so. Vitality and freshness, first of all. I can't identify specifically when corrections kill the poem but I can attest to the weakening that occurs. To the point when I lose interest in the piece, which effectively is its death. You are right: the act of writing can often sway the poet from the act of making a poem. The thing of prose is that it gallops along. Whereas poetry wants to define a space (of time?). If your poetry starts to gallop for the sake of galloping, you've lost the poem. In saying that, I accept that Howl or Song of Myself are not just galloping, that they too define a space, e'en tho that space is extensive.

124

2007-04-08T04:28:00.000-07:00

JH: Only the best questions for the best answers, then! I try to give to poetry what I suppose is poetry's, and to poetics what belongs to poetics. Poetry exists as its own object, with its readable properties evocative rather than referential. Allusions in a poem to historical and literary events are as coincidental as any of the words used. Immoderate polysemy, whether unavoidable by the author or imposed by the reader, does not destroy a poem, whereas it turns prose from informative to formless. Form in prose is its meaning, which comes from without, from the reader. Form in poetry is its line - in the individual line, in each individual line. This form is replicated from line to line, and an allusion to form is made in any patterning that may exist, such as assonance and alliteration, stanzas and cantos, sestina and sonnet. Any prose sentence requires the definition, dictionary or personal, received or exploratory, of all the words in that sentence. Poetry allows this only as it is a text that can be read, and requires something that would stop it from being poetry, but this has yet to be found. The self-sufficiency of poetry admits poetry's definition only tautologically: poetry is poetry because it has something, poetry, that prevents it from being prose. This is why poetry is not "prose plus X". Can this consideration of poetry and prose be extended to the consideration of the line and the sentence? Is enjambment another punctuation sign? If so, what makes it unique to poetry?

AHB: I learned enjambment from Creeley, tho it was actually from you that I learned the word itself. Enjambment provides breath and anticipation to poetry. It supplies a punctuating function but I don't think of it exactly as punctuation. Enjambment is not a full impedance, as punctuation marks are, but rather something like a subliminal hint. Pound cautions the reader not to stop heavily on Browning's line ends because you'll lose the prose sense of his lines. Browning did not think so much in the line but in the sentence, yet his writing was poetry. Browning filled the space between lines, which seems like the definition of enjambment. I shift words a fair amount in rewriting my lineated work to play the enjambments the way I hear them. I read recently that Ben Jonson wrote his poems in prose first, then versified. He wanted the thinking clear before he proceeded to formating. Prose unreels itself in a measured way. One races from one mark to the next, obeying each one. Even wild, adventurous prose proceeds thus. Poetry lives by its metric, its breath. Even Aram Saroyan's lighght has a metric. In fact, you can call its doubling an enjambment, a suggestion of time in the word. In a public reading recently, I read a lot of prose pieces, and suffered Dark Night of Soul(tm) about how this prose was received by an audience expecting poetry. Perhaps I work a sort of enjambment by not fulfilling prose's completion. “Good English” is taught with the idea of complete thoughts. The stretch of words from the initial capital to the period is suppose to be complete. which is fata morganna, but the directive of prose proceeds with the illusion. Whereas poetry, as you suggest above, isn't so clearly delimited. Such work that allows for expansive, inconclusive meaning is poetry, whether in strict sentences or whatever. That's my expert opinion.

123

2007-04-02T17:48:00.001-07:00

JH: How much of the work is author process and how much is grammar and a specific language (such as English)? Can the process ever be fully displayed in the finished product? Can it be shown in sequential steps? Is the process made more plain in procedural poems? The inspiration for the particular procedural poem is made evident by the poem, whereas a non-procedural poem about a sunset could have an inspiration other than the sunset -- the sunset could be a trope, which raises the question, where does figurative language enter in a procedural poem? What exactly is figurative language? Does it come from the same place that allows something clearly read or heard to be understood differently from intent or context? What does it indicate about words that one meaning may be substituted for another without the word disappearing? Are words different from language? If so, does poetry partake more of words or of language?

AHB: Your 1st question is a good one, because I think we all seem to fall for the rules. Grammar leads me quite a bit, and yet anti-grammar, so to speak, also leads me. Aren't we constantly fighting the frozen forms? The point of procedure is to waylay one's own tendency with an engine of a different direction, but of course that engine could become a tendency as well. I don't know what figurative language is. It exalts a possibility, and that's “the figure”. And that magic of how a word can replace another yet disappearance doesn't occur, that's the figure. The flarfy exercise of replacing a word in a text with another illustrates the remaining structure and integrity. I guess words differ from language, words being the implements of language's design. And now I must ponder if poetry partakes more of words or language... poetry itself seems a language, yet it is process as well. The ordinary words of conversation, the ordinary phrases, even, become poetry. How? You scour texts and take them into your poetry, the texts may have been poetry but turn into another poetry (yours) thru your efforts as writer. I don't know how any of this comes clear. I'm struggling to understand the prose that I write, and how I can call it poetry. Can you define poetry? I sense music (sound) and image and essence in poetry but I wonder, truly, if I write poetry or some personal hybrid. And I don't mean this in some sense of originality, but that I am lost in the world of poetry. I'm at critical mass about this. Have you a similar struggle with these concepts? You pose all the best questions here but seem assured in your experiments.

122

2007-03-24T04:45:00.000-07:00

JH: I submit poems for publication when a journal appeals to me, by its project, by its editor(s), by its inclusion of authors whom I admire (whether these authors are new or familiar), by a variety of attractions. When I deliberately began to study poetry, I discarded my notes almost as soon as I made them - no trace remained of what author was read before another, of what book lead to another. Now that I'm writing poetry, I discard my drafts, so no trace remains of what lines were erased, altered, or added. I wanted to move away, then, from someone who knew less about poetry and poetics the previous day, and I want to move away, now, from someone with an uncompleted poem. This eradication of process is a personal means of keeping growth impersonal, imperceptible, as though I was always today's poet. Where does the labor go, or what does it become, if it is not seen publicly in the poem via drafts appended or discoverable, nor personally in the poet's memory? Have you ever abandoned a poem? I have abandoned poems many times, discarding the attempts. Do you remember lines from these poems? I remember some lines from one of my abandoned poems. I have abandoned uncompleted poems, never a finished poem. Have you ever abandoned a finished poem? When do you decide a poem is complete?

AHB: I take the antipodal view from you. I like seeing the whole trail a poem follows as it becomes. But this may be mere curiosity, I don't downright learn from seeing this. Your approach sounds Buddhist, or self-ultimate, as Kerouac had it. I like that idea of always being today's poet. Wordsworth and Whitman are famous for having revised their work so much. The criticism there is that they are revising themselves not the work. I look back at older work and see nothing that I can revise. Another person wrote that, whether less wise or not I guess I can't say (tho I have my suspicions). I am not sure if I abandon a poem, that connotes negatively. I've stopped working on poems, and on series. That's often a logistical matter where I didn't get a chance to stay with the work and its impetus. Often enough, tho, it is a matter of go littel boke. the words have been writ now they must find a way for themselves. You ask, where does the effort go? We like to think that Michael Jordan received basketball skills from on high but he practiced obsessively. he was gifted with a physical body that could accomplish what he did but he had to train himself to perform his lauded acts of basketball. I think poetry is processual, whether or not we can observe the machinations of that process. Charles Olson comes to mind, who had these vast yet murky theoretical and philosophical ideas. His poetry and prose both show fragments of that thinking. The latter Maximus particularly proffer bits and glimmers of what he sought and followed. That lack of completion interested me. My own work is disjunctive, and I think that that disjunction is important. That I avoid determining completion. Because completion would stop the process. I'm not sure how this plays against your own perspective. Obviously, process exists in your work, you simply withhold the evidence. So perhaps your work lives within a disjunction too, or ellipsis, I'm not sure. The impetus or inspiration occurs here, you proceed with the writing process, arriving at a finished poem. You discard all that led to that poem. Your work is disjunctive in that way, as well.

121

2007-03-15T04:29:00.001-07:00

JH: I'm looking forward to reading Open Elegy. Could you say something about Open Elegy, please? Your comparison of a poem notebook to a diary is apt. A notebook in which one writes poems (and I, for one, transcribe finished poems into a spiral notebook, then throw the drafts away) resembles a diary in being a record of personal action, especially if variants of individual poems are part of the notebook, and/or if pensées are interspersed. What are your notebook habits, past and present and wishful? Mine have always been the same. I may some day publish a poem with variants appended. Are you interested in variants? Should every poem include variants? An unobtrusive means would be a note below the poem giving line and word variants, in chronological order if more than one per instance. Why, if I'm interested in variants, haven't I done this, or kept private records of my variants? I'm interested in variants other than my own, I suppose. But readers may be interested in my variants, which goes to the idea of publishing one's poems in case others might be interested in them. It is submitting to an interest other than your own, a potential, even unhoped-for, interest. Publication, variants, -- what are other things a reader may receive? Poetics, an explanation of individual poems, notes on references, auto/biographical information, and the poet's publishing history. These are incidental to the poem, and may be fictional. Could there be a fictional poem -- that is, a poem that is not a poem? Is a poem certain characteristics (lineation, non-prosaic use of language, announcement that this is a poem, etc) plus a reader? An author may create what could be defined as a fictional poem as a hoax and criticism (an example is Ern Malley) or to create a literary reputation (which raises the question, is literature the safety net beneath poetry?).

AHB: Open Elegy is a short series of poems I wrote last fall, under the influence of someone's death. I did post the poems to Wryting (I post pretty much everything I feel is finished there). I like the series, but it was more of an exercise, working with Lulu.com. And I got to typeset, use my own photo for the cover and otherwise make decisions. And it is a pleasure to see the work in a finished shape. As to notebooks, I've used all sort of strategies with them. I've done inclusive ones, in which everything goes in: journal entries, poems, notes, doodles. And I've kept notebooks segregated. The segregation practice tends to fall apart because I'll want a notebook quickly and be unable to find the appropriate one. I like pocket-sized notebooks (like from Muleskine: love those) to carry with me. I used to disdain hardbound journals, and stayed strictly with spiral bound notebooks, but I've broadened my view. In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we get a shot of Indy's father's journal: filled with notes and drawings and sheets tipped in: it's my vision of the perfect notebook. my use of notebooks tends to be incidental, off the top of my head. At a time when I wasn't writing much poetry, I still kept a notebook in which, every night before I went to sleep, I wrote 2 or 3 little poems. I'm interested that you discard your drafts. Why do you discard? In essence, I do this too, because when I make changes, I overwrite the previous version on the computer. When I worked with a typewriter, I scrupulously (as scrupulously as I can be, at least) numbered and kept each draft. I always dated the draft, and for some reason, noted the line count. I guess you don't consider the possibility of going back to a previous version. It is fascinating to see how a work evolves, that was something I liked in the Paris Review pictures of manuscript pages, tho mine doesn't evolve much anymore. What changes I make now tend to be cosmetic: typos and maybe some line adjustments. I kind of think of my notebook poems as fictional. They rarely get a real life, insofar as I don't often even type them out. Many of my notebooks went to the Ohio State archive that John Bennett oversees: they are completely out of my hands now. It sounds like what's in the notebooks are ready to publish when the opportunity arises. Do yiu have a publication plan of attack of some sort?

120

2007-03-13T06:18:00.001-07:00

JH: It doesn't seem that the zeitgeist understands classic books. It understands manufacture and the gesture toward consumption. I was looking at finished poems in my notebooks, and thought the page and websites would be another resting place. My poems could be visible to other people, and to other poems. My poems would be part of another person's store of read material, and part of what is available to another poet. I was reading a lot of ezines, and decided they were more interesting than a lot of print journals I was reading. I was first accepted by BlazeVox (my e-book Apollo's Bastards), then by Moria, then by MAG and other ezines. This was in 2002. Also in 2002, I was accepted by the print journals Nerve Lantern and Xerography. The next year, more ezines, and the print journals Sentence, Cranky, and others. There was satisfaction, in that something I had thought about in childhood had come to pass, and I was now aware of how I, personally, was as unknown to a reader as previously and would continue to be unknown no matter how many of my poems were published. This put me, as it does all authors, on the same level as a posthumously published author. Looking at the page, Geoffrey Chaucer is as distant as Allen Bramhall or Jeff Harrison. Publication allowed me to read my poem as a poem, not as something I wrote, as it wasn't in my handwriting or was recently typed for purposes of submission or posting. Building a body of publication, like building a body of work through writing, is an attempt to build an organism from poems. Changes may be made to this organism, by the poet or people other than the poet or natural circumstances such as fire, but it does not affect my life other than the task of building. Like the recurrence of Emily Dickinson poems in my poetry, and the recurrence of Virginia, this has nothing to do with me. Once a poet is published, the organism of poems is on its own, before and after the death of or living abandonment by the poet. Publication added a route next to my route of writing; the impulse to write is now accompanied by the impulse to publish. What are the beginnings of your publication history? What are your thoughts on publication?

AHB: some people regard poetry as an intensely private act. In such sitch, you write your poems in precious notebooks, like a diary, and maybe show them to some intimate. When I began writing, I right off showed my work to a friend who also wrote, so I always had this sense of writing as public. I knew no acceptable venue for my work (I assumed the snotty ass literary journal was strictly for honour students). I understand the distinction that you make concerning your work transmuted from notebook to page or website. It goes from internal musing to external life of its own. At Franconia College, lo these many, 2 of my poems were published in the college review without my knowledge. I imagine this happened to most of the contributors, the creative writing teacher submitted the work. And someone in the process made minor changes to the poems. That was my 1st publication. The same thing happened the next year. More substantially, Robert Grenier, now teaching poetry at the school, liked a long poem I wrote and asked to publish it in his own magazine, This 3. so my 1st publications were done without my seeking. Periodically over the years, I would send work out, even my 1st novel, and never got anything in print. Whenever I got the submission back I'd wonder why I chose those works, or see glaring places I could have improved. It continues that most of what I've published has been asked for. Which I feel is a good editorial practice. That an editor ought to seek work that he/she likes, and not just await the fortuitous submission. I very much favour the doing it yourself approach to publication. My friend Stephen Ellis has published lots of people, including me, in his broadside series. All he needs is access to a computer and printer. I just put together a short chapbook at Lulu.com. If this isn't as cost-effective as it might be (I haven't done a cost-analysis), it is a simpler process than going to your local printer. But the point is, I like the hands on, tho I am not that techno minded, so I struggle some. A year or 2 ago I did the inevitable search on my name, and discovered some of my poems I didn't know were published. Someone asked for poems years ago, and I sent some. I never heard anything back. So those poems had a life I was unaware of. Dickinson's fascicles were a sort of publication, even if only a select few saw them. I would even say that's how they should be read. That (perhaps) it is as much of a bowdlerization to print out her poems, and reorganize them, as to discard her marvelous dashes. I imagine most poets would continue writing even if there were no way to publish the work. And I am convinced that much of that work, ne'ertheless, will find readership. eventually.

119

2007-03-10T04:31:00.000-08:00

JH: One could write poetry and read books and not publish, and survive. Memory, personal and cultural, is the only thing that is affected by not publishing. The books on one's shelves and the poems in one's notebooks are identical in physical presence. Why publish, then? This question is tied in, inextricably, with questions of why art, why literature, why poetry, why culture. An unpublished poet who whose productions would be despised by popular, elite, and all in between is indistinguishable from a mandarin poet whose never-to-be seen poetry would be acclaimed eternally by noted poets and commentators - both are perfect writers (arguably, this perfection exists even with publication of both poets). To be published is to be announced as a writer, not a poet, except as practitioner of the genre termed poetry. Me, I like publication - because I would hate to miss out on poems by Allen Bramhall, among others. What do you not entirely trust about William Faulkner? I love the ambiance attached to poetry and art - if by ambience you mean the je ne sais quoi about poetry and art, what is brought to mind in the absence of a specific example of a poem or artwork, a poet or artist. If you mean poetry scenes, whether literary or face-to-face, I tend to be wary of them, although positive things have come from them. Do you think poetry scenes artificially create recurrences? By recurrences I mean things that reoccur in a poet's writing - such as methods, style, and words. Outside of a poetry scene, recurrences are self-imposed or imposed from outside of intention. Aliens reoccur in your work, Virginia in mine. Are "aliens" and "Virginia" synonyms? There are also less frequent recurrences. For example, in January 2005 I deliberately alluded to the closing lines of an Emily Dickinson poem (449 - "I died for beauty") in my poem "Weak As Roses: Wherein The Most Transparent Deception Is Yet A Cipher Undaunted".

In January 2006, I unintentionally alluded to the closing line of another Emily Dickinson poem (320 - "We play at Paste") in my poem "I practiced these sands, the freshest crowns". (P.F.S. Post does not pluralize "crowns" in the title, and capitalizes all the words in the title, otherwise the poem is posted as I wrote it). What does it mean that I alluded to a Dickinson poem in the same month of adjoining years? Is it just coincidence? In 2007, I quoted, deliberately, but not thinking of the two JH poems mentioned above, the penultimate line of Dickinson's 449. However, this was in February 2007, not January, suggesting more than the patness of coincidence. Are there any such infrequent recurrences in your poetry? I should add "that you know of", thinking that there are many recurrences in my poems, and in any poet's, that I cannot see.

AHB: In the years in which I had I'll call it no connection to other living writers, I still read lots of current writers, perhaps more than I do now. So I was part of the scene that way. But I have realized that meeting other writers (by the various means now possible) has been important for me. Just on the level of thinking I've written something kinda cool, I'd like people to read it. The Poetics list is almost entirely announcements of what people have done lately, like the 3 latest poems someone has now published in some mag or zine. The outward push should be balanced by inward reception. Does the zeitgeist understand classic books? I mean classic as in an artist's home run clout. Seems like an overly eager expectation of the next book exists, rather than patience to delve into the present one. Which tendency I attribute to the abundance of publication possibilities and ease of publication: so much stuff is available. I distrust Faulkner in how he may be too canny at times with his effects. he was a Hollywood writer, so did he get tainted by the power to play to the cheap seats? I wonder sometimes. In the flush of work that can be seen now, one must be wary of the imitative, the correct, the unexploring, because so much work is being cranked out. I'm reading My Angie Dickinson by Michael Magee, which is an intersection of Emily Dickinson with pop culture. Magee uses various techniques to translate (I'm not sure that would be his word) Emily's work from her own little world to the greater one. I would call Emily's work subversive, the way she plays with, mocks, changes forms and thinking. I suppose you could say Magee's effort emphasizes actualities in the shiftiness of pop culture. I'm not clear here (I'm thinking as I write). Perhaps we can say that Dickinson gave up the idea of publishing because she saw no way for her iconoclasm to exist. I cannot say what her satisfactions or lack thereof might be, in her commitment to refrain from publication. I like the idea of my “Aliens” and your “Virginia” as being synonyms. The specific meaning I may see in aliens may differ from how you see Virginia, yet in both cases we see a mutable constant, if that paradox isn't too precious. On my side, I do not ascribe to aliens in any meaty way: no tin foil helmets here. But the idea, in a very trashy scifi way, appeals to me narratively. Which brings to mind the sense of narrative that we, everyone, live. The coincidence you cited with your Dickinson poems asserts (even in your question) a narrative that transcends, possibly, your ambition as a writer. You are caught wondering if you'll always or even just once again reference Dickinson on a specific date. I cannot think offhand if I have similar recurrences, tho I suspect I do. How did you come to be published at first? Did you decide that what you wrote needed to be seen? Was there satisfaction in getting published? Did publication change your course?

118

2007-03-07T17:18:00.000-08:00

JH: I'm looking forward to reading Days Poem! What was the act of writing daily like? Have you done this before, whether on a long work or independent works? Could you write something about your poem "further proof that poems exist"? I find appealing your terming Emily Dickinson an "undistracted poet". What is a poet distracted by? Can a poet, when writing poetry, be distracted by anything other than an outside influence (a person on business from Porlock distracting Coleridge forever from the continuation of "Kubla Khan")? Can distractions be favorable to the poem? Are there two types of poets, the distracted poet and the undistracted poet? Or only two types of poems, distracted and undistracted? The idea of novels being an influence on poetry is one I've thought about -- does one borrow a way of thinking from novels that becomes accessible to poetry? I suspect prose has become an influence on my poetry - such as the syntax that lurks around median punctuation (the punctuation within a sentence - "sentence" including sentences that make up a large sentence).

AHB: Dickinson had a ferocious focus, it seems to me. She pressed on in her way, against cultural imperatives, for instance. Her poems don't seem to fail, because she is so homed in on the process. That is, even her less successful ones assert the larger project of her poetic life. In writing Days Poem, I felt the need to be undistracted. I've written novels, on a daily basis, but I felt a greater imperative with Days Poem. For 5 months, for instacne, our son was bedridden with a broken (in 3 places) femur. His care filled our day, so that I had to squeeze writing in, sometimes desperately. the feeling of persistence and perseverance was strong. I didn't want to miss a day, tho I did miss a few. That guy from Porlock shows up all the time. It's not just a time squeeze but also the ancillary “thinking” that impinges on the pure product. You think of Higginson, if that's his name, pretty much going holy shit!!! on meeting Dickinson's intensity face to face. Artists aren't crazy per se but they represent something awfully close, at least at times. Imitation and influence can be extremely distracting. Novels influence my work exactly as a way of thinking. Henry James really fascinates me because his stories so often lack story. Instead they exist as constructs in which this arch ruminator simply ruminates. So that Clover Adams could well say of James: he chaws more than he bites off. Though it is that chaw that I find so remarkable. The other novelists that I mentioned (and I should include Faulkner, tho I don't entirely trust him) all stretch out in their thoughts. regarding”Further Proof that Poems Exist”, it too would be a rumination, directed even. It's an oracular sort of piece in its necessity surrounding the poem's acceptance as a worthily created product of the imagination. I'm at times amazed at how seriously I take poetry, because I'm so wary of the whole ambiance attached to poetry and art. Are you at all? I spent a lot of years thoroughly unconnected to anything approaching a poetry scene. I knew no writers, and no listservs or blogs alternatives existed then. Could you exist as a writer in such a way? Could you just read books and make poetry and not publish, and still survive???

117

2007-03-06T04:26:00.000-08:00

H: Does a poet become identical, for the duration of composition, with the choice of procedure? Does this lend humanity to obdurate words, or blanche the author to an extent sufficient for the poem's words to arrive? A recent poem of yours, titled "further proof that poems exist", is lovely and poetics-provoking:

Poets call for improved marveling. Too many words left unregistered.
More lilting could do trick.

Exotic dancers cite location as imperative. Their sitting replaces
words. Words aren't properly situated. Time now to react.

Later agitation occurs with revelation of loss. Nobody meant to mean
nothing, it just happened. A poem harnessed for years becomes unglued.

What are we to make of making? asks poet, some sort of dullard, or
expert in raining.

Trees instead of vacation, asserts the remedy. Unhand the glossary, step
back from function.

Tremendous tides in the sea place risk on shorelines. Ravenous sharks
eat openly. Swimmers divagate in the morning, digest in the afternoon. A
poem in this oracular jungle cannot stay trained.

Literally pulled back, as if track of each word would dedicate too much.
Some explanation was “necessary”, yet diligence could not hold on. Shark
swallowed something, performed no evaluation.

The poet has gauze for eyes, observed a textual champion. Inside
observation replaces outer reception. Programming language paces a
display “in the future”. The future cancels poem's beginning.

Shark futures distribute food in randomly excited parcels. Poets like
their chances just staying afloat. Poems, meanwhile, remain mindless.

----------

Could you speak on this poem, please? I would also like to hear more about Days Poem. We were tagged by Anny Ballardini to list the ten books that most influenced our writing. Ten (plus one) authors very important to my writing are, in no particular order:

1. Edgar Allan Poe.
2. Walt Whitman. Among many other qualities, I admired and learned an inclusiveness that could more accurately be termed an additioning; the lyricism of ( / within) prosiness; the apparency of inspiration, in that every poem that arrived to Whitman seemingly resulted in a written poem (and from this I gathered Posterity, like Nature, takes whatever is present).
3. Barbara Guest. Together with Louis Zukofsky, an impetus to a change in direction for my poems. This change occurred in the Summer of 2001, a year before I started publishing. A chord struck.
4. John Milton.
5. Stéphane Mallarmé.
6. Paul Valéry, especially his writings on poetry.
7. Charles Baudelaire.
8. Emanuel Swedenborg.
9. The King James Bible.
10. Ezra Pound, especially his early poems, and his writings on poetry.

Each of these is more landmark than influence, which means to flow in, which would be not only too much a myriad to record (as a verb), but also mostly unknown to record (as a noun). The project was to list ten books, not authors, so here is a book list: The King James Bible (anonymous committee), Leaves Of Grass (Whitman), ABC of Reading (Ezra Pound), Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire), Heaven and Hell (Swedenborg), Selected Writings (Paul Valéry), Poems (Mallarmé), Complete Poems (Milton), Complete Tales and Poems (Poe), All: The Collected Short Poems 1923-1964 (Zukofsky), Rocks on a Platter (Guest). What is your list? PS: We've been collaborating on our poem "Monster" since the beginning of 2003.

AHB: I think yes a poet becomes identical with choice of procedure. A poet serves as the poem's means. I can use Days Poem to illustrate. I began Days Poem under the influence of a book by Jim Leftwich called Doubt. I liked its dense yet sinuous prose and, perhaps as importantly, that it ran 500 pages. Days Poem quickly found its own path, which was a tumble of “characters” that I kept returning to: Walden Pond, bears, hobos, Tarzan and Jane, Fu Manchu. It is journal like in that I wrote daily, in a fiercely necessary way. It took 14 months to write and at times it seemed (like our Monster) to be never ending. It is nearly 1000 pages and, I am surprised and proud to say, light on its feet. To me, the work rather clearly shows some of my influences. Leftwich and Peter Ganick (another poet of awesome, incredible extent), Thoreau, and of course the sort of all action narrative for which I still harbour a taste. To apply myself more seriously to Anny's list request, I find it difficult to answer. I'll start with a list of books:
1) Maximus Poems. Olson has meant much to me but perhaps most especially for bringing in the “non-poetic” (history and all that) into the poem for me.
2) New American Poetry. its flaws are now obvious, if not legion, but it introduced numerous excellent writers to me, and it had Olson's Projective Verse.
3) Ron Silliman issue of The Difficulties, edited by Tom Beckett. I got a formative understanding of LANGUAGE poetry from this, tho I should add the other issues (Bernstein, Bromige, Howe).
4) WCW, Selected Poems. possibly the 1st poetry that caught me.
5) WCW, Spring and All. an eye opening adventure.
6) Pieces, Robert Creeley. I never really enjoyed his earlier stuff, but this druggy collection worked for me. My sense of the line very much owes to him.
7) Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein. I didn't think literature could do this, and then I realized that it could.
8) collected Whitman. expansiveness and embrace.
9) Tender Harvest (selected), Emily Dickinson. the undistracted poet.
10) John Keats selected. romantic intensity and acceptance.
10+) Thoreau's journal. daily grind and look about.
I would place a number of novels on the list, because of how they cross boundaries: Moby Dick, Ulysses, A La Recherche, several by Virginia Woolf, Henry James' oeuvre (regarded as a single work: his stories all seem to be part of one large massive endeavour). And I would add Baudelaire's prose works, and... and... and...
and already I see I forgot Cantos and ABC of Reading, A Day at the Beach (Grenier), Midwinter Day (Mayer). I'll stop there.

116

2007-03-03T06:18:00.000-08:00

JH: Procedure fascinates me, too. Is the specific procedural idea, "idea" for lack of a better word, the poem, or is the procedure the poem? If something other than the written product is the poem, what is the written product called? What does it mean to return to previously written procedure? I wrote the first GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE in February 2005, and wrote a second one a couple of days later. The third GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE wasn't written until July 2006. I've written them fairly steadily since then (36 to date). How does one decide to return to a procedure, or, in the case of revision, a non-procedural poem? We have earlier spoken of series - is a series a revisiting? How much time must go by before continuity is revisiting? On the page a ten-year break between cantos or a line is indistinguishable from instantaneity. Is there a difference between continuity and revisiting? How well does an occasion travel? When you write, what in the non-writer must stop in order for the writer to begin? By write, I mean any kind of writing that is not a conversion of speech into print. Do you get stage fright before you write (this is opposed to what is known as "writer's block", which is an inability to write)? Is the poet ("poet" defined here as what causes a person to write, from start to finish, when a poem is to be written) altered by this oscillation from writer to non-writer? Does a person have memories of being a poet, as he or she has of being a person? Is one ever a poet when not writing - how would one know? There is an occasion of being a person, and there is an occasion of being a poet - how well does one occasion travel to the other occasion? It is likely that the person carries over to the poet; is there a vice-versa of the poet carrying over to the person? If so, how would the poet manifest itself in the person - only in writing, or in occasions of non-writing?

AHB: pick a question to answer. It does seem part of a poem that one used particular procedures to produce the text rather than “made it up”. And yet, the reader hadn't ought to belabour the idea of a trick. It doesn't matter to me whether an angel or muse gave me a poem, or that I used a procedure or program. I remember discussion about August Highland's work, which is produced (at least some of it) using programs that he did not write. Someone wondered if the programmer should be considered the author. Well, should the programmer be granted credit for writing the program, or should the person who created the computer? Argh! I credit the one who says they are making a poem. The point is that any work receives tributaries from many directions. Works of art seem like instants, yet they are created in time. My own poem, Days Poem (soon to be published, Meritage Press) continually refers to hobos, Tarzan & Jane, bears, Walden Pond, Fu Manchu, and so on: all as what I would call characters. The collaboration that you and I have been doing—for how many years now????—relies similarly on re-referencing of similar characters. I think in both cases a revelation or evolution is witnessed. That witnessing presses the writing forward. Poems are occasions. To write, one must accept the occasion. When I am busy or distracted, the occasion is elsewhere. I can write for short spells, 5 minutes say, and feel productive, yet I need some writing focus to start things. I used to write much more than I do now. I feel as much a writer and poet now, tho I write less. I don't meet with poets often, and when I do, the occasion is not necessarily marked by a lot of poetry talk. Yet these occasions fuel me as a poet. Tho in these circs, perhaps I am poet only in name tag. Certainly I see things thru the prism of poet, and whatever I do could influence my writing of poetry, but I guess I am not consumed by it all. I used to run 2-3 hours a day, and in a way I was a runner the entire day, because I'd be hungry and thirsty all the time, plus I'd always carry this energized weariness with me from, I suppose, the endorphin release. Mayhap something similar occurs as a poet.

115

2007-03-02T04:55:00.001-08:00

JH: Thanks! The names in "The Recital" are from the Appius and Virginia story (the tale of a Virginia who was the daughter of a centurion named Virginius. Virginius killed Virginia to save her from Appius Claudius Crassus, a decemvir - a member of a group of ten judges, which is said to have been the beginning of the end of the office of decemvir), first found in Livy, and repeated in many elsewheres. The 14 lines the characters tell are lines from 14 sonnets. The first line in "The Recital" is from the first line of a sonnet, the second line is from the second line of a different sonnet, continuing in this manner to the 14th line, which is from the 14th line of a 14th sonnet. Here are the authors used, and their sonnets, in order of appearance:

1. Barnabe Barnes "ah sweet content..." from sonnet 46 of "Parthenophil and Parthenophe"
2. Matthew Arnold "we ask and ask..." from "Shakespeare"
3. Christina Rossetti "loathsome and foul..." from "The World"
4. Sir Thomas Wyatt "do never appear..." from sonnet beginning "Some fouls there be"
5. Sir Walter Raleigh "my lost delights..." from sonnet beginning "Like truthless dreams"
6. Edgar Allan Poe "how many thoughts..." from "Sonnet - To Zante"
7. John Milton "and at thy growing virtues..." from sonnet 9
8. George Meredith "now the black planet..." from "Lucifer In Starlight"
9. Samuel Daniel "The world shall find..." from sonnet 33 of "Delia"
10. Robert Southey "restless through Fortune's..." from sonnet beginning "With many a weary step, at length I gain"
11. William Shakespeare "ruin hath taught me..." from Sonnet 64
12. Elizabeth Barrett Browning "Some prescience..." from Sonnet 20 of "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
13. George Gascoigne "each hour a day..." from Sonnet 2 of "Alexander Nevile delivered him this theame... whereupon hee compiled these seven Sonets in sequence..." (sequence begins with
"In haste poste haste, when first my wandring minde"
14. Ezra Pound "as white their bark..." from "A Virginal"

Each line from a sonnet is offered complete and largely unchanged from how it is found in editions of the author's poems: I modernized the spelling in the lines by Wyatt, Raleigh, Milton, Daniel, and Gascoigne, and I did not retain capitalization of the first word of any of the sonnet lines, nor did I retain end punctuation. In all of the Arnold editions I consulted, the "Thou" of the second line of his sonnet "Shakespeare" was capitalized, but I did not retain this capitalization. My lower-casing of the lines' initial letter led me to question if "ruin" in Shakespeare's sonnet 64 was an apostrophe. I retained capitalization of the apostrophe "Fortune" and the proper noun "Arctic". Although "Time" is an apostrophe in sonnet 64, I decided not to present "ruin" as an apostrophe. This brings to mind the existence of concealed apostrophe - an apostrophe that occurs only in a position where any word is capitalized. Such an apostrophe could be made made explicit by content that would encourage the reader to infer the word is an apostrophe, and/or by other apostrophes within the poem's lines. I use lower-case letters in my poems except for apostrophes, proper nouns, and dialogue within quotation marks. I use punctuation in my poems only when grammatically necessary; that is to say, where it pertains to the meaning of the line, to create discrete units. However, in my prose poems, so far, I use standardized sentence capitalization and punctuation. It's the presence of the line as opposed to the sentence (and vice-versa) that dictates my decisions on capitalization and punctuation. Speaking of ambiguity, the Laurel Poetry Series edition of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry (1959. Edited by Richard Wilbur, who was also the general editor of this series from Dell Publishing Company, Inc.) has line 3 of "Sonnet - To Zante" as identical with line 6, making the first six lines read

Fair isle, that from the fairest of all flowers,
Thy gentlest of all gentle names dost take!
How many thoughts of what entombéd hopes!
At sight of thee and thine at once awake!
How many scenes of what departed bliss!
How many thoughts of what entombéd hopes!

In addition to the new poem this typo presents, it changes the scheme of "The Recital" - the sixth line of "The Recital" is the sixth line of this "To Zante", and it is also the third line. What does unforeseen expansion do to form, to allusion, to quotation? Moving on to the plot, the action, of "The Recital", it can be envisioned as a theatre performance (the script of which is in the past tense, and lacks stage direction). The "bark" of "white bark" Virginia mentions could refer to white in lines 3 and 12 ("white" does not appear as a word in line 3, but "leprosy" is associated with white -see, for example, Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" line 192 "Her skin was white as leprosy"). Line 8 contains the word "snows", which is associated with white, but these snows are shadowed by the black planet. Association further expands the reading of a poem, as "white" could conceivably be associated with other words in other lines in this poem (after all, the word "their" of "their white bark" can admit two or a million). On the level of the sonnet, "The Recital" retains the sonnet by Barnabe Barnes, to use the first instance, but obscures 13 of the lines with other lines, 13 bodies overshadowing 99 percent of sonnet 46 from "Parthenophil and Parthenophe".

AHB: procedure fascinates me. Your use of sonnet is apt, as that form seems to be a re(con)straint for the writer, I mean beyond the metre/rhyme formality. A sonnet tends to be a specific occasion. I'm thinking of the sonnet writing contests that those rowdy English Romantics used to get all up side of. A sonnet seems to quantify an emotion or emotional moment in a formal, stylized way. It is that stylization that comes thru in your poem. Back to thoughts of procedure, I've used flarfian procedure to make poems. That means not just googling for phrases, but maintaining an attitude (just as the sonnet writer has an attitude towards the poem's subject, lofty and enriched). The procedure allows a letting go, not just of my vocabulary (by using the found words) but also my poem-making attitude. I'm not commenting on the real flarf writers, just myself, tho I will say that those who force the flarf writers to fulfill their own manifestos (what the real flarf writers have said about their work), or who invent manifestos for the flarfsters to fulfill, are just playing games with limits. Your poem here, and the way you often work, is a skewed re-visioning. You remove the lines from their born context, yet their nature is not obliterated. A similar transformation can occur with googled poems, in which the reader recognizes the original context of the words, yet can perceive a synchronous event that partakes of those words while still distinguishing itself. I've diddled a little lately with the sort of ways you've gone. I haven't your patience, but it is an interesting method for me even so. There are other ways of letting the poem find itself. Jack Kimball has recently been collecting what he calls romantic spam. I can't remember the name of the person on the Wryting list who has been using a Bernadette Mayer procedure to collect sentences from listservs. These methods all advocate an eye for poetry, eye and ear that is. That the hike up Parnassus isn't always the same path. Basically, if a procedure makes people nervous, it has got to be good.

114

2007-02-27T03:33:00.001-08:00

JH: Is it the poem or the poetic that is the foundation? Does one point to the other - the poem pointing to the poetic or the poetic pointing to the poem? Are philosophical, personal, and historical/literary issues incidental or fundamental? I see the poem as pointing to the poetic, with language pulling in the incidental. Language is something other than the poetic, but is inseparable from the poem. Words point to things outside themselves, but the poem points to the poetic, which is integral to the poem. The poetic cannot be seen outside the poem. Is to invent more of the empyrean to bring it closer, by giving it more words that can interact with words given to quotidian matters, or is it to push the empyrean further away by allowing more of the unattainable? John M. Bennett is a challenging and excellent poet, as is Allen Bramhall. Here is a poem by Allen Bramhall called "les plaisirs des Smurfs":

cha cha requisition disorder
consternation among panelists
pumpkin popularity conflicts
strict Miami Vice probation
ocular nob button funny stuff
A Passage to India gnomes forensic site
kacking sounds debate
comical entropy
underwater festoon rebate
Hamptons payback lawn sprinkler
botulism for girls
late night irrigated etui
spondees amidst mayhem
burglar suppositories
left to write
ontological umpire budget
traditional moon rock
rosewater les meubles
boom fractal marmalade
estimated silly birch bark
dullard tonsil spot
ruminated onion duck
Spiderman lump lament
chuckling with cheese
pseudo suede fuss cancer
caustic underwear hovering

.. and when rentfree Fu Manchu finally established his realm, it beggared the mind. Who are these troops aligned on the mountain ridge bordering the snow field, tending toward downcast? What are hordes in favour of? When does a poem rise? Do they even read in the wind? Fu Manchu, that is a tyrant anywhere, presents a poem on the spot. The spot loses all geography, like Nepal and Tibet. The idea behind the spot that says it is a poem seems to fail. It needs a look. We aren't afraid. The English stand for 'something'. Sir Denis Nayland-Smith knows arch enemies when he sees them. Dr Petrie smokes out the last bumbling evidence. The east came west with as much as can be pretended. After that, something carefully idyllic: Sir Denis smoking his pipe.

--

I love the pairing of lineated and prose poetry. The lineated poetry gives me one rhythm, and the prose poetry opens up another, with the rhythm of the former informing this new realm (and the mentions of "poem" both self-referential and referring to the lineated part above -- a self-referentiality outside the sentence, and passage, that does the referring). A theme appears of location, of geography, and of perhaps-unanswerable questions. Could you write something about this poem, please?

AHB: You're right, sez I, the poetic points to the poem. A poem doesn't make, it is made. And it is our astonishment at that making that is poetic. that statement is amazingly crucial to me. Because I don't feel naturally 'poetic'. Not, at least, in the sense of ease in the parlance. Which I assume some people have. I brought up John Bennett because there's a functioning vision to his work, an integrity of inquiry concerning words. He wears weird glasses that see something in words that most of us barely grasp. Regarding my own poemization, I was abed and phrases started appearing in my mind. When I got up, I remembered a few and wrote more. And this whole Fu Manchu thing seems to be nearby. I don't want to sound like a dull explainer, so I will just note the respect I have for these incomings. Why write about Fu Manchu? Why am I so stark about Nepal and Tibet? So the energy was simple, random phrases collated, then a prosy change. Your own poem, posted today on Wryting-L, which I will quote in full anon, presents a useful thought: "ah sweet content, where is thy mild abode". these 'things' come to us, seem important, but what are we holding????? your poem is called The Recital. It seems situated, um, somewhere—Latin names for one thing, and Virginia—and possesses an enveloping energy.

Appius told Minutius ah sweet content, where is thy mild abode
Minutius told Calphurnia we ask and ask - thou smilest and art still
Calphurnia told Corbulo loathsome and foul with hideous leprosy
Corbulo told Horatio do never appear but in the dark or night
Horatio told Icilius my lost delights, now clean from sight of land
Icilius told Numitorius how many thoughts of what entombéd hopes
Numitorius told Virginia and at thy growing virtues fret their spleen
Icilius told Virginia now the black planet shadowed Arctic snows
Horatio told Virginia the world shall find this miracle in me
Corbulo told Virginia restless through Fortune's mingled scenes I went
Calphurnia told Virginia ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
Minutius told Virginia some prescience of thee with the blossoms white
Appius told Virginia each hour a day each day a year did seem
Virginia told Appius as white their bark, so white this lady's hours

I don't now whence these Latin names come from. You need not be a Latin scholar but the feel is quite solid here. Your Virginia is a manyness, and fascinating from the many angles. The tension is philosophical. The interconnection of some 'then' and 'now', literarily speaking, is fascinating and compelling. Do speak further.

113

2007-02-23T17:11:00.001-08:00

JH: "Poems are aggregates of percepts" is an apt definition of poems. What is the difference between a poem's line that says "It's a sunny day" and a line saying "We should be nice to each other"? Where does reportage and opinion enter in a poem? As to aggregation, what is the difference between a disjunctive poem and a more linear poem? Does a disjunctive poem neglect much of its language's (such as English) resources, or does it emphasize them (or can any distinction be made)? To progress via syntax involves memory and anticipation. Is there memory and anticipation from one end of a word to another, or simply identification, or ignorance, of the word? If there is memory and anticipation within the word, is a group of words (phrase, sentence, line) itself a poem? Could a poet devise a manner of reading a letter (whether that letter stood alone or with other letters to form a word) - for example, reading the progression of points from one end of a line in a letter to another? This would require an essay, or content within the poem, to instruct the reader on the alphabet and grammar of the letters. Once read, this explanatory material could be imposed on any text that used the outward form of the letters in this poem (there are comparable examples such as the recognition of iambic pentameter).

AHB: where reportage and opinion enter the poem is the battleground. A poem is neither opinion or reportage because, ahem, opinion is opinion and reportage is reportage. And yet, these can inform a poem. A poem transmutes these into a realm that isn't just flat, straight lines. That sounds fluffy, but I think we have to lean on something. Poems make use of statements and descriptions but their perimeter extends beyond these small antics. Disjunction allows the reader to make leaps and extensions. The syntactical gaps are filled by the play of the reader's mind. It's a slap of immediacy. Disjunction is a sort of calming strangeness because it allows us readers to fashion our path amidst the tensions of the words involved. A group of words... IS a poem. It is, at least, if the Reader is there. John Bennett's work comes to mind because he puts seemingly common stuff of language thru a demanding prism. He has an eye for wonder that challenges readers. We see John's work daily, on the Wryting list (he's incredibly prolific),. I can't respond to all the questions you pose, you suggest a world of excitement. Our dreams of a straight, direct language—I infer a human need here—is a wish towards some empyrean that needs more inventing. Poetry proposes the intensity of the words, the letter, the shape of something on the edge of or near each word. I actually dislike statements such as I am making, and yet, what are we worrying about? It is a sign of age, if not growth, that I see Poetry as a philosophical entity. It is an inquiry. It is not, itself, a pleasure, tho it can broaden the eye in a pleasing way.

112

2007-02-23T04:03:00.001-08:00

JH: A negative influence is a fascinating idea! Is an after-image of the unappealing contained in avoidance, or is this not an after-image/memory, but the unappealing revealing itself as unavoidable? Something visible is meant to be seen, by definition of "visible" rather than "meant" as synonym of "fated". To turn a blind eye is selection, whether visceral or analytical. I agree that more than a flash and trail of a meteorite is needed for a poem, but why is the flash, or trail, not enough for a poem? Is a poem defined as "idea + X"? What is X? Writing? Writing as converting perception into words is not enough for a poem - what is enough? Or is it that perception alone has too much to include poetry, but there are some perceptions with something missing that poetry tries to supply? Or is what is missing from such a perception specifically a poem? We have yet to speak about the English language and its relation to poetry. What do you think are some characteristics of English that are favorable to poetry? Do you think English is more favorable to prose or poetry?

AHB: by negative influence I'm thinking of Harold Bloom's idea of misreading. That some writers repel rather than compel our work in a direction. I think conflict can be useful as a means of discovery. You are right to suggest that this is the unappealing revealing itself as unavoidable. That flash or trail is enough for a poem. That is, a poem can be a meditative state. One can access poems one has read, or might write, when neither reading or writing, when musing, say. These poems are not percepts but some manner of working with percepts. Poems are aggregates of percepts????? maybe so. As a musical language English appears to offer much variety. French is the only other language I have written in, simple French, so I cannot make great comparatives. English offers a vast palette for anyone wanting to write in metre and rhyme. I don't know what it is like to read ideograms. Does one really see the picture as one reads? If so, that would present an aspect that English doesn't really have. A least not so directly. I do make word choices based on etymology, id est, the (semi) hidden. But I cannot claim scholarly skill in that way, nor do I do it all the time. I use a lot of English spellings, which suggests other accents even if I do not pronounce differently from American spelling. English is possibly more adapted for prose than poetry because of the etymological distance that I mentioned. I've seen literal translations of Japanese and Chinese poetic, where the immediacy of the words presides over syntax. If that is the experience in the languages themselves, that seems more poetic than what English can do. I'm amazed that I mentioned Harold Bloom, who always seems like a grey mass of obfuscation.

111

2007-02-17T05:42:00.000-08:00

JH: Antic View questions result from your questions and answers, together with my recent musings about poetics. In writing poetry, I can no longer tell the question from the deed; to write poetry, for me, is to inquisitively repeat what I've heard in my head so as to ascertain what I've heard, but I receive no confirmation. The poem is overheard by me, but the poem does not hear me as far as I know. Is a poet's history part of writing poetry? One may speculate on the ego-lessness of writing, but if a poet did not know a language there could not be any poems. Language forms the individual, the individual forms poems. Past reading, writing, and thinking comes into play. Is it easier to inform one's reading than to inform one's writing? Reading may be broadened by experience in writing as well as past reading, but may writing be broadened by reading experience without much writing experience? What of someone who listens to poetry, and composes poetry, but cannot read or write? Does an illiterate poet have an advantage over a literate poet in being less literary? How much of the literary is available to one who cannot read or write? Does the literary need to be read, or only seen? An illiterate person sees writing and can define it as something that cannot be read except by some other people: is, then, there such as thing as illiteracy? Such a reading is very literary, as all of writing and reading is seen on the surface, instead of reading the word "cat" and defining it as a specific animal. Poems come to a poet without writing, and are, if the poet is able, written down. Often in the act of writing more of the poem arrives, or more of what is presented by the poet as the poem. If a poet has a lot of experience reading and writing, does the poem, instantly upon arrival in the mind, become literary? Does the poem have a lot of experience reading and writing? Poems have unseen origins, do they also have unseen pasts (aside from drafts, and aside from their poet's history)?

AHB: informing one's reading is natural: you read more, and consider. to inform one's writing entails... what...? seems like you need to jump away from what you've done and what you've read. a receptivity to sharp turns. there's a sort of egolessness there, where you try not to become entrenched in previous assumptions, however brilliant those assumptions might have been. poems, as you say, come to poets without writing. poets transfer these poems into a readable medium. that's a sort of mundane transformation of a philosophical act of understanding. part of a poet's mind in action becomes a poem. makes me think of the idea of being an artist. we all take it seriously. even those who don't appreciate art have an awe, if perhaps a sardonic one, of artists. artists devote themselves to art. how much time do you or I spend a day writing? less time, perhaps, than working, watching television, reading, walking the dog, sleeping, eating, etc. yet writing is a way that we understand the entire world. it is our lens but it is also our guidance. writing is not just what we do but an intrinsic component to our living. we meet with poems daily, maybe “all the time”. I mean there's a way to see poetry, or any art form, as an entertainment, something to fill time with interest. but as artists we've taken a worldview. little does my dog know that when I walk him, I do so as a poet. there's that common statement artists tend to make, that they couldn't live without their art. there's a sense where that's not true, if your life's terms weren't available to doing art. yet people make art in prison camps. art presents itself. the poem wants to be written, or at least acknowledged. I can't write all the poems that come to me. it's like meteorites flashing by. sometimes I see more than the flash and trail. I see the poem's life, its history, its reading. I have acknowledged influences, which can include negative ones (I surely won't write like that poet). but poems make themselves known that I can't ascribe a history to in that way. almost a chance intersection. the sky, you might imagine, is full of these poems.

110

2007-02-06T04:12:00.000-08:00

JH: Reading is distinct from interpretation, if interpretation is seen as wholly creative. But definitions, as in dictionary definitions, play a part in both reading and interpretation. How do the poem and dictionary definitions interact during the reading of a poem? Is there a picture, created by the poem, or that is the poem, first and foremost before the words are defined clearly (if so, is the first reading of a poem ever retained?)? A definition is the introduction of other words to the word it defines. Where do words outside the poem belong during the reading of the poem? Do words outside the poem come to resemble the poem, or resemble the act of reading the poem? Is poetry, once in the world, a method of reading that can only be used for poems or whatever words are in the poem's ambit? Reading is viewing; how is reading different from non-literary seeing? Interpretation is focusing on definitions and other outside words. A synonym of "meaninglessness" is "uselessness". But since anything at all can be interpreted, and almost anything can be read, how is a poem useless, if it can be used by reading and interpretation? Does a poem exist for anything other than reading and interpretation? Can a poem be used for anything other than reading and interpretation?

AHB: reading and interpretation go hand in hand, of course. one can read in such a way that forces an interpretation, based on bias or presupposition. like a dislike for avant-garde, or feminist writing, whatever any of that might be, or a love for New York or Language Poetry, likewise whatever. Small Press Distribution puts books into categories in their catalogue, as a means to sell. seeing Allen Ginsberg in the Gay category shook me. the wideness of his interests and vastness of his appeal gets lost in squeezing him into the one box. but the reader can and does do that, with a reading based on assumption or closemindedness. reading finds the parts of the machine and interpretation sees the machine at work. I want to turn from your questions, before I get too stupid, and look at the questioning itself. it seems like the poem inhabits a space that we readers infer, the space, that is. and we infer the poem itself. this resembles physics, where we infer the invisible from visible processes. our certainty bases on assumptions of connection and process. I've read where such scientists as Newton, Mendel and Pasteur fudged results of their experiments to bring forth the results they predicted, the “right” results. don't we readers do that as well, and we writers too? we assume limits to words and limits to poems, defining each by their boundaries. what initiates your questions? I spent a long time in my writer life not asking or answering questions. I bumped away from work that didn't engage me, with which I couldn't engage, and toward that which compelled me. I now feel I should be more cognizant, yet the murk is unsettling. do you work within the effects of the questions you ask?

109

2007-02-04T04:50:00.000-08:00

JH: If one does not realize that lists are being used in F1: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, what to make of the progression of words? If one knows of the schema of GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, one may suppose the words are related. But if not, what then? None of the poem disappears, but a part of the reading does. In reading any poem, anyone misses out on lists and schema -- though one may speculate on the mystery of getting from one word or line to another, there is the suspicion, indistinguishable from certainty, that there are unnameable and imperceptible enigmas poetic, literary, and linguistic; inability to speculate on these enigmas impairs theory; inability to know these things as unenigmatic impairs the reading of a poem. Do these inabilities impair the writing of a poem? If so, is this impairment consistent? Would making a judgment for or against such impairment of writing poems be defined as a reading? Though unspecific, can the abstract be read, or only perceived?

AHB: I'll start with a quote from Jung: “Interpretations are only for those who don't understand; it is only the things we don't understand that have any meaning. Man woke up in a world he did not understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it .” an inability to speculate on enigmas is a reading, albeit (perhaps) not satisfying. or it is not a reading at all, like if you didn't even bother to look at the words. a geologist can get excited by a rock that someone else will registers as no more grey thing. confusion, annoyance, bafflement all can be part of a reading. I think reading is relationship, and it need not be a 'good' relationship. I've had all these attitudinal reflexes to work thru. when I 1st read Pound, and faced that jumble of languages that he throws at the reader, I felt dismay. why can't he just write in English? sometimes with Dickinson, I mean even now, I have felt similarly in trying to worry out her syntax. with Pound, it was all new to me, this sort of possibility. with Dickinson, I already 'got' her, trusted her, yet the how to read this feeling set me on my heels. I think the abstract can be read. some writing baffles yet engages me. I think I'm reading not 'perceiving'. aesthetics is a limiting function, assuming levels of effect. yet every work has an effect, and the hierarchy of that can only, I think, be seen as adjunctive, added on. what the hell could meaninglessness possibly mean?

108

2007-01-30T03:05:00.000-08:00

JH: F1: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE does intermix several lists. Instead of the progression of one word from line to line, I progressed from line to line an example from one category. The categories are, respectively, sharks, roller coasters, geological time, birds, poisons, U.S. Civil War battles, stringed instruments, firearms, and ducks. It may be noticed that I have used these categories before, in another series: "Sharks of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley", "The Roller Coasters of Phillis Wheatley", "The Geological Time of Aphra Behn", "The Birds of Nikolai Gogol", "The Poisons of Felicia Hemans", "The Henry Green of U.S. Civil War Battles", "Stringed Instruments of Sheila Kaye-Smith", "Firearms of Matthew Arnold", and "The Ducks of Cotton Mather". With the exception of "raven", all the examples in F1: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE were previously used in these poems. The recurring category examples are depictions of the pre-existing poems ("The Ducks of Cotton Mather", etc), with the exception of Sawsharks, which may be seen as an allusion to "Sharks of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley", since there's not enough examples for a depiction (is "coincidence" another word for "allusion"? When - and is this a matter of quantity or quality -does depiction stop being allusion?). The categories and examples are accessible even if my "The Ducks of Cotton Mather" series isn't kept in mind, making the progressive words from line to line (Gettysburg, Murfreesboro, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg) synonyms within the category (in D1: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, the progressive words are unidentical and begin with the same letter). The "3a.m." throughout the poem (in the position earlier termed the "connector" - see Antic View 83, 91, and 94 for commentary on GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE) is, to me, where explanation becomes problematic: does "3a.m." mean "three o'clock ante meridiem"? If so, do the three in the mornings occur on the same day, etc. If the a.m. does not stand for ante meridiem, what does it stand for? The initials A and M pull in letters from words in the poem ("Arsenic" and "Arquebus", "Murfreesboro" and "Mallard" name just the words that have the initials A and M); "3a.m." occurs three times a line in this six-line poem. Should A be considered apart from the three, since there is no space between them? Does the letter M partake of the numeral three?: etcetera. David Divizio has an art series which processes GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, here

Could you talk about your poem "foundation of 6 or 7 steps", please?

Fact, the Himalayas.
Schneider who is gray
out of steel chosen
in the nth hiring.

Die sick, butter grease
of farm laborer matrix, the
griffin Bianka put back
the person with the
diet Grosvenor ode.

O use liner injury,
Oil is no zoo.

Paris has thousand Frankensteins,
makes the Himalayas Schneider
which is gray of stem.

choose the nth hiring.

Those are sick
of the butter grease
of farm laborer griffin
Bianka.

put back O malicious Governor,
use injury liner, Oil not
Paris zoo.

thousand Frankensteins, finish
the diesel elephant.

Victory in an armchair
of low belly yaw
because the axis.

I am machete of traumatized
perfume's haft of bean hiring.

enormous end in common
stags of Seersucker. O
yaw of Virgil stein contrast:
Rich daisies, how ideal.

AHB: I noticed from 1st glance how the list items leapt out. having interest in the Civil War, those place names are particularly vivid. the poem sets up relationships that the reader hasn't likely prior experience for. a gallimaufy. you bring up the matter of depiction vs allusion. one has to consider exactly what depiction might entail. a word by itself alludes to whatever register of possibilities, but depiction seems to need context. Gettysburg incites one to think of Lee, Little Round Top, Pickett's Charge, Lincoln, etc. Kingda Ka brought for me nothing directly, tho I heard Kingdom Come in its syllables (I had to supply a context). I don't think Kingda Ka depicts Kingdom Come”, just supplies the allusive possibility. but perhaps I'm wrong. “Foundation of 6 or 7 Steps” is a “translation” of Heine. I had gotten a translation of a Heine poem by Ben Friedlander and liked it, never having read HH before. I had an urge to translate so I got a German text at Project Gutenberg. I don't have much German under my belt but I thought that with aid I might manage. but I was too impatient to proceed in such an activity so I shot the text thru Babelfish and spellcheck. if either program choked on a word, I split the word and tried again. I finally cut a few words and shifted things a bit. it really sounds like a lame process, but I see it as an act of finding. I mean, Frankenstein showed up, which I liked. to what degree can it be a translation of Heine? 7 or 8 years ago I did a flarfy (pre-flarf) translation of a few of the Duino Elegies. in this case, I substituted unlikely words for those in the translation that I used (which no doubt came from Project Gutenberg as well). my translations retain something of Rilke, which I find fascinating. the Heine, so far as I can tell, bears little resemblance to the original.

107

2007-01-27T04:02:00.000-08:00

JH: Thanks! Hard to tell if disjunction was always present to readers/auditors of poems (parataxis is an old term), or if it is more noticeable now. The progression from word to word is a mystery, and the impetus to get from one word to another and have those words stick together intellectually is an argument for convention, whether linguistic generally or literary specifically. However, intellectual cohesion is an argument against words, do you think? Why not be content with one word? There could be one word in a poem, with the other words being literature. How to highlight that word? A series could be a way to highlight a recurring word distinguished from a word recurring in a poet's poems such as "the", "and", or "a". But why distinguish "Fu Manchu" or "Virginia" from "the" or "and"? The words "the" and "and" have fixed functions, while "Fu Manchu" and "Virginia" are more fluid. How to make characters of all words? Would this involve a leveling, an equality, of all the words in the poems? Would this be impossible? Perhaps this leveling can be hinted, as in the opening words of your poem "http://www.bigbridge.org/deathabramhall.htm" jerking goshawks from the sky: "fortunate breathing mechanism". Each of these three words has an equal weight, and must be encountered one by one, rather than sequentially as such. This establishes a meter, encouraging future words in this poem to be read similarly. Does equality of words have to do with the compression ideal of lyric poetry? Brevity, and traditional meter such as iambic pentameter, may be an attempt at an equality of reader attention to each word.

AHB: You are right about the question of disjunction back then. because of the necessities of metre and rhyme, the reader expected a certain amount of acrobatics. and you think how Whitman tended toward not disjunction but a word order that sounds like an assertion of set form but isn't (Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, When Lilacs First in the Dooryard Bloomed) (Me Imperturbe???). progression from word to word, as you say, is a mystery. I guess how I distinguish prose from poetry would be word weight. prose is a flow with highlights whereas poetry wants each word weighing in. of course one can turn to such a poem as Aram Saroyan's that consisted of one word: lighght. I always found metre rather distracting. the smartasses like to crow how everything by Dickinson can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. yes, if you give unequal weight to the words, which can hardly have been her intent. in fact, she puts so much weight on each word, that her syntax perforce becomes puzzling. “Goshawks” does illustrate a sense of momentum in which I write. hefting those three words as they arrive, then the next, then the next. I'm incapable of the spare sort of compression of Robert Grenier, or look at Tom Beckett's work. your own poetry often has an 18^th century lyric sound, yet words jam together in a tidy compression. I think my own compression consists in elision, which I do as I write. so anyway, here is a poem of yours.

F1: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE

Sawsharks 3a.m. Kingda Ka 3a.m. Tertiary 3a.m. Greenfinch
Steel Dragon 3a.m. Triassic 3a.m. Jackdaw 3a.m. Arsenic
Quaternary 3a.m. Swift 3a.m. Hemlock 3a.m. Gettysburg
Raven 3a.m. Wolfsbane 3a.m. Murfreesboro 3a.m. Violin
Cyanide 3a.m. Chancellorsville 3a.m. Clavichord 3a.m. Arquebus
Vicksburg 3a.m. Pipa 3a.m. Flintlock 3a.m. Mallard...

this poem marks an odd confluence. one notes a number of sources combining here, seemingly several lists intermixed. it is true that each element, even the repeated time, bears equal weight. I think I could kill the poem by explaining it. I like how it opens terrific possibilities.

106

2007-01-25T04:20:00.000-08:00

JH: To throw a work to eternity, to refute or ignore a poem: these soon become past actions. How is a literary work a description of an author's past actions (which include the composition of, and the decision to compose, a literary work)? Isn't it ownership alone that allows a writing's author to make decisions regarding its survival, ownership that could be termed secrecy, the author being the only person who originally (and, potentially, ultimately) knows of the text? Allowing a text to survive, to whatever degree, is the only description of its author's actions. What is described when an author writes of the destruction or concealment of past writing? Could this be termed allusion rather than description, an allusion whose referent is coterminous with the allusion (since another reader cannot confirm, or speculate, the referent)?

AHB: I like that sense of allusion you make, allusions to a work's potential. there are so many works that never happen, projects that fail to be finished or just vague, wondrous ideas, maybe not even expressed, just floating in the brain. and the artist makes choices of what among the ideas will be the one to work on. so the artist seems to take possession of the work that he/she accomplishes. and can hide or destroy that work, or pump it up. these are strange issues. an artist chooses to be busy, to some extent. that's the main thing, really. the mind is timeless but the body isn't. the artist tries to coax some sense out of the work being done, as a means of motivation, I guess, and as an explanation or apologia to the world. yet that can be no more than a nudge. much of my own art life has been withheld from public view, for reasons of non-boldness or whatever the failing. now I make more effort, which serves to define my work as something. anyway, this odd, short poem of yours, which you posted to Wryting, has a quirky dazzle:

To the Vermeil Selene

This red shading but a rose, and although storied the frailest she the moon rose --- the red of you is the which of me? The running of the world is exceedingly silent --- as when the sky puts the fan to the moon's brow, to her locks. Selene!, were I equal foe against the drift of years!

it seems to be a disjunctive version of some 18th century or earlier English poem. it seems both channeled and filtered.

105

2006-12-18T16:45:00.000-08:00

JH: Now I'm even more curious about your novels! What is the difference between approving of something one has written and disapproving of something one has written? If, for instance, an author decides to write no more a particular type of poem, isn't that poem as untouchable, to the author, as a classic from centuries ago? If the poet, acting as a reader, does not identify with the poem's effect and manufacture, the poem is less of the human than previously. Wouldn't this make the poem more desirable, more worthy of preservation? What of a published body of work comprised of poems that strongly displease their poet, with favored poems consigned, unseen by another person, to the fire? It is inconceivable that this hasn't happened at least once, given the many years of the world and the many poets who have lived in it. Though this poet may have impeccable taste in poetry, and the destroyed poems would have won much and lasting praise, where does valuation enter into poetry? How could consensus enter?

AHB: you hit on some interesting points, and in fact I am thinking a bit lately of works that don't make it. when one judges one's own work, one sets it up against an ideal. ideals don't work, or don't exist, or can't be touched (whatever), so that's a tough basis to work from. it is interesting to think of works that the author did not support, not merely lost but consciously forbade being accounted. the work detaches from the author, in a way. in the exact opposite way that Allen Ginsberg = Howl. even if Howl wasn't Ginsberg's favourite poem he had to accept it as an extension of himself, because of its fame and influence. but what of the poem that seems unlike Ginsberg at all, which he maybe refutes or, worse, ignores? my novels were extensive experiments, I gave myself up, that is, quite completely to the exercise of their conception. two of them probably are worthwhile, if I could find them, and if I had the time to work on them in a final draft sort of way. where I had the most difficulty was preparing the ms to be seen. the first one did go to a publisher, and returned. in a sense, I didn't know how to present them as “me”, as important parts of my effort as a writer. this is at least partly a matter of maturity, which I decided to come by slowly, if at all. and since these novels weren't like others, they were hard to sell (I mean encapsulate). without sounding ridiculous, I throw the work to eternity. that's what we do, isn't it? what I think about my work little matter unless I actually effort so much as to destroy the work. in a letter to William Dean Howell, Twain posited a play he thought he might write, in which Tom and Huck appear as ratty old men. this is Twain's pessimistic morbidity speaking. it's a work that hadn't ought to be writ, being such a disappointment from the giddiness of the boys. and yet... just the idea...

104

2006-12-13T15:53:00.000-08:00

JH: I've thought of methodologies instead of poems a few times, and variations on these methodologies more than a few times. I consider this to be thinking about a poem (thinking about Poe's "To Helen", for instance), though the poem hasn't been written yet. This is to think generally, without specifics/quotations, about a specific poem. There is more to thinking about this unformed poem - a methodology is the willing of a poem that wouldn't exist without this methodology - than when one is not yet a poet and is thinking of the poem or poems that he or she would write: what lines appear to this nascent poet, what lines are these lines attached to in this poem that does not meet the page? But methodology may be a re-visiting, a re-reading, of the nascent poet's thoughts, the thoughts of a person who can be called poet only in retrospect. A poem without a poet is the wish of a poet without a poem, whether this poet has written a thousand poems or none. I've read Guy Davenport, and am an admirer of his essays and fiction. Speaking of fiction, can you tell us about your novels, please? How is writing prose-fiction narrative different from writing poem narrative? How is the conception of a novel different from the conception of a poem?

AHB: I perhaps should not have brought up my novels. I think of them, lovingly, as failures. I wrote my 1st 20 years ago. it emerged from a doodle and went on. it was a wickedly fast paced scifi parody in which I tried to wring every possible joke I could from situations. I wrote it with no idea where I was going, thus like my poetry. it was a great deal of fun to write. from it came a number of characters, and I got involved with these characters to the extent that I kept writing things with, or with, these characters. I didn't really care about plot. I did a great deal of rewriting, and as such these novels proved useful in terms of honing my writing talents. something like 8 years ago I wrote another novel which I still think of fondly tho I haven't looked at in years. a high concept thing, I saw the characters all as J Crew models, I means they looked like that. and they all were involved in some never specified mission that seemed crucial to the world. yet all they actually do is rush from place to place and drink cappuccinos. all these novel attempts owe to the novel by James Schuyler and John Ashbery, A Nest of Ninnies. I love how that book is so underinflected, and how so little goes on. Schuyler's solo novel Alfred and Guinevere is similarly wonderful. these works pretty much dismiss plot. novel plots (and movie plots) tend toward fakery. or more accurately, tend to serve motives of relief that I think can be pretty sententious. which poetic narrative eschews. the way Melville subverts the plot of Moby Dick with his varied ruminations presses the work toward the poetic. and, frankly, I see a similar effort in such like as South Park. the classic novel wants to replicate, um, nature. the poem's conception seems more integral to nature, as if it were the actual energy and not a use thereof. I think I'm saying something useful here but may not be clear. like the poem is the car whereas classic novels are the fuel that moves the car, which is the reader, and I guess that could be titled Egotistical Sublime. poems are things in nature, I think I mean, while novels are, well, made up. I love many novels but rarely for the happenings to the characters.

103

2006-12-09T17:50:00.000-08:00

JH: In "The Edward Gibbon of Phillis Wheatley", portions of poem titles by Phillis Wheatley are replaced by passages from Edward Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". A Gibbon passage replaces one letter or multiple letters which may or may not form a word. In TO THE KING'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY. 1768., the word "the" is replaced with a passage containing the word "the". Some passages contain the letters needed to spell the word it replaces. In these cases, the passage does not replace the word, but the word in the title, being, in the passage, surrounded by different letters and words. The passages, in this manner, may mirror words from other titles. Titles may mirror words from other titles, and passages words from other passages. There will be more actions in more poems in this series, which is the same unnamed series that include such poems as

"The Wasps of Zane Grey"

"Shakespeare Sonnets of Francois Mauriac"

"The Seven Wonders of Max Beerbohm"

Phillis Wheatley wrote in English, not her native language, the native language of Edward Gibbon. To use a word in any language is to possibly use the word that has appeared in the literature of that language. To write a word is to use the letters that have appeared in the literature of that language. This is unavoidable, but why would a poet, or a reader, want to visit texts of the past? If this conscious visitation of texts is unavoidable too, wouldn't there be a minimum number of past texts to read, with a very few random texts thrown in according to a reader's interests and access? Why the desire to read widely, or to re-read? Also, why would an author wish to quote an earlier text -- "quote" in the sense of appropriate, as well in the sense of an epigraph occurring anywhere in the text?

AHB: I have found that when I'm walking the dog or otherwise separated from writing implements, instead of lines of poetry, I think of possible Google searches. do you, in similar circs, think up methodologies? and—here's the whizbang question—do you consider that idea a poem? When I think of Google searches that I might try, or lines of poetry, something extends infinitely into poem space, a perfect poem, say. I am not so adept that I can predict how a Google search may turn out, nor can I guess that ensuing lines that I think of will be as enticing as that 1st one that lightning bolted to me. but the potential remains. when younger, I read widely out of a sense of duty. I'm less inclined now to read that way. a for instance would be my reading Eliot, who I had a bias against from the start. I read him, and begrudged him this and that, recognizing the prejudice under which I read him. perhaps tabula rasa could happen enough so that I might dip in more amenably. in fact, I did do that with Ginsberg. quoting is an interesting matter. quotes often are the most poetic parts of a poem. by which I mean, the most self-contained. one quotes for the eminent solidity of the phrase. perhaps too for the allusion and collision involved, invoking this writer at this time. I've done a lot of embedding in the so called novels that I've written, slipping in quotes from here and there that mayn't in the context be obvious to the reader. it's not so much a personal allusion as an invention of a universe of connections. if you've ever read Guy Davenport, you just about get swamped with intersections of people, who knew who and what not. when Jackson Mac Low used a specific text to serve an aleatoric work, he expects some meaning from that text, even tho his random exercise could largely eradicate the original text. poem space, where poems are...

102

2006-11-30T04:45:00.001-08:00

JH: That writing is a "narrative of fixing onto the inspiration" is a great point - an apt phrasing of something that we've discussed but unphrased. Some poets verbally disown their poems, some physically destroy them. How to remove what never existed materially? To remove a poem from the world is to remove a picture of the poetic. Another picture, similar or identical, will exist again or exists already. To destroy a poem is to provide another example of the impersonality (person, here, in the sense of an individual) of the poet. To disown a poem via speech is story-telling, as much as anything in speech; to disown a poem via writing (essay, letter, poem, etc) is vain so far, yet problematic (especially in the case of the palinode - a poem recanting a poem) in that anything can happen in writing, even the erosion of a bit, or all, of the poetic. Or, once in writing, can a poem, as a representative of the poetic, be disproved? It's impossible to prove or disprove a poem, or one's thoughts about a poem - it's also impossible to prove the preceding words of this sentence. Is proof anything other than rhetoric? A feeling of something behind words lends weight to rhetoric, a feeling of something behind poems lends weight to an idea of the poetic. Speaking of the poetic, could you write something about your Captain Element, please?

Captain Element

Captain Element has a wide array of narrative and lyric approaches, as do many of your long or lengthy poems. The poem is unbroken by these transformations (which are not disruptive to the shape of the poem -- one of the most fascinating aspects of this and other of your poems).

AHB: There's a lot of scientific proof engaged in the poetic. I mean attempts thereof, which fall mostly to naught, I suppose. Tho I agree with Pound that a conscious understanding of one's aesthetic ought to be required, certainly by critics. I used to be in the wine business. there's a mechanical means for tasting a wine. 1st observe the colour and viscosity, then sniff the aroma (which, given our taste mechanism, i.e. olfactory bulb, is where the fancy flavours are perceived), then taste. being so procedural allows one to cast off distracting extraneous concerns. naturally, if you are hooting at a gala thrown by the Comte de Incroyable, you can throw procedure to the wind, one needn't be stiff-necked all the time. I like what you say about Captain Element, that it is unbroken by the transformations. this would be because the narrative is not meant to get the reader anywhere. I like twining these characters, Fu Manchu, Tarzan and the one I made up, Captain Element. the Fu Manchu books are particularly rife with tense moments that fizzle out. Sir Denis Nayland-Smith, Fu Manchu's arch enemy, is pretty much a bumpkin versus the diabolical doctor. but God or Fate favours the English because despite all his advantages Fu Manchu is thwarted by some silly means. the narratives of the various characters are nearly meaningless and certainly just about interchangeable. and maybe archetypal as well. there's something about pop fiction that carries an archetypal zest and essence. full of elemental movement, desirously toward or desperately from some Object. Captain Element seems rooted in these basic actions. the exact goals are not unimportant, just the movement is. so I guess. well let me turn to a poem of yours, for it has 'characters' too. This was posted to the Wryting-L list.

The Edward Gibbon of Phyllis Wheatley

ON THE DEATH OF MR. SNIDER MURDER'D BY RICHARDSON

on

the

In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.

of

mr. snider

The principal conquests of the Romans were achieved under the republic; and the emperors, for the most part, were satisfied with preserving those dominions which had been acquired by the
policy of the senate, the active emulations of the consuls, and the martial enthusiasm of the people. The seven first centuries were filled with a rapid succession of triumphs; but it was reserved for Augustus to relinquish the ambitious design of subduing the whole earth, and to introduce a spirit of moderation into the public councils.

by

richardson

*

ISAIAH LXIII. 1 - 8.

isaiah

lxiii.

1

Happily for the repose of mankind, the moderate system recommended by the wisdom of Augustus, was adopted by the fears and vices of his immediate successors. Engaged in the pursuit of
pleasure, or in the exercise of tyranny, the first Caesars seldom showed themselves to the armies, or to the provinces; nor were they disposed to suffer, that those triumphs which their indolence neglected, should be usurped by the conduct and valor of their lieutenants.

8.

*

ON BEING BROUGHT FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA

The native Caledonians preserved, in the northern extremity of the island, their wild independence, for which they were not less indebted to their poverty than to their valor. Their incursions were frequently repelled and chastised; but their country was never subdued.

being

brought

The poet Buchanan celebrates with elegance and spirit (see his Sylvae, v.) the unviolated independence of his native country.

africa

to

Ossian's Poems, which, according to every hypothesis, were composed by a native Caledonian.

*

TO THE KING'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY. 1768.

to

See a Memoir of M. d'Anville, on the Province of Dacia, in the Academie des Inscriptions.

king's

The praises of Alexander, transmitted by a succession of poets and historians, had kindled a dangerous emulation in the mind of Trajan. Like him, the Roman emperor undertook an expedition against the nations of the East; but he lamented with a sigh, that his advanced age scarcely left him any hopes of equalling the renown of the son of Philip.

It was an ancient tradition, that when the Capitol was founded by one of the Roman kings, the god Terminus (who presided over boundaries, and was represented, according to the fashion of that age, by a large stone) alone, among all the inferior deities, refused to yield his place to Jupiter himself.

majesty.

1

St. Augustin is highly delighted with the proof of the weakness of Terminus, and the vanity of the Augurs.

68.

*

ON RECOLLECTION

o

Careless of the difference of seasons and of climates, he marched on foot, and bare-headed, over the snows of Caledonia, and the sultry plains of the Upper Egypt; nor was there a province of the
empire which, in the course of his reign, was not honored with the presence of the monarch.

recolle

The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of the emperors.

on

*

PHILLIS'S REPLY TO THE ANSWER

The emperor Domitian raised the annual stipend of the legionaries to twelve pieces of gold, which, in his time, was equivalent to about ten of our guineas. This pay, somewhat higher than our own, had been, and was afterwards, gradually increased, according to the progress of wealth and military
government.

Besides a lighter spear, the legionary soldier grasped in his right hand the formidable pilum, a ponderous javelin, whose utmost length was about six feet, and which was terminated by a massy triangular point of steel of eighteen inches.

The European provinces of Rome were protected by the course of the Rhine and the Danube. The latter of those mighty streams, which rises at the distance of only thirty miles from the former,
flows above thirteen hundred miles, for the most part to the south-east, collects the tribute of sixty navigable rivers, and is, at length, through six mouths, received into the Euxine, which appears scarcely equal to such an accession of waters.

The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind. The beauties of the poets and orators, instead of kindling a fire like their own, inspired only cold and servile imitations: or if any ventured to deviate from those models, they deviated at the same time from good sense and propriety. On the revival of letters, the youthful vigor of the imagination, after a long repose, national emulation, a new religion, new languages, and a new world, called forth the genius of Europe. But the provincials of Rome, trained by a uniform artificial foreign education, were engaged in a very unequal competition with those bold ancients, who, by expressing their genuine feelings in their native tongue, had already occupied every place of honor. The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.

At that time the archiepiscopal throne of Alexandria was filled by Theophilus, the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue; a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.

* * * * *

I hadn't heard of Wheatley before, fault to me, but I found her works at Project Gutenberg, and will check her out. this is one more of your collisions between authors and/or others. please speak on it. oh, Robert Fitterman has a book in which, using Google searches, he updates Decline and Fall.

101

2006-11-21T05:35:00.000-08:00

JH: The piles of writing you speak of reminds me of something that's been on my mind for a year or so: a poet's abjuring of a poem or body of poems. This progression of the poet's thoughts goes beyond the limits of the poet's thoughts needed by the particular poem to get itself written. If a poem didn't need a poet to write it, the poem (if the word "poem" can even be used in this context) would appear as a dream or a thought. The writing, letter by letter, of a poem is the poem's growth into maturity. As an infant cannot speak, so the poetic, appearing as inspiration (and thus much like a dream or idea), cannot speak. A poem that becomes, however quickly or slowly, unacceptable to its poet may be less formed in a worldly shape (lack of factors, whether classifiable or of the je ne sais quoi variety, that would assimilate it into a civilization's idea of the poem). This may be due to the poet's literary tools, but a poet can only work with the materials presented, whether by a civilization or by the poetic. Perhaps a poem's power comes from what is left upon the subtraction of civilization and the poetic. What we speak typically resembles prose more than poetry, but prose is written, formed from previous sentences (today's newspaper, Sir Thomas Browne, etc). A key element in writing is alteration before presentation. This element is as unalterable as any element, since it exists as a potential (it may not occur to one to change a note reading "Going to the store be back soon", but one has the power to add, eradicate, or substitute any part of the note before it is read). Our thoughts present themselves to us as unchanged -- our own thoughts and we cannot dictate their initial appearance. In writing, we can give the appearance, to the reader and to our own intellectual satisfaction, of going far back to the very hint of a thought. On the page, speculation can give the promise of an answer, that will come from a reader or from the author (in another work, or further down the page). Rhythms, as dictated by punctuation and varying word length, are controlled by the author (again, potentially). Rhythm, the pace of arrival, is uncontrolled outside the page, within the sphere of thought and natural phenomena. The poetic is what explicitly asks for the poem, for writing. Writing, that is to say, what can be altered, both scene and letter, is a potential result for any thought, but is necessary for the poem.

AHB: Great riff! "The poetic is what explicitly asks for the poem", c'est vrai. It may be enough to say all that writing that one does is process, but to do so only hints at the story. And it is a story. It is this narrative of fixing onto the inspiration (if I can use that word, meaning the instigation to write), finding the words, accepting the terms of the writing (choosing what to alter). In Winnie-the-Pooh, Pooh ponders the mysterious message 'bizzy baksun'. The message was intended as ordinary speech: busy, back soon. The non-standard English and the enigma-seeing bear without a brain combine to place a poetic in the world. It is the reader who discovers he transmogrification, the language that twisted. anyway, I was taken by your thoughts here because any writer or artist will have lots and lots of work that finally he/she abjures. Though abjures may say it too strongly. It may be that the artist failed the work (or vice versa?). It may be that the artist's needs later have been transcended. Certain artists, because of their fame, are known for every available scrap of work they did. Picasso, for instance: people are avid to see anything of his. Partly, mostly, this is because of the commodification factor that envelopes Picasso. But that respect for all his work (respect, not necessarily adulation) gives us an opportunity that most of us do not bequeath to ourselves. I think most artists want to run from their earlier work, or their casually done, or their failed. With Picasso we honour (that is, we pay attention) not just to his juvenilia but his napkin doodles. The very hint of a thought, as you say. The artist develops those hints, or develops a means to deal with those hints, those rhythms, those dreams. Those hints, rhythms, dreams are hard to see.

100

2006-11-19T04:36:00.000-08:00

JH: I haven't written a lipogram, though I may some day (no plans yet). I wonder if there is ever a real method, an actual procedure. There is always disjunction in writing. The idea of a method, such as the lipogram, is as imperfectly committed to paper as the description of a sunset is, compared to the poet's thoughts, incomplete on the page. A lipogram seems simple (to read, that is), but what exists aside from the method, from the means? Is the content of a lipogram closer to the poet, or farther, than the content of a non-procedural poem? We've spoken recently about disjunction in the poem - what about disjunction in the poetic? The disjunctive poem could result from an unwillingness to write anything not dictated. There could be a disjunction in the poetic that arises from an unwillingness to be translated into words. The lacunae in a poem could be a result of the poetic, not an omission but a copying. With all the varieties of poems, there's a question of whether the poetic is one thing, or whether there is a hierarchy among the poetic. Certain poems are considered preferable to others, even poems by the same poet. Is this due to human judgment, or are there weaker poetics than others? How can anyone tell? I feel there's a way to see if there's one poetic or several. I don't know if that way has arrived yet. Any suggestions? How would this knowledge change anything? Couldn't a poet proceed as if there was one poetic, wouldn't the reference(s) to only one poetic make it, in the poem, only one poetic? Wouldn't the reference(s) to multiple poetics differing in value make them, in the poem, thus? If the poetic is known solely through the poem, what to say of differing references? Are they only apparent references, with prose being the only place where explicit statements can be made about the poetic?

AHB: Weaker poetics might be a way of considering the difference between successful 'good' poems and less successful 'bad' poems. the duality is unsatisfying because it is too clearcut. certainly we deem what works and what does not. such a judgment doesn't live in heaven, the empyrean, Parnassus, or whatever. I mean, it's only fair to assume that every poet meant something serious with every attempt at a poem. but that person's means may be worn out, unnatural, stupid even. I think we can only comprise one poetic, in the sense that we can't get what we don't get. I know I can't. human judgment enters the picture, even clouds it. I think we allow that human judgment can be exceeded or transcended, in rare moments at least. that something in the poem powers beyond what the poet intended and understood. your questions are tough because who writes except as they yelp and whoop on the playfield. we're involved in an act that rushes by. I suppose our thinking bifurcates, left brain and right. we can do both simultaneously but not with equal weight. we have prose mind and poetic mind, and constantly wobble between the two. what do you think (id est, get off my back with your hard questions)? I make far reaching statements as if I could see all sides but it's hard not to accept a magic explanation. that Erato (Errata?) sent me a poem via email, woo hoo. I don't really mean get off my back, but these considerations are perplexing, unsettling even. artists take a lot for granted. the longer one practices, the more one sees the shakiness of those assumptions. as artists start out, the process is a lucky happenstance of finding and netting. but prolonging in the arts, the magic weakens and one seeks procedures by which one may move 'in that realm'. it seems to me that some younger artists of promise disappear (as artists) as they age. when the leave the nurturing precincts of high school and college the art becomes more distant and unimaginable. that is, unless one develops a means of creation that includes study, practice and reflection. for years and years, I produced piles of writing that I would now declare only shows my ignorance of the poetic nature. I'm sure there are things in that grey mass that I could take pride in having written but largely that work is just a flow of words that I couldn't stop. I care little for what I wrote prior to 1999 or so, the learning process is just that slow. it is slow because the nature of the creative act boggles every mind. it's a good boggle, but perplexing.

99

2006-11-01T14:22:00.000-08:00

JH: What weren't poems are now poems - this also applies to poems that were never written, does it not? Think of all the poems that could have been written had poets not lived in a time when a poem was held to be only a certain form. This applies to this day - though today there are a lot of poets who are constantly thinking of what a poem could be. The internet allows these experiments to be seen by a wide audience, who then may add to the efforts. All poems are experiments, I've heard, and this may be true - but some poems are more experiment than poem. Why is this? How can one be more the other? How can anything be more something else than it is itself? The author could say "this is an experiment; this is writing, as prose is writing, more than a poem", and the reader could disagree. Who, then, says how the poem is itself? If a writing is more experiment than poem (and how can this writing be partially a poem at all - is it because it alludes steadily and convincingly to poetry and past appearances of poems?), does this mean experiment is prose? Many experiments could be described in prose rather than illustrated via what meets the eye or ear as a poem. Poems cannot be paraphrased, but experiment can. This last statement is problematic, as much experiment is a kind of grammar. A lipogram, for instance, omits the same letter from every word in the text. One can point out that there are instances of subject-verb agreement (subject and verb in a sentence must be singular, or both must be plural) in a poem, without paraphrasing the poem. Can one paraphrase a lipogram by pointing out that there are instances of an omitted letter, considering these instances are found in every single word of a lipogram? Is a lipogram an experiment at all?

AHB: the formal structures of yore, formal as in agreed upon (I accept that Mac Low's structures are formal, but they are idiosyncratic, or sui generis, whichever term makes me seem more intelligent), presented challenges of subtlety. I have done a few, not many, poems in strict form. these were experiments because, as much as I admire many writers within such strictures, I'm not the child to be using said structures. I've done poems using Mac Low's formulae, and other methods I'd picked up from others. mostly these have not seemed like 'my' writing. I've mentioned my flarf experiments. I believe I use the same packet of methods as those who proudly wear the badge. many of my earlier attempts seemed like imitations. now I feel like my efforts are 'my' poems, and some are pretty good ones. I'm not even sure why this is. my point, and thank goodness I came equipped with one, is that experiment is a land of possibility. the image of someone in a landscape deciding what is and aint edible comes to mind. this berry looks good [barf], this one looks weird [mmm], etc. experiment can be soulless, a going thru motions. educational, but soulless. but experimentation can be the driving force itself, with risk involved. experimental as a descriptive for a type of writing is tedious to me, at least to the degree that experiment means an urge to be different. I respect that urge but ask for a sensibility behind it, overarching it, in fact. I guess (emphasis on the verb) that a lipogram can be an experiment if the writer had, um, something in mind. if the writer determined that lipogram was part of the path, not the destination. perhaps you could answer this question, as I gather you have done the lipogram. there are works of art that at least partly needn't need fruition. the idea of Jeff Koons creating a rose parade float is almost enough, so that one can say, someone made a drastically cute dog out of flowers, hahaha. but the execution does make it real. and it is something, even tho if you wake up early on New Year's Day, you can witness 'the real thing', which aint ART. I think a lipogram is no longer an experiment, but it can be used experimentally, a means to an imagined end. I think a lot of dull poetry accepts that a method is exceptional, but method isn't the poem. the monkeys who write Hamlet could as easily have produced last year's roses are red yawp. so let's give a shout out to the how of the usage, not the why. I guess.

98

2006-10-28T05:53:00.000-07:00

JH: How, figuratively speaking, could a knitter prove authorship, that is to say, direct human agency, if the machine is programmed to blow a stitch (and does so randomly, so that machine-made products aren't identified by having the blown stitch locatable in the same spot)? Could the poet prove authorship via commentary outside the poem? This commentary could be machine-made, or a fiction, a person's description/myth of how the machine text was made by a human. In Antic View 96 we've discussed the unprovability of emotional response/association, how about the unprovability of the imagination? Unprovability, of the emotional, the imaginative, or, to sum up, the mental, could be an indication of the integrity/self-sufficiency of the poem (especially when considered as a finished, written object). What is recognizable in a poem are the words. The reader can prove recognition of the definitions of a given word in the poem, but how can one prove one has understood any part of the poem (including a given word in the context of the poem, which could render previous definitions useless)? The reader is as self-sufficient as the poem. Where's the bridge? Is this bridge, if it exists, across anything other than space? If not, what's under the bridge? If one crossed over to the poem, could one ever come back (whether a complete return or visitations)? Is this part of the fascination some have with the quote unquote mad poet (if so, a reader who is not a poet could as easily go to the poem, whether as a face-(oh, what a face this must be!)-to-face meeting or as an area to occupy, only the reader, unless a writer or a writer's subject, is unsung and thus unknown. And the reader could only go to another's poem, perhaps), that the poem this poet pictures does permit any other pictures, such as those of the world once held in common with non-poets? Does this happen on a less legendary scale with any poet, with any reader?

AHB: tempted more than once to answer I dunno and throw it back to you. but that could be wrong. the only proof of understanding would be some version of the Dickinson test, i. e. blowing your top hat or in some way getting a enlivening reaction. and sometimes the proof of understanding is a bunch of questions, that you got enough of he poem to realize you don't get it, that it has proved vaster than your first inkling, and your second. the knitter proves authorship thru nerve, or even the body electric. one senses the liveness. or is that just made up? I don't know if I could tell if a machine made the sweater, or notice my grandmother's thrown stitch. I liked the sweaters and scarves my grandmother knit me because she made them, not because I have a lively scale for knitted items. there may be no there there, regarding the poem. in the sense that a point in space can be triangulated but not measured. is that clear? a poem exists but it isn't a collection of words, it is um a monolith? an integrated unit. that is, words, any words, can be empowered to poemness. those same words can be in George Bush's last speech (not a poem). some poems look like poems, but George Bush's last speech could be lineated to look that way. we concede that some poems just plain suck. that is, we first concede that the piece in question satisfies certain definitions we have of poetry, but its engine is a little weak, it burns oil, etc. but I might just say a work is a poem if it gets to me, period. somewhat against my will I'm discovering more poems by Allen Ginsberg that I like than I previously suspected. due to my ability to receive. what weren't poems now are. as you say, the reader is as self-sufficient as the poem. but it is funny to think of the poem that I wrote, because I may still have this thing, the primal poem, within me, this primal poem being the instigation or spirit of what finally got written. the thing I wrote imitates or transfigures that primal poem.

97

2006-10-27T04:18:00.000-07:00

JH: Thanks! "Babylon is falling to rise no more" is my favorite of my prose poems. I intend to write more prose poems, but this poem is not part of a series. The lacunae may come from the reader's keeping an eye out for progression. The three sentences are re-phrasals of each other, with any detail added not adding to the action but to what the reader lacks in omniscience. The reader doesn't know what the narrator will witness (in the sense of speaking, as well as observing) until the third sentence, or why the narrator is a lamb until the second sentence. More sentences could be added to supply what is lacking in knowledge: is the lamb meant figuratively or literally? was the narrator always a lamb? is Babylon the historical Babylon? why and how exactly did it fall?, etc. The two sentences indicate that the first sentence is not inclusive of all it purports to say.

The in-inclusiveness (uninclusiveness) is unavoidable, as the first sentence is not linguistically obscure. More sentences could be added, without increase of this indication. Each sentence in this prose poem is uninclusive: whence the cat? is the cat literal or figural? is "a cat may look at a king" a quotation of the folk saying commonly phrased in just those words? how many towers before the last tower? These are not unanswerable questions, they are unaskable questions, as the poem cannot possibly provide them answers in its present form, though were that form altered answers could be provided them. Were every conceivable question answered, would it still be a poem, prose poem or otherwise? What makes this a prose poem - what about it is prose? The term "poem in prose" is a synonym for "poem" since all written poems are written in prose. I feel that if "Babylon is falling to rise no more" were longer, it would cease to be a poem, and turn into prose. The indication of uninclusiveness with words containing their basic meanings is what makes this a poem. Additional sentences that provide detail explanatory of previous sentences without increase of indication, or additional sentences that do not provide this explanatory detail, would be extraneous to the poem. But could one not have a poem with a long prose tail indistinguishable in appearance from the heading poem, or a prose-appearing poem in any area of the prose? Would the poem be corrupted by this adjacent or surrounding prose? We see how poetry is already and constantly challenged by prose that is not even on the same page or in the same book. A poem's title, being in prose (or is it always in prose? If not, is it a separate poem acting as an epigraph and thus a quotation and thus prose?), threatens the poem. Is a poem what is threatened, by the reader, by the poet, and by all that is not the poem, including poetry?

AHB: Some years ago I reached a point when the lessons of my reading got too weighty. reading commentary, particularly that of the LANGUAGE poets, was useful but it forced rules on me (a poem is this). so finally I just let constraint go and allowed that prose could be poetry, and prose was comfortable for me. but is it that easy? there is this tension of the word, to turn from 'ordinary usage' to poetry. this shows especially when language is appropriated. the use of search engines to create works is one means of appropriation, and there are lots of other ways, as well. the following is a find-and-replace job I did yesterday.

PATENT PENDING

An electronic poetics has a sexual innuendo and has a poetry-sensitive "rhyme scheme" surrounding the sexual innuendo. Areas on the "rhyme scheme" are designated for controls used to operate the electronic poetics. Visual guides corresponding to the controls are sexual innuendoed on the sexual innuendo adjacent the areas of the "rhyme scheme" designated for the controls. poetry data is generated by the "rhyme scheme" when a user poetries an area of the "rhyme scheme". The poetics determines which of the controls has been selected based on which designated area is associated with the poetry data from the "rhyme scheme". The poetics then initiates the determined control. The poetics can have a sensor for determining the orientation of the poetics. Based on the orientation, the poetics can alter the areas designated on the "rhyme scheme" for the controls and can alter the location of the visual guides for the sexual innuendo so that they match the altered areas on the "rhyme scheme".
* * ** *

I suppose it may 'mean' something to the reader to know that the source text is the abstract to the patent for the iPod. but this is a poem because... why? 1) I said so. 2) the tension between its structure and its meaning. that is, the stiff dry language of the original remains in the background, at odds with the replaced words and my 'poetic intent'. I should mention that someone suggested that I misspell rhyme one time, a glitch to throw off the sense of the mechanical (in the way that knitters are supposed to blow a stitch, to show that the work isn't by a machine). poetry is threatened, yes, and poetry threatens right back. I think poetry IS the tension thus created. I think our minds constantly perform the boolean as we read: we look at writing as one or tother. of course it could be both, but that may be too much to wrap around.

96

2006-10-19T04:38:00.000-07:00

JH: Does disjointed narrative offer only layers, and no linearity? Diagrammatically, the disjointed narrative goes down (and up), but not across? The reader can read the movement from end to end of each line or section, and how much traveling time is needed for a coherent narrative? Emotional content here is important, as emotions have their own time which the poem can borrow. Emotions call up associations: how do emotional associations differ from literary associations, that is to say, allusions? Literary, in the previous question, includes the historical - anything received from a text. Literary allusions, to me, are as personal as emotional associations. Is it, then, appropriate to treat literary allusions and emotional associations as two things? Or is the nature of allusion/association emotional? Is it literary, as we have no evidence of association outside of literature (the earliest record of allusion is just that, a record, a written document - this hypothetical and legendary earliest recorded instance of allusion. By extension, or regression, association goes no earlier than the first poem/song - perhaps association, in the form of metaphor?, was the impetus of this first poem.)? Association cannot be proved to another person; association is indistinguishable in speech or writing from invention. Allusion can be proved by comparison with a prior text. Texts that mention emotional responses can be consulted to give credence (or doubt) to someone's claim of emotional response. We have learned to love allusion, hence the emotion in emotional associations?
AHB: I see disjunction going across (to the reader) in packets, chunks, phrases. not as a kit but as an assembly. that sounds like a rocky metaphor. I'm trying to intimate the immediacy possible with disjunction. rather than taking each step toward a place of meaning, one teleports. I don't know how emotional and literary associations differ,except that the seed of literary allusion is shared, however the resultant impression grows, whereas emotional, personal allusion begin singularly. I suppose it's the diff between collective unconscious and unconscious, tho I don't want to throw a Jungian (or any) veil over the discussion. one sees that interpretations to an artwork situate in a neighbourhood, that people at least tend to see roughly the same work, tho there are degrees of similarity, and some people are in left field (with Manny Ramirez!!!). (somewhat personal allusion). what I mean is, there is a core something that travels between us, however much we personalize the meaning. the word meaning, ach, it's a troublesome word. I think an artist doesn't so much give meaning as process. shifting the governance of one's mind to another way to understand. less direct, more enveloping... I think of my own writing, the act of, and it doesn't feel like I try to convey meaning as much as open a door or light a path. that the thing made conveys, but I only have so much control of the conveyance. a poem of yours, posted to Wryting-L, yclept “Babylon is falling to rise no more” shows the lack of control (I wot):

A lamb, am I, to witness Babylon is falling to rise no more; a lamb to witness as a cat may look at a king; with the descent of Her last tower Babylon, I'll claim, disappeared hugely with such a burst my ear has a wolf's pang for its like again.

* * * * *

I love these little prose snatches that you write. did I say prose? I infer a larger work of which this is intimation. not really, insofar as I don't know whether or not such a larger work exists. but allusions arise in this work, and lacunae exist that I (the reader) wish or need to fill. my thesis here is that you present this text (however you created it) to the reader with the idea that the reader would (or would have to) fill in the gaps.

95

2006-10-08T09:33:00.000-07:00

JH: Poetry "is the vast question mark addressed to language" - yes! A glyph attached to words, confronting words - words on one end and indefinable space on the other end. Perhaps a poet can push through the glyph and write on that blank space, but that doesn't change the depth, only the surface. To add to a surface would create more depth, would it not? Then again, to hover above a surface a few inches or many miles would alter the depth perceptually. Does the work of the poet consist in burying deeper what is in the depths? To further conceal (that is, to add more weight to what covers the depths) or to pile the depth higher, this is the work of the poet? Poetry may want to obscure human depths or human perception of depths in order to bring more attention to itself. Narrative has come a long way in obscuring things - religion, politics, science, social mores, and complicated emotions have evolved much by means of rhetoric, fictional story (fables, theatre, film), history, popular words and phrases, and writing. Poetry partakes of narrative, and may have been the first means of sustained narrative (or so poetry would have us believe). Poetry is something that evolves alongside, and not with, language. Does poetry reside in communication, or does it need the space that language provides? "Stop!" or "Come here" have no poetry outside of a description of context (and any given description does not necessarily make poetry).

AHB: the question of poetry as communication is a tough one. in one sense, poetry is so mysterious and personal that to say it communicates it to overstate the process. but poetry makes a place, and shares it, and that sharing is communication. there is an aesthetic of poetry, and all the arts, really, that urges statement, recapitulation, copy. I think of the sort of passage from a novel that one might quote, consisting of lush (overblown) descriptors—so beautiful!--but that's just simplification. the arts challenge context, maybe. green is just green until applied exactingly, and so too with every word. poetry certainly is an artform in which every word had ought to have that necessity, whereas plays and novels probably don't (and by this definition, Finnegans Wake might be a poem, but I don't really care to work he taxonomic register right now). the idea that narrative obscures is well charged. narrative suggests a simple linear path, yet that path is layered. we know that Moby Dick is about a whale hunt, and we ALSO know it is about Ahab's path of self-destruction, his monomania, and all the other things critics ave said. the narrative is never just one such path. I think of my own writing as much to do with narrative, partly because I use often sentences, which themselves suggest a narrative development, also because of the inter-collisions I employ. those inter-collisions include humour, sadness, anger, the way they bundle. they also include the combination of low and high that exists in my writing. even writing more disjointed than mine presumes a narrative, if you think of a rope cut up, the rope's length is still implied (Baudelaire said something similar in his intro to his Poèmes en Prose, tho he spoke of a snake).

94

2006-09-29T17:47:00.000-07:00

JH: To purpose the poem is to provide its first word, a word invisible to the reader, but a word not necessarily unutterable, since it may be utterable as "This poem is an elegy.". What then when the word isn't present to anyone but the author (in the case of an extremely personal impetus) or even to the author (the very first sonnet, or the very first poem in a literary movement yet to be named)? It doesn't bother me to purpose a poem. Sometimes a word arrives to begin the poem invisibly, sometimes visibly. In my latest GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE poem the last word of a line (the first, processionally) is in a phrase from which the last word is extracted to move down future lines, answering the question of where, in the GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, does the processional word come from, and raising the question of where does the phrase come from. The processional word is included in a phrase only in its first and last appearance, in its other appearances the phrase is invisible, though the word is visible. The word "marble", for example, does not get a second visible phrase, but the reader knows "marble" is due for one. The phrase is not repeated the same way so the invisible phrase cannot be read, whether mentally or visually. It may be read imaginatively, but not the same from reader to reader or reading to reading. No other word in a phrase is repeated throughout the poem. The processional word in the first phrase (the first phrase to be read, actually the last phrase in the procession), or, rather, in the phrase at the beginning of the first visible line of the poem, and the processional word in the phrase at the end of the final visible line are indeterminate, lost as they are in a phrase whose each word is distinct from any word in the poem.

R: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE

thought thee diminished; knit; just; dear; wrought our fall
with graces knit; just; dear; fall; diurnal star leaves cold this night
just the unjust will save; dear; fall; leaves; forget thyself to marble
Parthenope's dear tomb; fall; leaves; marble; might that noise reside
fall in universal ruin; leaves; marble; noise; languished hope revived
leaves of an unvalued book; marble; noise; hope; sceptre or quaint staff

The poem does not end with ellipsis points, as do other poems in this series, as this could indicate words omitted from the phrase. The introduction of this poem into this discussion presents this poem as an enactment of the word that appears from a mass of other words, on the page or in the poet's head, to begin a poem or to begin a line. A poem breaks free, and is open, but does it free itself, or open itself? Does a poem need the reader to do this for it? The poem is self-contained, so why shouldn't the interpretation/content (one, interpretation or content, cannot exist without the other?) be self-contained? The poem as an elevated speech (whether W.B. Yeats or Edgar Guest) whose message is humanly simple but whose language runs alongside the language it is written in (each word a pun whose second meaning, whose very status as pun, is lost on the human reader/auditor). The word arriving from nowhere could present the poet with an opportunity to use the comprehensible half of this pun to attempt to write a grammar of this language. Once the grammar is completed, a different kind of poetry (the word "poetry" as opposed to the word "poems") may be written (perhaps this has already happened), or the need for poetry will be no more, and any poems written from then on are but homages to (as opposed to elegies for) poetry (perhaps they already are). How would we know this grammar is completed? Or, how would we know a significant portion of this grammar has been completed? The attention paid to language in the last two centuries may be an indication that a portion was completed, or is nearing completion.

AHB: Maybe the poem is dead, and Poetry is thinking up another guise for its exhaustive antics. Your questions all seem bundled around whether or not the poem is participating with us readers, or if it has finished and moved on. Looking at some middle of the road poetic claptrap today, I won't bother to name the perps, and the form of so many of these poems, even the ones I enjoyed or respected, seemed plain done. poetry, however, goes on. the problem with those MOR poetry volumes is an attenuation of force (not a bang, a whimper). we've heard poems such as these, seemingly can't avoid them. it would be nice to call them bad poems, but that's not enough, nor is it accurate. many are crummy exercises, but not all are. the poems bother me with their complacency. these poems survive because they are familiar, obeying the strictures. the grammar, as you say, is completed. I don't mean my stance to sound so snotty, but I think there's a genre of comfortable poems. those are poems that are content in their restrictions. Poetry, on the other hand, is the vast question mark addressed to language. Poetry trumps poem every time. a poem is a microcosmic possibility, a point on the map. I don't know if I am answering any of your questions. I see in them a sense of poetry as a process of agitation. a general ennui signals that the grammar has been completed. the US Poet Laureates have, in recent years (not that I've paid much attention to these lofty figures of Parnassus), been big on developing ways to trick people into liking poetry. they may convince some few to like certain poems, but poetry requires an inspired dedication. homages are the last hint of the freshening wave.

93

2006-09-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

JH: Thanks! A plush playground is an apt description of the Wryting list! I don't know why there's a elegiac note to "Knots of Hilda Doolittle" - another knot to untie. Indeed, this nameless series provides a exegetical knot that I'm unmodernly trying to unfasten. What is hidden, what may be non-existent outside the human imagination, may well be elegized, yes? Something has passed, something never seen alive has surely died. To elegize the imaginary mourns the dying of what could not be born, only conceived. To write a poem is not to create, but to memorialize what existed in the poet's mind, unseen by others except through the poet's index of it on the page or in the spoken poem. Much of the description in this series is factual, but from where does it arrive other than in the context of the poem? Nobody asked me, and it's not a plan to educate anyone who would be interested in learning how to tie knots or identify ducks. Such groundless, though factual, information is imaginary. An allusion to Mount Parnassus in a poem gives the name of an actual extra-literary place, as well as line of sight through all texts that have mentioned Mount Parnassus (or words that may be mistaken, unwittingly or punningly, for Mount Parnassus). The name is information, is an index within an index, yet is groundless since the poem does not explicitly call for the entry of Mount Parnassus (even if preceding lines are what may be recognized as a definition of Mount Parnassus, or words commonly associated with Mount Parnassus, as the poem does not explicitly call, and aren't all calls explicit?, for these lines). What does a poem call for? Itself, and any words will do? Why then revision, and willing direction? Are the poem and the imaginary at odds? The poem may not be prime, in the sense that a thought is said to initiate other thoughts. A thought may initiate other thoughts, and amidst these thoughts is the poem (twenty places, nineteen are thoughts; places one through fifteen are thoughts, place sixteen is the poem, places seventeen through twenty are thoughts), which may not have anything to do with the thoughts, only hitching a ride on brain waves. If the poem is at odds with the imaginary, then the elegy has nothing to do with the elegiac. There may be an elegy without an elegiac tone, only words that are commonly associated with the elegiac.

AHB: HD's work always showed a great presence of the past, and this can present an element of elegy to the mind, in reading of those knots. I think, yes, a poem is not prime. even words may not be prime, so many meanings and shades in each. poems exist thru intersection of those colours and meanings and shades. and a shade of elegy could be there, or wonder or what. I think the poem, and art works generally, are attempts at the imaginary. provocations towards some density of the imagined. I recently wrote some poems under a clearly elegiac instigation. William Shatner, Paris Hilton, Flava Flav, H. P. Lovecraft and others flow thru these poems, which surprise even me. I think I needed to remove some of the hoary aspects of the elegy from consideration. the tone remains typically gloomy, but Shatner silliness is my hope to let the elegy free itself, find itself. just as the conjunction of knots and HD in a way frees both. free in the sense that water is free, urging toward boundless. Gray's Elegy, I've always loved that. it's unspecific, guided by landscape. seemingly all these elegiac cribs of Gray's acquaintance manifested themselves in this autumnal mood, or so I infer. in a way, he did what you and I each did, hoping influx from disparate sources can agree as a whole. I think of rewriting mostly as cleaning up the channel thru which flows. I'm always aware of surprises, eager for them, and disappointed when the unsurprising appears. does the idea of writing an elegy, purposing the poem, bother you? in he pieces I mentioned above, I didn't sit down to write elegies, the circumstances were very present.

92

2006-09-08T17:20:00.000-07:00

JH: "We've got Everest in our hands. It purrs, so small in its geologic niftiness." Could you speak about your Everest series (which I'd love to see as a chapbook)? Yes, I've read Aaron Kunin's The Mauberly Series, which I admire, and thanks for reminding me of Steve Benson, whom I haven't read enough, but will soon remedy. I love the theme of allusions in poems, as what allusion is accessible enough to a hypothetical body of readers? You could mention the Statue of Liberty, and there may be someone who hasn't heard of it. What you consider to be a simple word may be for someone tantamount to a scientific term. Conversely, what allusion is rare enough? And, what process complicated enough? To some, an allusion to an ancient Greek religious practice obscure to most classics scholars will be as clear as a reference to the Statue of Liberty. To some, a complex procedure will be clear as 2 + X = 6. So, what is meant to be clear and speed along to the rest of the poem may be a stumbling block for one reader, and what is meant to roughen the texture of the poem or provide freedom of invention through esotericism is clear, fixed, and unobstructive. One of the things I like about the "Tale of the Roving Orange" is it could be oral as well as written, and indeed, could also have never been written, only narrated, whether in print or by voice: "The 'Tale of the Roving Orange' consists of after line of the word 'banana', except at about the center of the word block is the word 'orange'." The poet would then have the option of adding "It is modeled after the knock-knock joke 'orange you glad I didn't say banana?'." and then possibly telling the particular knock-knock joke (any Antic View reader who doesn't know it may Google the punch line we've quoted). We've spoken about print and internet publishing, what about orality? How about memorizing poems (would this necessitate musicality and relative brevity? would some poems be adjudged preferable due to the orator's skill?) and reciting them to people? If poetry is human, why not keep it human, why not make it inseparable from the human body (approximately locatable site of the mind) instead of bringing technology into the matter? Human speech could be for prose and poetry (bonjour, Monsieur Jourdain), and print could be solely for prose, as it was in the beginning, one human speaking poetry to another human, with the poetry more revealed as a result, borrowing none of the authority print offers (confirmation of information's accuracy, reception, and worthiness of remaining preserved).

AHB: my Everest poems came out of reading about Everest climbs, specifically the climbing season, May 1995, when I think it is 8 people died on the mountain. I've read 6 books by people who were on the mountain at the time (I believe 3 more exist), Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air being the most famous. thinking of the personal, local travail, and the heinous political situation 'up there' (I mean Nepal and Tibet, but of course that connects with America's grim ursurpation of elsewheres), just resonated into a 'story' that never really clarifies what it is telling. timor mortis conturbats me, no doubt. your question, 'what allusion is accessible enough to a hypothetical body of readers?' waltzes in nicely because, if you haven't done the particular armchair expedition that I've been on, you'd maybe not 'get' what my Everest rumination wants to be. 'Tale of the Roving Orange' was, in fact, orally presented before I actually saw the text, which itself, I'm guessing, could've been an afterthought. my friend was one of two people I've known whose dreams were a sort of literature. both people could recount their dreams in great, lavish detail. the narratives were specific and extravagant, and you'd have to be Jung on acid to squeeze them into any sort of interpretative compartment. in both cases, these dramatic recitations proved to be their art. orality is an interesting thing. I do not memorize agreeably, it's a labour. but I'm thinking of Robert Genier's recent work, how he has personalized the event. I seem no longer to have a link to the gallery offering some of his prints, which are pen scribblings (I use the word kindly) of words. the particular nerviness of his lines and no one else's. early on, I opted for the keyboard (typewriter, at the time), rather than hand scribble, but the niftiness of type does come at the cost of scribble warmth. I have a book by Frances Yates about memorization in the ancient world, which I've only just begun, but she touches on an interesting problem of how the ancients held on to SO MUCH. the Pali Canon consists of all of the Buddha's many sermons, none of which were originally written. all was memorized and passed down orally. it is humanly possible, and in fact, such crass new phenomena as Youtube can offer a route for oral broadcast. anyway, let me switch gears to more of your recent work, again from our plush playground the Wryting-L listserv.

Knots of Hilda Doolittle

HERMETIC DEFINITION

to tie a Bowline Knot

Bowline is tied to:
swift thru dolorous lessers

form an eye

eye is tied to:
ships (schooners) affrighted

with the standing part
of the rope running underneath.

run the free end thru the
dolorous lessers swiftly, then
thru the eye (wide, affrighted
by schooners), making a loop
below said eye. take a turn
around
the standing part & feed
the free end back down
the eye & hold there.

pull standing part to tighten knot.

*

HIPPOLYTUS TEMPORIZES

the Double Fisherman's Knot
is made by looping a rope
into a figure-8 in order to tie
two ropes together. since beyond
rope, as in breath, is almost certainly
tyranny, it is recommended the
ropes be secured by their ends.
endless amounts of rope is desired.
practical is to tie two ropes into a loop.
the Double Fisherman will make another
knot secure when tied with the tag end
of the rope behind another knot, in other
words, when half of the Double Fisherman
is tied around the standing line of another knot.

*

HELEN IN EGYPT

to make a Clove Hitch, make a turn
around a post with the free end
running underneath the standing part,
not exactly artistically. was Virginia's idea.
take a second around in the same
direction and feed the free end thru
the eye of the second turn /. pull tight.

It was Virginia's idea to make a Clove Hitch, but Neaera was ready to fall in with it. It was to be done thoroughly and lastingly but not exactly artistically. Virginia and Neaera were war widows and had made a solemn compact to remain widows forever. Ianthe had confessed... As for Appius, he tied very few knots and very few people asked him to tie anything. O, he felt to the full the lure of treading WHERE NO HUMAN FOOT HAD EVER TROD. Ianthe had thrown her wedding-ring at him and flown out of the house. How Virginia and Neaera would show him they were widows indeed!

easy to tie and untie, it holds firmly but is not totally secure.

*

THE HEDGEHOG

beware! the Square Knot will untie
itself under movement. do not trust
the Square Knot to join two ropes
together. the Square Knot will capsize
under a heavy load. when tying the Square
Knot, both parts of the rope must exit
together. whence the untrustworthiness
and trickiness of the Square Knot? gather
around: but no, I will breathe not a word,
not until the Double Fisherman runs out of
rope.

these are the words he was at last compelled to write.

*

HYMEN

to tie an Anchor Bend Knot,
make two turns around
the shackle, leaving turns
open. knots may evade us,
as our own features are
less familiar to us, to our.
take a half-turn around
the standing line and
feed the free end thru
the turns and pull tight.

the Anchor Bend Knot was a ruin awash in wilderness when I found it.

* * * * *

this intersection of HD and knot tying just boggles me wonderfully. I can't imagine where you came up with these classical knot tying exegeses, and you don't need to tell me. there's an implied conundrum to all of HD's work. she was an analysand of Freud, and you can hear her questions thruout her work, which I do love. the odd grandeur of the knot explications and HD's charismatic identification with ancient Greece just explodes like fireworks for me. wonderful! I remember in Boy Scouts learning knots, the square's the only one I can tie now. indeed, knots may evade us. I recently saw, on the History Channel, a lump of rope representing the Gordian Knot. of course you would take a sword to it. you would if you were MODERN. HD herself was a kind of battleground between pagan intensity and modern diligence. ah, but why is there an elegiac note to these HD knots?

91

2006-09-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

JH: I wanted to ask you about your Joan Houlihan poems - the poem you quoted, "honed jewel in hand", is the poem that I had in mind, too! A very fortunate error, the replacement of "i" with "Joan Houlihan". In procedure, the trick is a topic. I don't mind explaining mechanics at all. A question could be, is it useful that a poet present an explanation of procedure together with the poem? If an explanation is provided with the poem, the explanation becomes part of the reader's pre-existing store of information, and then it is no different than when a poem references Caligula without any explanation and the reader already knows who Caligula is. A procedural poem presented to the reader with an explanation can be read as a poem without obtrusive procedure, as when a reader acquainted with sonnets reads a sonnet without being distracted by the sonnet form (with any variation from a traditional sonnet form being noted as a variation and not an invention). However, since a poem is defined, partially, by its self-containment, an explanation, which is defined, partially, as what comes from outside the explained, is unnecessary. The series as a poem: elements of the poem being made clear by precursors intrinsic to the poem: my poem (entry?) P: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE is explained by (though may be read without reference to anything, even the English language) reference to the main procedure of the GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE series, a sentence of a set number of words (not counting connectors such as "eke", "&", "of", "n", etc) followed by a sentence that is the previous sentence with the first word removed and a new word added to the end (example: "megarynchos of creallocate of sprnyde of lyreams of padmirme / creallocate of sprnyde of lyreams of padmirme of hierxoti") and so on, ending with ellipsis points to indicate the interminability of the poem:

P: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE

Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginie
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginie Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia
Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia Virginia...

In P: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, the last word in line one and the first word in line four is "Virginie". According to the main GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE procedure, "Virginia" is shown to be a connector as well as a mobile word through the placements of "Virginie". "Virginie" needs to move three places in order to get from the position of the last word to the first word. Here's an illustration, using different words, and a connector different from any of these words, instead of all "Virginia":

fish of dog of cat of Virginie
dog of cat of Virginie of mouse
cat of Virginie of mouse of bird
Virginie of mouse of bird of rock

The initial appearance of "Virginie" as the last word in a line of words that are "Virginia" shows that a new word has been added, something not easily seen in prior GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE poems. "Virginie" makes two appearances, its first and its final, in order to show the true appearance, movement, and disappearance throughout the entire poem of the "Virginia" words. The procedure animates words that are static on the page, and differentiates "Virginia" as mobile word from "Virginia" as connector. It is possible to present all 140 words as "Virginia" and present an explanation of the poem (though this would lose the highlighting of the final word in the first line), but to use "Virginie" in two positions refers to the poem GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE (or, to put it another way, whether synonymously or more accurately I don't know, the GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE poems) itself. In addition to speaking more on your Joan Houlihan poems, could you please say a few words about your superb poem "Anglo Saxon Purity"

Marcel Duchamp spoke to me
during the course of the Second world

humans could not budge because
they had webbed jointless limbs

the science of apportionment
division discontinuity

the word “art” interests me
very much if it comes from Sanscrit

as I'm no prophet my job is making
windows where there were once walls

a poeticized culture would not
insist we find the real wall behind

AHB: Joan Houlihan's omnipresence attracted me, when I saw my mistake. one thinks that critics desire omnipresence, as arbiter or whatever. and just the visual insistence of the name. which I've been using in at least 20 poems, probably more. I have no particular animus against Houlihan, except that she's one more critic as distancing factor. me, I would like to get closer to the poem, any poem, not driven away. I've said afore that Jackson Mac Low's procedural notes are part of the poem, and think likewise of Steve Benson. those come to mind immediately. when people read publicly, they often detail the provenance of the work, and it seems essential, at least partly (partial essence, hah!) to do so. Pound and Eliot were my 1st examples of poets who didn't explain allusions and references. and as the young writer who wanted things clear, that was quite aggravating. their assumption, or demand, was that I be well read (in their curriculum). which I guess I proceeded to attempt. not so much for their sake, but that they identified useful centers of concern. your GRANDUNCLE poems grow more interesting to me as each one appears. they make me want to change my routine. which I am resistant to, even as I feel the gravity pull. GRANDUNCLE P reminds me of a poem a friend wrote in high school: “Tale of the Roving Orange”. it consisted of line after line of the word 'banana', except at about the center of the textblock was the word 'orange'. kind of a take off of the knock knock joke (orange you glad I didn't say banana?). seeing your poem made me just about crow, because the process had boiled down to such seeming simplicity, yet a pregnant one. I wonder if you know The Mauberly Series by Aaron Kunin, which can be downloaded here, at ubu.com. he uses a limited vocabulary derived from Pound's series. Kunin is something of a magister, I think. I've taken to Joan Houlihan as a point of obsession. it's good (to me) that she's in Massachusetts, living a couple of towns away (no, I haven't stalked her). local as haven, perhaps. that the gravesites of Thoreau, Emerson and Hawthorn are maybe 3 miles away has a deep effect on me, and Walden Pond some 5 miles. so she works better for me than, say, Harold Bloom, Margorie Perloff (crap, did I misspell her name?), Helen Vendler or whoever might be propounding. perhaps indicative of my commitment (I hope not!), I've had to bend my brain to remember writing "Anglo Saxon Purity". I think the words were all taken from quotes at the beginning of chapters of Trickster Makes the World by Lewis Hyde. I think I took the first line of each quote in the book. I have to read more John Cage, because I know my procedure lacks buddhist purity, there is something wonderful about his willingness to commit to randomness. what I did was semi random. I'm super hankering for Jeff Harrison books, which brings up the big wtf. you've amassed a wicked pile of material, and many others are likewise surfeit with great work that isn't seen enough. my wife wants to design a chapbook for a series of poems I've done (my Mt Everest poems), she has a great vision for its look and visuals. to do it, tho, needs money and it needs time. I believe in DYI (side note: check out Shanna Compton's useful, and let us saying giving (she seems like an angel in gthe nervy poetry world), assistance here) but, you know, logistics. what's to be done? I mean the internet is good, righto, but it aint enough...

90

2006-09-06T04:47:00.000-07:00

JH: Yes, I can see them twining. Duncan had the right idea. To put entries in an ongoing series in collections of various poems leaves the series more open. Books as ellipsis points. When I post a poem to the Wryting list, or any list, it has been completed, except for when I go back to change one or two things - such as the title of "Thus, We Speak of the Language of Hopeful No Return". The Wryting list does not bear on my procedure, except as publication. Were there no internet, they would just pile up in a box to be published later in a book and/or singly in magazines. I don't envision publishing a complete collection of the nameless series full of names ("The Ducks of Cotton Mather" being a poem in this series), or having every single poem in this series scattered through several books. It interests me to see how many poems could be omitted with a series still retaining whatever it had to offer (see Antic View 85). If a series of poems is offered complete, is it still a series? Isn't it rather a poem? A long poem? Any long poem, and a series read consecutively or entire counts as a long poem, could do without certain lines - and have lines added to it. So, does presenting a series incomplete prevent it from being a long poem? One could track down every single poem in the series, and still be unconvinced that the poet doesn't have others. The Faerie Queene is incomplete, yet is still a long poem. So the omission of entries in a series more resembles the omission of lines in a lyric poem? If the reader wasn't aware that poems were missing from the series, it's unlikely that the incompletion would be a factor in the reading. So why are all the entries in a series needed? Why would the omission of any entries matter? If one or two entries that were to take the series in a new direction were omitted the series would still be a series. What is the minimum number of poems to make a series? I believe three is the minimum number for a pattern. I think in patterns when it comes to series. So why not just three poems per series? Any poem added to a pattern does not extend the pattern, but places new poems, new patterns even, next to the original pattern - these new poems are at best allusions to the original pattern. One could write a series of series connected by allusions, but doesn't "a series of series connected by allusions" also describe an anthology of poems by different poets from different eras, or a magazine? A book containing poems similar in form, appearance, and word usage allows a reader to look for patterns within one physical location, seeing the poems as related by being in one body. Is any pattern, such as my GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, capable of thwarting contamination by the very idea of pattern, of being conflated with any poem that has basic similarities such as the English language, enjambment, or punctuation?

AHB: Ya got me. I hadn't thought of a complete series as a poem. well I have but you explain it freshly. I was thinking you have to read Paradise Lost or Dante's Comedy in order, because they are stories, but that isn't the case. things can be read out of chronological order, especially as each story is familiar to most of us even if we haven't read the works. the modernist long poem like The Cantos can certainly be read out of order. there may be value in reading them as presented, but I doubt that it is a necessity. I won't even try to answer your last question. I think I stay in the box too much. yesterday I was doodling up yet another Joan Houlihan poem (I've done at least 20), a flarfy exercise. I wanted to do a find and replace for all I's (1st person singular) in the text. I did it wrong and every 'i' got replaced by 'Joan Houlihan'. usually I just undo the error, but this time I kept it. this is the result:

Joan Houlihan turned to see a long-haJoan Houlihanredfu-manchu LJoan Houlihanmbo to the
"Banana Boat Song" "Thats Stoner rock man! ... lol A fJoan Houlihanrst person narratJoan Houlihanve about growJoan Houlihanng up wJoan Houlihanth a CaucasJoan Houlihanan [wearJoan Houlihanng a banana costume]:

Joan Houlihan'ma prJoan Houlihanvate banana who bruJoan Houlihanses easJoan Houlihanly

Well let me see last tJoan Houlihanme Joan Houlihan checked the WHJoan HoulihanTE men saJoan Houlihand Fu Manchu was tryJoan Houlihanng to unJoan Houlihante all of AsJoan Houlihana to take over the world, hmmm where have Joan Houlihan heard that

"ThJoan Houlihans Joan Houlihans a trJoan Houlihanumph for you, SmJoan Houlihanth," Joan Houlihan saJoan Houlihand "Joan Houlihan wJoan Houlihanll devote the whole of my attentJoan Houlihanon to Dr. Fu-Manchu!" he added grJoan Houlihanmly Fu Manchu could only play for so long onstage '"That Joan Houlihans almost Joan HoulihanncredJoan Houlihanble," Joan Houlihan saJoan Houlihand Fu Manchu plots to assassJoan Houlihannate foreJoan Houlihangn world leaders by usJoan Houlihanng slave gJoan Houlihanrls wJoan Houlihanth poJoan Houlihansoned lJoan Houlihanps

I liked the Joan Houlihan intrusion. I suppose there's a what the hell is this potential for lot of readers. when a procedure is used, doesn't it tempt the reader to explain the trick? is such explanation off topic? where perhaps the reader had ought to enjoy the text as is. I once saw a photographer give a showing of some of his pictures. during the question period, most queries were of the what f stop did you use variety. the photographer became frustrated that people weren't reacting so much to the pictures' effects, were stuck in the technical. does it bother you, on some level, to explain the mechanics of a work of yours? or does such explaining help define the world in which that poem can live, so that the explanation extends the poem's purview?

89

2006-08-29T05:34:00.000-07:00

JH: Poetry is a closer star! Brilliant! Sometimes pictures are part of my poems, as in G is for GRANDUNCLES (OF THE CATTLETRADE), where the pictures accompany their words.

In "Thus, We Speak of the Language of Hopeful No Return" the picture is an illustration, one that is no longer needed as I've decided to re-title the poem, probably "Lines, On A Plaster Mask Of A Drowned Girl". The new title clears up the ambiguity of the image, in addition to making the subject of the poem less fixed. The cast in my link is that of l'Inconnue de la Seine.
I had the idea of a title series, as opposed to a poem series, that would use the title "Thus, We Speak of the Language of ---- " for a variety of poems. The "Lines, On A Plaster Mask Of A Drowned Girl" poem was not an appropriate debut for this title series. I opposed a title series to a poem series, but are they severe opposites? GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE has, so far, an unchanging set of words in the title which lend to interpretation of the poem. Possibly too early to compare the two, as the "Thus, We Speak of the Language of ---- " series is unwritten, aside from the false start. What is a title to you? They have different functions - from a key, to a wish to title a poem something other than "Poem", "Sonnet", or "Song". Why do some poems get titles, and some don't? Does the poetic have anything to do with titles? Or is a title an act of interpretation? ---
but this is in the case of titles coming after poems. I don't know yet if "Thus, We Speak of the Language of ---- " is an instance of inventing a title before the poem, or if it is an instance of inventing a series. At this early stage, it's all words, sans categories.

AHB: I've always felt that orchestral music loses something in so often being identified merely by opus number. give me names for the work. titles start an imaginative flow, are one's first step into (or with) the poem. titles seem to anchor a poem. not so much that the poem is about what the title mightr indicate, but that the title assumes some boundaries. which, yes, is limiting, but then a poem wants to be abut something not everything. I shy from titles that might seem (too) interpretative, tho I guess by using them the author is saying go this way. starting with the title, which I do sometimes, seems directional. whatever one writes after the title bears this implied direction. I'm seeing your series as they appear on the Wryting list as they develope. that is, they weave together. in envisioning a book form, can you see twining them similarly? Robert Duncan opted for this, running several ongoing series thru his books as they chronologically appeared. this brings me to wonder how you look at the Wryting list and how it bears on your procedure. does the work that you post have to be fully finished, or some level of completion?

88

2006-08-26T11:39:00.000-07:00

JH: I agree that all writers should write reviews, whether publicly or privately. I don't write reviews, publicly or privately. My public writings are poems and Antic View entries. My private writings are poems (which are eventually public), emails, and titles of books that I mean to hunt for at libraries or bookstores. If I see a passage I want to revisit in a book I own, I write a page number, and sometimes a keyword, in the inside of the cover. If I see a passage I want to revisit in a book I don't own, I copy the passage in a notebook I use exclusively for copied passages. I often look through this notebook, which is comprised almost entirely of passages on poetry. I particularly enjoy remarks on poetry by people who aren't poets, as I find them largely indistinguishable from remarks on poetry by poets. Perhaps I don't write reviews because I fear this blurring of identities. Does one cease to be a poet when writing of poetry? Writing prose is where poet and non-poet meet, as is reading prose. Poetry is where the non-poet cannot go except as a reader. Does one cease to be a poet when reading poetry? The only two states of a poet being writing poetry and thought unguided by an outside poem (a poem written by someone else) (does reading a poem you've written count as a poem written by someone else?)? Every poet is a compromise with the poet's weaker elements.

AHB: I think I've harped on the writers write reviews bit before, and what I really mean is that conscious evaluation is needed for the writer. this is a constant. which I'm sure you do, whether you write it down or not. I need to write it, otherwise I remain in a sort of inchoate non-verbal glow. poetry absolutely astonishes me, in a baffling way. I cannot write 'privately', not in the sense that I think you mean. always, I'm aware of the Reader, that potential. if not the id then an id. I admire your method of gleaning. I used to do similar, even putting the interesting quotes and phrases that I found into categories. Auden published a nifty commonplace book. I should go back to doing that, as I am a collector of notebooks, always ready for a reason to fill another. you are kinder, by the bye, to your books than I am. I like to annotate, underline and write poems in books (mine only, not library ones). I even kinda appreciate the underlinings in used books that I buy, tho often these are insipid indoctrinations by the teachers. your stance towards poetry is my stance towards writing. well, there is a class of writing that lacks intensity, or crystalline essence: that's prosaic. which is the prose that doesn't exult, I guess. when I write of poetry, it's like looking at a faraway star. it necessitates description, but also this ethereal wonder. poetry, in this simile, is like a closer star, an abstraction of light. so I feel that, yes, the poet still exists when writing of poetry, but it's a cooler activity. I think all I'm writing here confirms your statement that every poet is a compromise with the poet's weaker elements. reading a poem that I've written is indeed a poem written by someone else. anyhoo, a recent poem of yours posted to Wryting-L:

Thus, We Speak of the Language of Hopeful No Return

less placid even is
the face of the ox who drags up the morn,
and more terrible is her placidity:

such peacefulness is remorseless for eternal

with the poem you include this picture. first I'm curious about the picture. it looks like a death mask, perhaps someone I should know (I want to say Goethe), but I don't know. you occasionally include pictures with your work. are the pictures part of the poem or um illustrative?

87

2006-08-23T18:59:00.000-07:00

JH: Dreams once affected my poetry more than they do now. Sometimes I would try to describe what I saw in my dreams, sometimes words would come to me in dreams. More often the impetus for poems come from nowhere in my waking hours. The past two months, the impetus for poems come from my series (GRANDUNCLES, and the unnamed series that includes "The Ducks of Cotton Mather"). So yes, my series prepares the land for possibilities. There is less blindness in this seeding than in unmediated inspiration. In pure (unmediated) inspiration—a synonym for, or rather a manifestation of, the poetic?—there is more compression than in the mechanical function of series or procedural work. The famous compression of poetry! Is the compression of poetry an illusion, of poetry or the poet, masking approximation? The varying blindnesses of the poet that allows the imaginary to be written in the face of the known is passed on to the reader via the poem. Mechanics beyond what's unavoidable in the act of writing poetry (the unavoidable being words and prior writing habits or the reaction against these habits) widen the poem rather than compress it. The poetic itself is flattened against the procedural, against the thematic (of the series). Compression, then, as loss. What does this waste of poetry entail? Inspiration as a spur to poetry becomes poetry (previous entries in the series, or procedural templates) as a spur to writing? Do you think that a certain amount of the poetic is lost in the writing, in any writing, even the most purely inspired? There are two kinds of the poetic, the written and the unwritten? The written poetic would be the revelation arriving on the page instead of in the mind, as in a dream in both instances. The unwritten poetic would be what rushes the poet to the page. When both the written and unwritten poetic occur in the same poem, do they have anything to do with each other? In other words, do they come from the same source? If a nonverbal and imageless inspiration sends the poet to the page, where the written poetic then appears, is this anything other than coincidence? Would both kinds of poetic in the same poem widen the poem, or compress it still further? Words by definition (ha) widen the blank space, and words by definition compress a thought into a row of letters. How to make a common word unique to poetry—is this a function of the sentence (a string of words) or the line (a string of words in movement—would love to hear your thoughts on this parenthetical definition of the line. The eye moves a sentence in order to read it, but the line has a different motion - yet there's incidental enjambment in prose of any considerable length. One object of my GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE is to create some poems within the series that address the movement of line and sentence)? Both, no doubt - I feel that I originally intended "the sentence or a line" to be a set in opposition to something I forgot while writing the parenthetical matter separating them. The line/sentence creates a new word, as does the poem (the poem being the only place where that line/sentence could exist). This would logically seem to be an elongation rather than a compression, but the new word, created by the poem, refers only to itself, and is not used in prosaic commerce. So its use is particular.

You recently reviewed five books for Galatea Resurrects

Anny Ballardini

Stephen Ellis

Jon Leon

Ernesto Priego

Mark Lamoureux

Great reviews - I look forward to reading many more from you! Any background on these reviews you'd like to share? What are your thoughts on writing reviews - how, or is, writing reviews different from blog, interview, or essay writing?

AHB: I love the depth of your explanations. I can't match that. The unwritten poem bothers me. it floats away from one's grasp. seemingly like every work is a compromise with weaker elements. Before I read Magic Mountain, I had this image that I could not really put to words. MAGIC and MOUNTAIN evoke something beautiful, poetic and impossible, and I had this picture of of of... something. I liked the novel, especially that unnerving final image of ghostly Hans Castorp, but it was 'just a story'. In the same way, these poetic energies arise, but what goes onto the page seems less than I imagined. regarding line, when I lineate, I feel a musical precision occurs. or if not occurs (that's presumptuous), then at least the music is a major insistence. by music I mean a complication of time, where the reader enters a fluid expanse, registered by the least syllable and letter, and how meaning dazzles that. My ear in this is almost surgically adapted from Creeley. The line, of course, has a visual tempo as well as its function in beat. whereas the sentence offers a completion (or suggestion thereof), a semantic whole. the reviews are just reactions, and I will be so bold as to accept several meanings for just. I try to register something interesting and effective in what I read. Eileen Tabios has a nice project in Galatea Resurrects, offering space for reviews. she even will send review copies (which she has accrued) to prospective reviewers. I asked to do some, a lark. I'd bought Ernesto's book, Stephen (whose work I don't mind championing) had given me his, and the other three came from Eileen. I asked for Anny and Mark, and Eileen suggested Jon, whose work I didn't previously know. my goal isn't to explain the books, nor to suggest a complete reading. I just want to note what caught my attention. I think all writers should write reviews. by this I mean formally commit to the process of evaluation. whether these are published or remain journal jottings, it seems like a good exercise. I've written on my blog that everything I write there includes a question mark. however declarative I may be, I'm still just poking at the thing. I'm not against negative reviews, but criticism (one sees it all the time) in which there's a momentum of style, the Joan Houlihan School of Snide Rebate, that's just gamesmanship. I don't mind not getting it.a publisher once told me, if he didn't understand a work, he wanted to publish it. that strikes me as an excellent basis. do you ever write reviews or reactions, for yourself if not for John and Jane Q?can you describe the tension between your writing and The Other?

86

2006-08-22T03:58:00.000-07:00

JH: "The Henry Green of U.S. Civil War Battles" is a departure from the others poems in this series. The possessor is reversed, with the author belonging to what would typically be subject in this series. Green's writings are not described, unlike Shakespeare's sonnets in

"Shakespeare Sonnets of Francois Mauriac"

Green's writings are characters in this poem, instead of, as in the other poems belonging to this series, descriptions. Neither of the statements in the previous sentence are entirely true, but the sense, the invention, of their accuracy is what permitted me to write the poem. Is this a discussion point, that a blind eye is needed to write poetry? The physical blindness of certain poets (Homer, Milton) comes to mind here, and the fascination some commentators have with this blindness. I've only read mentions rhapsodizing on this sightlessness, that I can recall, but I'm sure there's an essay somewhere. I read a supposition that ancient tribes blinded their poets so they wouldn't wander off (from the tribe, I suppose, rather than the subject matter). There was sightlessness involved in this poem. I wrote half of it one day, and the second half the next day. The night between, I was awakened from sleep with these words in my head, which I immediately wrote down:

why abhor surprise
when it's the sole chimera
Fate provides us?

is not forgetfulness a surprise?
could not oblivion be the pounce
on that monolithic exposed nerve?

The lineation is the same as what I wrote down that night. As I read what I had just written, I decided to put it in "The Henry Green of U.S. Civil War Battles". I also got the idea then to add a line from two of my early poems, "all surprises should be filthy with dust". These stanzas and the line occur in a section of "The Henry Green of U.S. Civil War Battles" distinct from the other sections in having no title. The poems in this section are separated from each other by a tilde ( ~ ) rather than an asterisk. This gives it the look of a poem in a different series, a series as yet unintroduced apart from "The Henry Green of U.S. Civil War Battles", placed in the center of a similar poem in another series. And, indeed, I may interlock series in the future. I speak of sightlessness being involved in the poem, as there was no accompanying picture, that I can recall, in the formulations of these lines that woke me up. Something made me add them to my current poem instead of letting them become a new poem. There's is a blindness in all poetry, in all composition, in all human endeavor - is this list in descending order or is all equal? If descending, why must poetry be first in everything? Wishful thinking? Is "wishful thinking" part of a definition of poetry? What separates the wishful thinking of poetry from any other variety of wishful thinking? An asterisk, or a tilde? Also, please say something about your superb "ninjas in the expansion joints", also posted on Wryting-L

we rose in the great gust of gifted good morning. we ran the slope to its downward friction, smack dab into all that we left. that was the point all along, evidence (the tracks of our shoes) to the contrary. stories always head to some plain of typical reaction. not to say that we posed, good friends. we just read too much. ninjas on the roofs of everywhere, cracked and blighty with all they've had to tell: these essences of implosion constitute an accepted governing. smudges in primary documents cover the estimates of the ruling class. it will only take time to disagree, and love still lasts longer. Last Language executes a question by wondering if all that sand was worth the fight. amazed, you might be, dear Reader in your association, to learn of battles mentioned in newspapers and other sites of presentation. did you think the Kennedy Camelot helped you out of bed? you were loving way before that. I saw that very fact in a particular cloud that came to me, possibly just recently. way before the Philippine nugget bore its registered fruit, way before those insinuations of practice thru out the organizing system of economic contempt, the ball had rolled and rolled. too many people trip on the wording, haha, laughs Excellent English. Tundra sweats a bundle with the effort of the lower clime. Yeti looks freak out in the city that we share. we've expanded easily, to subways, parks and all the implements. this gestures toward the closing number, like a bell in the gloaming. we love, in situations of desperate cooling, while the land cracks up good and solid. Everest snow will muscle down on our apt phrases, just as the champion army stops for a bunch of water to enliven future situational ways. how far, wondered Excellent English aloud (where the problem world exists in dots and dashes), will the information go? no one knows but the creek rises. a creek! I cry. my god, I am given to yell for the flourish of rocks worn smooth by the water's delight. why do I say delight in a gravitational imperative? because plain things surround darkened excesses. so we came to a bridge over a river, a dynamic landscape in every respect. the river looked cool and precious. the view gave us an image of integrity divided by the ratio of our attention. we crossed in a pathetic equation of interest and the spark made softer by the dilation of love. oh love, the great what. love sees wars, even, in the elemental press towards exacting a place from the edge of nowhere. discussion doesn't diminish the fret of finding more oil in the garden, we just wonder why our vote always kills. we're at the same loose ends as always, as Reader frankly can distill. Yeti, our distinguished colleague and less than upbeat Wookie, yowls something strange without benefit of a word. made plangent by the test, we all agree. the story takes its toll, as you, rare Reader, perfectly know.
AHB: poetry as wishful thinking: maybe could be. in the sense of idealized. which may distinguish from wishful as in wanting or envious. in your series, you wish a collision of these disparates, a collision that makes sense, that synergizes. “Ninjas in the Expansion Joints” partakes of similar collisions, insofar as it and the series of which it is part bring together differing elements hoping that they will blend. this Everest series, as yet untitled, came out of my reading. I read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, about a disastrous climbing season on Everest 10 years ago. the story stuck with me, and I ended up reading 4 or 5 more accounts of the same events. with this "expertise" in hand I had a place of which or in which or to which to write. the pieces in the series share an elegiac tone. recently I began what I thought was an Everest piece then thought it was shrouded somehow, slack. so I googled a number of phrases and played with the text. it became much more disjunctive, but I managed to deflate what I came to realize was a corny phrase: sardonic wind. the tone no longer remains as was in the poem, and I don't know if I can add it to the series, tho I like the poem. one senses a story amidst it all but I don't comply with any exact telling. your series have a shared mechanical function, where you prepare the land for possibilities (seeds). I rarely avoid narrative completely, tho plot often irritates me. I'm more interested in novels that de-emphasize plot, unles he novel is strictly whizbang plot. anyway, I think in both cases we savour touchstones of characters. these repetitions instill a sense of process and development. do you think? I look forward to seeing a collection of these works of yours, so that I can fully perceive the relationships with series, and the relationships between series (assuming you would put these series all together). do dreams affect your work much? Charles Olson woke at least once in the middle of the night and wrote something on the wall.

85

2006-08-20T04:26:00.000-07:00

JH: Very in your element! Series, then, are a repetition, rather than a continuation? Continuation may be defined as what prolongs the flash, but a flash is a flash for only so long before it becomes a new day. Repetition may be defined as what prolongs that prolongation, the labor (procedure, or the very act of writing) reflecting itself at a certain point (fairly early in the process, I'd say) instead of retaining the flash, as representation is more about the materials of the representation than what is represented. Procedure is an obligation to its work rather than to its assignment. Is the assignment the poetic? The work is utility, and the flash (inspiration) the poetic? The words are a necessary evil that is the sole proof of the flash? The words obscure the flash, making the poem fictional in the process of making a narrative, and in doing so remove all indexes to the flash. So far I've been talking about the individual poem, and not a series. A series would leave the flash initiating the first poem in the series further and further behind with each new poem, logically speaking. But does a series provide more complete evidence of the flash, a fuller picture? Series as Cubism, and the non-serial poem being a scene through a window? New views of the flash with every new entry in the series, with the material obscuring the indexes in previous poems being left behind as individual to those poems? New material (words) cannot conceal the same area of flash in one poem as was concealed in a previous poem in the series. In addition, further poems alter reading of previous poems, and vice-versa. Any poem has its own flash, distinct from the poet's, or so the shape of a poem presents. In a series, this concept of flash (the concept of a poem's, its words', own flash) isn't presented as strongly, since it is weakened by all its instances.

AHB: Interesting how this conversation sounds like physics. series as fireworks. a concatenation of awe and surprise. I think of series in terms of Moebius strips, where physical space loses its safe definition. I recall reading an essay somehow relating poetry to Klein bottles. I say somehow because I lacked (and lack) the physics, or mathematics, to grok the argument. but I appreciated the picture of bent space poetry that I gleaned. a series does seem involved with physical space, how the sections relate. a linear timeline exists, but a 3-D expanse also appears, as each item in the series defines a new core of reaction to the initial impulse. here is another one of your series within a series. you posted this to Wryting-L this week.
The Henry Green of U.S. Civil War Battles
CHICKAMAUGA

O, the jollity
pleasures mask!
the jollity masked,
also with a dustjacket
of "Pack My Bag"

*

GETTYSBURG

the waters of Nanterre
(translation of two passages
from Madame de Créquy's
Souvenirs), yes, but there's
turf 'neath your tent,
same as any camper

*

MURFREESBORO

"Caught" (1943) was designed
to put a lantern in your face -
ah, your face was already day!

*

why abhor surprise
when it's the sole chimera
Fate provides us?

~

is not forgetfulness a surprise?
could not oblivion be the pounce
on that monolithic exposed nerve?

~

all surprises should be filthy with dust

*

CHANCELLORSVILLE

falling stars never look for me,
though "Arcady or A Night Out"
would have them do so

*

VICKSBURG

before "Concluding" was
Nature's palmist, this 1948
novel was artifice's psalmist

*

BAYOU FORCHE

...besides, "Mr Jonas",
I silent away among names

* * * * *
context determines here. you've placed these poems within the context of the Civil War, so the reader must relate them to the battles (I see an odd epitaph for Stonewall Jackson in Chancellorsville) and the larger context of the Civil War and Henry Green, whatever that relationship is. each poem chooses a different direction. the poem moves in a line (tho the reader can choose to read out of order; my eye naturally would jump to Gettysburg), but each sectional unit also practices its own territory. a chain reaction in which the excitement of each unit joins together as a whole or wholeness defined by the title, the relationship of Henry Green and Civil War battles. I presume there exists a larger context, a gathering of these series of series, which definitely resonates micro/macro.

84

2006-08-16T05:58:00.000-07:00

JH: The title of that poem is "The Ducks of Cotton Mather". Others in this series include The Birds of Nikolai Gogol, Sharks of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Roller Coasters of Phillis Wheatley, The Wasps of Zane Grey, The Etiquette of Erle Stanley Gardner, The Geological Time of Aphra Behn, The Poisons of Felicia Hemans, Shakespeare Sonnets of Francois Mauriac, and The Comets of Edward Albee. I take a category, such as ducks, and write a description of individuals within that group. The descriptions are headed with titles of works by the author named in the title. Why use authors instead of just titling the poem "Ducks" or some such? To double myself as author, functionally. All description, prosaic or poetic, alters what is described. To place an author before myself in the poem - the name sharing the title with the subject and the titles of the author's works heading the description - allows me, personally, perhaps, rather than theoretically (theoretical: what is an attempt to prove, to persuade; the wildest theory mimicking an instruction manual or a handbook entry in intent... and the personal unable to persuade due to lack of empirical evidence; one can attempt to prove Freemasons are running the United States - or how a particular helmet can protect one from alien mind-control rays, the directions for construction bearing this information in themselves - and back it up with evidence outside of the author's head, but you cannot prove to an audience that the reason you are a murderer is an abusive childhood) to treat the subject ventriloquilly, how Jeff Harrison would write of ducks while keeping Cotton Mather continually in mind (or rather, the works of Cotton Mather as they've come to my attention). This series is personally procedural more than it is physically procedural. My explanation of GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE can be supported by comparison of the poems, the movement of their words are described by the commentary. My explanation of poems in the series (as yet unnamed) that includes The Ducks of Cotton Mather cannot be proven. Procedures, physical and personal, assist me in seeing the poetic, in regarding the poetic apart from the poem - the poem a shadow or halo of the poetic, the poetic a shadow or halo of the poem. Lines crop up for these poems, poems that are in a particular series, ("St. John Chapter Eight, Verse Six & Eight" is another series of mine) and no other. What do series say about the poetic? Why lines, themes, and approaches for a certain kind of poem and not for another? Do you consider poems that fall outside of series as more integrally poetic, or otherwise preferable? Procedure, and series, as an alembic, and poems that fall further from the author as purer? What of recurring characters? Do they but resemble series, or are they a series?

AHB: There's something time-fluid about series that seems necessary to me, I mean for me. a stand alone poem seems to drift, whereas in series, an anchoring proposition exists. I realize this is an odd attitude, for I surely see single poems by others as being complete (I was going to say universes but that's too forceful and imaginary). I feel I must relate all my work, ALL of it, as if each work were an unfinished sentence, accumulating towards some whole. I might be defining myself too carefully here. maybe I note a tonal consistency in series, or standpoint perhaps. but let me return to the time-fluid idea. series instigate commitment, for reader and writer, an involvement in passage. that attracts me. everyone has flashes, 'inspiration'. the returns, when one is not guided by that magnetic example, these are the work of the artist, where the artist thoughtfully configures the gift. does this sound fuzzy? in your series, you have a flash of how to proceed. you then labour to hold that flash. and by doing that, you extend the moment. recurring characters, images and themes propose solidities, touchstones. perhaps you are right, series as alembic, as the author falls away and what remains are the themes and characters, the word with living intent. whew!!! see how out of my water I am in speaking of this.

83

2006-08-08T04:52:00.000-07:00

JH: You are far from a resistant reader! In my GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE series I take a sentence of six words (not counting connectors such as "eke", "&", "o", "n", etc). The next sentence removes the first word and adds a new one to the end. Future poems in this series will have variations on this procedure.

In D: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, I took words from Edgar Allan Poe's "A Few Words on Secret Writing" - with "n" as the connector ("n" as in "and", but also as a stray letter adding to the reading of the previous / following word. I replaced three of the recurring words with never-to-be-repeated words (line 3 - "wade" becomes "ifeov"; line 8 - "aoahe" becomes "ridiiot"; line 11 -"uderdudr" becomes "tfocei") in order to show the inevitability of the repetition. This is developed further in E: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE.

In C: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, I cut the sentence in half in order to make lines, so the sense of repetition is different from previous GRANDUNCLES. Stanzas add to the variation. Here's the first of four stanzas:

home eke haven eke game
grave eke shame eke save
haven eke game eke grave
shame eke save eke name
game eke grave eke shame
save eke name eke knave
grave & shame & save
name & knave & dime
shame eke save eke name
knave eke dime eke dive
save eke name eke knave
dime eke dive eke groom

As to the title, words are cattle in such procedures, and here the word granduncles is assigned to the word cattle, with cattle still present: removals lying next to what was to be removed. Cattle as in livestock, but also cattle as in monstrous births, as Lanny Quarles has pointed out: "another association with mutant word as cattle it occurs to me would be from Philipp Melancthon's Deuttung der zwo grewlichen etc. (long title) of a wood-cut of the "monk-calk of saxony". this was a monstrous birth the protestants used as an indictment of the monastic estate." The poetic act will become more apparent with more entries in the series (individual poem as fragment of the whole that is the series. What of individual poems as read distinct from a poet's entire body of work? Does this lend to the incompleteness, the abandonment of a poem by the poet or the reader's ability?).
Poets have written with spacing as a major intended component (Mallarmé's "Un coup de dès" is a well-known example). The spacing of these poems is dynamic. In GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, the spacing is more static, a slot to be filled with words, instead of space isolated from words. The set number of words and connectors create this space within the poem.

E: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE

ACE o QWERTY o CERTAIN o INERTIA o SYLPH
QWERTY o CERTAIN o INERTIA o RESUME o STOP

CERTAIN o INERTIA o CAUSE o STOP o GULF
INERTIA o GONE o STOP o GULF o SOLDIER

BOATING o STOP o GULF o YEARN o HEW
STOP o GULF o ABBOT o HEW o CONCH

GULF o EXEGETE o HEW o CONCH o ROSE
BEETLE o HEW o CONCH o ROSE o MISS

HEW o CONCH o ROSE o WINDOW o COURSE
CONCH o ROSE o SILVER o COURSE o IRIS

ROSE o BREAK o COURSE o IRIS o BELL
FABLE o COURSE o IRIS o BELL o MORE...

In E: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE, the last word of line one is repeated, but remains ever new through the progression resulting from the removal of the first word of a line and the addition of a new word to the end. SYLPH becomes RESUME becomes CAUSE becomes GONE which becomes BOATING. The fact that it is the only new word aside from the word at the end of the line identifies it as the same word that started out as SYLPH (true, YEARN in line five is a new word from the the one that started as SOLDIER, but by then the pattern has been established). The last word in lines four and eight get the same treatment as the last word in line one. Every single end word is not repeated as a new word because this would cloud the anew-repetition of the end word of line one. The words on either side (and, finally, only the reader's right-hand side) of the
repeated-anew word help to establish it as the same word of line one. I've been saying "new word" instead of something like "new appearance of the same word" for relative simplicity of explanation.
E: GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE is written in couplets to help the reader's eyes. The space between couplets are incidental and practical, as are the spaces between words and letters.
The words are capitalized to add further concrete distinction from the connecting "o" - the brevity and exact repetition of the "o" being two other distinctions. The last word of any GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE line, to date, is not followed by a connector such as "o", but a linebreak. This shows the connector is on a different trail than the words. I call them connectors here only because that's what I've always called them in my head when writing the poems in this series. The poems end with ellipsis points as the poem could go on forever, as could this commentary...

"Aliens Straining At Sense" is great!, and I'm always glad to see the aliens.

Aliens Straining at Sense

Could you tell me about this poem, please?

AHB: Wowzie!!! that's a procedure, and then some! you're watching language's fluidity, I wot, and the concept of structure. which, oddly, is what I do what I attempt flarfy works. I am a resistant reader, at least compared to, for instance, Lanny Quarles, who I think got what you were doing in a basic and deep way. I've learned not to let strangeness stop me, whereas a lot of readers possess a rigidity, an urge for conformity. so I look at your Cattletrade poems, and look and look. I can be satisfied with that, and not throw out a work because I cannot knit a neat explanation for it. I've found that Jackson Mac Low's procedural notes are interesting as part of the produced poem itself. likewise, I think what you write above is a poetic act, one associated with the 'final product'. anyway, the alien poems are a series I wrote several years ago, and were lost on a dead computer for some time. I have written many alien poems, and alien cartoons, and even have flying saucers in a number of my paintings. I hope this doesn't mean I belong in the movie Slacker. I found on the net once directions for making a helmet to protect you from alien mind-control rays. I mean serious, lucid instructions. I like space opera aliens, or the Red Threat ones in 50's flicks. there's something underneath all the adventure that makes space aliens interesting, I mean widely compelling. mentors, demiurges, gods, angels, elves? in the Alien series, I allude to a law on the books in Chateaunuef-du-Pape prohibiting les cigares volant from flying over the vineyards. Jung wrote about flying saucers. it's a fascinating weirdness that I don't think people have considered much. the series is just a possession of all that, and some political intent I guess. not as juicy an explications as yours, I'm afraid. anyway, another series you are working on, posted to Wryting, center on various somewhat well known personages, a series of poems within the larger series. one seems to be poems inspired by the titles of Perry Mason books. this is the latest one, on which I ask you to comment.

THE WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD

the Laysan Teal has
a dark head & neck,
fourteen plumes (&
seven are of gold),
a white ring around
the eye, a blurred blue
ring around the bill,

the same

blurred blue ring around
Cotton's incapable sleep

thievish is the Laysan Teal,
&, as such, surreptitious

seven of the plumes: hopeless
(the same that are of gold)

the Laysan Teal resembles
the female Mallard, but
more reddish-brown

*

BRONTOLOGIA SACRA

the female Mallard is
mottled
buffy-brown in color
a pale eye-brow
a dark stripe through the eye

she peruses darkness
her raptures are unprinted
(raptures imperfectly corrupted)

the male Mallard has
a metallic-green head
& neck separated from
a purplish-brown breast
by a white ring

the same

white ring around
the Laysan Teal's eye

their bodies generally go
unburied, male & female

*

HUMILIATIONS FOLLOW'D WITH DELIVERANCES

the Harlequin Duck (Histrionicus histrionicus)
is the sole representative of its genus. it's
marked like a harlequin & is also known as
the Rock Duck, the Mountain Duck, the Squealer,
& Lord and Lady. a mountain duck that frequents
swiftly running streams. hunters often hang rhymes
on their wings. always there's a line about rain-haunted
skies. "Come, barren Graces", while improbable, is
a traditional beginning to these rhymes.

*

NARRATIVES OF THE INDIAN WARS

the Ruddy (Spine-tailed, Heavy-tailed,
Quill-tail, Stiff-tail, Bristle-tail, Sleepy,
Fool, Deaf, Shot-pouch, Daub, Stubble,
Twist, Blather, Scoot, Hickory-head,
Paddy, Noddy, Dinky, Hard-tack) Duck is
equally fond of salt, brackish, & fresh water.
its flight is rapid, with a whirring sound,
occasioned by its wings' concave form.
they ease to whatever the dawn requires.

*

A VOICE FROM HEAVEN

tho web-footed, Mandarin Ducks
have the power of perching.

branches of trees overhanging ponds.

the tunefulness of iron clasps.

the Chinese, who use these ducks
in marriage ceremonies, are loathe
to part with them to visitors.

Herr Bibliothekarius, in April 1836, wrote
William Wormswork, "I could more easily
send you two live Mandarins
than a pair of Mandarin. Ducks."

they are the only ducks that prefer captivity,
"longing," in Herr B's words, "at the chains' clarion"

82

2006-08-04T17:30:00.000-07:00

JH: Your "you can see poets becoming literature" came to me as the actual poets dying and the written word remaining. Literature as letters (missives; characters of an alphabet), as written matter. You read literature with everyone else, yes, and you read literature along with everything else. The back of a cereal box is as read and removed from your production (writing) as Tess of the D'Urbervilles or one of your own written poems. I've earlier formulated, poetry + time = poetry, and can now progress to poetry + time = literature. What then does literature plus time equal? I would claim that time has no equal bearing on literature, save for physical destruction, or alteration, of instances. Writing being mnemonic, literature is a structure from which poetry can be received.
AHB: You're right. Literature lives on after the poet, and the poet exchanges his/her life to the thingness (that's a Heidegger word) of literature. I like the image of literature as a building—or holy grotto, to pretty the picture—in which poetry resides. I fear I may step into icky territory but literature is like a church. you go to it with a certain respect and expectation, a receptivity. it's a timeless place, where writing from millennia ago, in any/all languages, can be accessed. having presented that image, I don't want to harp on any religiousity of literature. but let me now switch topics. you've recently been plying the Wryting-L list with quite a bit of work, at least two series. I'm only just now catching up to this work, having been offline the past week and more, but let me offer Exhibit A, if it please the court.

D: GRANDUNCLES OF the CATTLE TRADE

fuaefshff n hetiusafhie n oissichoa n wade n fdoudf
hetiusafhie n oissichoa n wade n fdoudf n weiie
oissichoa n ifeov n fdoudf n weiie n aeohdeff
wade n fdoudf n weiie n aeohdeff n iuhffde
fdoudf n weiie n aeohdeff n iuhffde n herdhwid
weiie n aeohdeff n iuhffde n herdhwid n aoahe
aeohdeff n iuhffde n herdhwid n aoahe n raeodu
iuhffde n herdhwid n ridiiot n raeodu n suisduin
herdhwid n aoahe n raeodu n suisduin n uderdudr
aoahe n raeodu n suisduin n uderdudr n desiaeafiun
raeodu n suisduin n tfocei n desiaeafiun n udai
suisduin n uderdudr n desiaeafiun n udai n onstduf...

this is not your usual poem. it would certainly shock many readers. should I, as typical dumb resistant reader, wonder how you produced this text? should I take it as a conundrum, something coded? I ponder it wondering how to pronounce the words. I should add that this is part of a series, but its fellows don't offer this particular challenge. what's the poetic act here?

onstduf...

81

2006-07-25T08:48:00.000-07:00

JH: Thanks! You writes gooder tho: "those critical knots that Donne ties in his clanking machines, worry beads of metaphor that hold you"! Love also your Benchley and Thurber background, which bespeaks a commitment to literature that seizes on words that carry something extra with them (humor, surprise, sprightliness). "Poetry can't be directed, even when fitted into forms, even narratives." is an excellent point. I wrote that one can write poetry with or without the assistance of literature, and would like to ask now if literature cannot allude to poetry with the same integrity as poetry can allude to literature? What is the meeting point? We've established (for the nonce, upon shifting sands no doubt) the word as the meeting point of prose and poetry. What is the meeting point of literature (how to define literature?) and poetry, and is it one-way, with poetry alone coming and going at will? Literature, as an instance rather than a set, could be defined as a text whose words allude (deliberately, but how to define intent in a text?) to other texts as well as the meanings of the words (the words singly and together). But the instance is instantly part the set. What is to be subsumed: is this an apt definition of literature? Anny Ballardini in a comment to Antic View 79 asked "Which elements are made available to the poet when writing?", which currently I can only answer with another question, "What makes a poem a poem and not literature or prose when the poet is writing?" Is it sheer will, or habit? Some elements made available to the poet when writing are imagination, taste (an old-timey term for what one considers a proper poem), and what one has written before (as an enemy as well as a guide). Imagination is composed of pre-existing elements, too. So the elements are refined more and more from their original shape until they are suited only, or primarily, to the poetic? If so, what separates these mutated elements from my ersatz definition of literature? The fact that they are not public (and barely private)?
AHB: One easy answer can entail how literature is culturally accepted. Shakespeare, of course. I must've read Merchant of Venice in 9th grade, found it less heinous than I expected (expecting little offered in public school as any too pleasing), but, offered medicinally: that was literature. when I read Shakespeare later, on my own: that was poetry. the difference somewhat defined by my receptivity, but also the 800 pound gorilla aspect. the term literature probably guides us, giving us cairns along the way. you can see poets becoming literature. The Cantos, say: that news has been scoped. what was once the edge and avant has been taken in by 'us'. which doesn't mean The Cantos are over, just that the work has lost that initial surprise. you even see this in the Beats, what once was seen as rough and demanding has now been cottoned to. it's a regular cultural process, I suppose. poetry perhaps is a singular state, for reader and writer both, whereas you read literature along with everyone else. does that seem a fair statement? I don't think one can presume to write literature, literature lacks the immediacy of this life's present, tho it comprises great sweeps of time. literature is somewhat an honourific, but also evidence of impact. I don't want to make poetry sound too rarified, but I think its vitality is its focus. or essence. perhaps literature is a structure in which poetry can live? is all hard to say. literature and poetry meet where we are most human, in the face of love, life and death. it's hard to set such terms down, for fear they will seem inflated, but damn it, they aren't.

80

2006-07-19T16:52:00.000-07:00

JH: What of a poetry that is without any innovation, and is thus without surprise to the poet or reader? Examples could be Augustan poetry, or avant-garde poetry that presents familiar disjunction. What does such presentation enact? A point of Neoclassic poetry is to provide a poetry that is classic, a square peg in a square hole. Contemporary procedural poetry does much the same thing - words filling their intended formal slots. Do such poems present an idea of literature, rather than an instance of poetry? "Yes" would be my immediate answer, though mulling it over (as I shall) may raise a qualification or two. Antic View (is Antic View outside us personally as much as Monster?) has raised a dichotomy of literature and poetry; one sentence in the definition of literature may be that it can exist as a closed book. In writing prose commentary on poetry, Antic View has been approaching poetry as literature: Here It Is, without many particular examples. Thousands of examples would be chicanery, deferring an eventual awareness of the treatment of poetry as literature. One can write poetry, with or without the assistance of literature, but can poetry ever be written about, without being prose about the ornamental (other adjectives could be used, I'm using "ornamental" to suggest that the poetry is visually subsumed by the prose of the commentary) verse within the commenting prose?
AHB: First of all, you writes real good, a language of strange immediacy. I notice this as I scramble to reply. You are right that a non-surprise quality of poetry can exist. Formal works can please within their formality. Which, maybe, qualifies as the surprise I brought up as essential. Certainly iambic pentametre poems in abab rhyme can surprise by content. Think of those critical knots that Donne ties in his clanking machines, worry beads of metaphor that hold you. What's crucial isn't the form but the content, or some tight equation of the two. That is, cliches and banalities can be writ in formal or informal structures. Those square pegs in square holes are, to me, a phony poetry. Emphasized by a necessity to get something across. When I think of Poetry, the magazine, the guff it presents seems linked solely to some idea represented: here's something that looks like a poem. Not a true enactment of the active poetic influence. The same way that when you see a Hollywood movie, and recognize all the elements (need I list them?) consciously added to satisfy the idea of a Hollywood movie. I really don't know what poetry is. I probably already have mentioned that the first writing I did was inspired by Robert Benchley and James Thurber. Both humourists, but I thought I was writing poetry. I couldn't write their particular feuilleton, but did see this possible expanse, predicated on surprise (as humour is surprise). I guess likewise I'm satisfied to think of Antic View as POETRY, at least because it aint rigid. And perhaps because half of it is out of my hands, and furthermore because I'm riding waves of surprise as I respond to what you write. Commentary is prose because of its direction. Poetry can't be directed, even when fitted into forms, even narratives. Oh gosh, I dunno. Poetry is a megalopolis. We're all denizens.

79

2006-07-08T04:28:00.000-07:00

JH: Very well-put! I don't mind tardy responses, as they're worth the wait. Speaking of collaborations, Anny Ballardini's comments in our comments field about Van Gogh possibly showing Gauguin something that might escape common sense raises the topic of common sense and poetry / art. As to poetry, does common sense play a large part? Does it in yours? In mine, the common sense is the common store of Western literature I share with most of my readers. Anny's comments also lead me to speculate on the non-literary behavior of the poet (and whether any behavior of a poet is non-literary). A lot of a poet's personal experience (this includes reading and writing) does not appear in the poetry. There's more experience lived than poetry written in a poet's life. Why do certain experiences make it into a poem, and other's don't? Why is a poet, or indeed anyone, interested in a certain thing more than another? Does this spur to interest come from the same place as poetry does - i.e, from outside? And, in speaking of the poet, is interest part of the poetic? What can be said about interest in considering procedures whereby the material comes from outside the poet's experience (by this I mean typically autobiographical experience; I realize that the materials for selection and combination are philosophically the poet's experience)? I'd say that the poet's interest lies in the choice of procedure rather than the specific content of the poem, and in choosing to write a poem procedurally. Does interest shift in the writing of a poem, first in the topic / procedure, then, in the case of non-procedural poems, from word to word and line to line and stanza to stanza? Is this a way of escaping the prosaic, this shifting of interest? It may also underscore the uncertainty of human thought, of the suspicion that nothing is finally final, which I think is part of the poetic. Often this interest shifts itself right out of the writing of the poem, causing the poem to be abandoned, temporarily or otherwise; what is to be said about this? The poetic as it appears in a frame of time does not always coincide with a particular poem. When the poem cannot shift and remain the same poem, the poem must come to a stop. One can go on writing it, though. Then you have literature masqing as a poem within the poem.

AHB: I should just say I dunno and be done, but where's the mystique in that? Just kidding. You tend to place tacks on the road in front of my rollicking bicycle: a lot of the ideas you throw out are ones I've never considered. Thus I flail. I don't know why certain experiences appear in one's work, while many others don't. Let me think... You are right that procedure is key. Such of my reading that casts a particular narrative can find its way into my work. Like lately, having read a number of books about climbing Mt Everest (a thing I would ne'er do in this life, thanks), I have written poems out of that. The narratives allow a procedural step. Flarf interests me because it is a conscious move toward areas of concern that one mighn't allow or acknowledge. Perhaps the bad in taste, perhaps the inarticulate. When I write with the flarf hat on—it is bright green, btw—I look for oddity, surprise, misadventure. I think readership has gotten caught up on a superficial aspect, and do not acknowledge the power of the inarticulate. I speak of the chat room sort of rage and wonder that flowers in flarf. The inarticulateness of that rage and wonder is poetic. But I don't mean to isolate on flarf. Poetry isn't common sense at all, it is the uncommonest sense. Van Gogh's ear is an emblem of vast, barely expressed intensities, Starry Night versus D'ou Venons nous. Except that it isn't a battle of eradication but what, together, comes after or from. Zat make sense? Paul and Vincent were poorly matched as personalities, yet there was some sort of making between them. An artistic formulation. Their clash escaped prosaic. I lean towards a hoky fantasticalness, writing of Fu Manchu and Tarzan and a frisky Lenin. Proust chose class strictures, but made them fantastical. Woolf went into sex and class. Etc etc. I think you're onto it, with the idea of shiftiness. Artists look for territories where their feet don't stick to the ground. When the feet stop moving, that's when adventure loses out, and the determined and prosaic lives on. So we write to surprise ourselves, keep the engine running.

78

2006-07-07T05:44:00.000-07:00

JH: Not cool at all! Sometimes I clip along merrily, for a few lines, but there's always something in poetry, for me, that resists writing. That the poetic winds up in the words that prose uses is something that the poetic resists mightily. So I'm a nervous nutty wreck, too. For me poetry cannot be planned - it could happen at any moment, and it could stop after a few lines. The poetic comes from nowhere, but the solely human has to write along with what the poetic provides. What makes me nervous is wondering, as I'm writing, which is the poetic and which is me. When I get a thought as how to finish a line, and what line should follow a particular line, and where to enjamb a line I feel it's me doing the thinking, being of the intuition that the poetic does not allow me, or indeed any poet, into its thought process. Do you think the poetic arrives fully formed, but incompletely recognizable to the human mind (thus requiring writing to bring it more into view)? Or do you think the poetic itself is a process given to the poet and the final product, the poem, is something the poetic wants (though often the poet realizes that the poem is very much removed from the original process)? Considering these ideas of the poem as a collaboration between the human and the poetic, does a collaborative poem between two poets, such as Monster, shine any light on the matter?

AHB: First, apologies that I'm so slow in responding to you. I take a pointless pride in my usual writing quickness (altho I am very poky in formal, thesis-type writing), but I am living in a high disractability. Anyway. Fully formed and incompletely recognizable, verily yeah. That iffiness is important, I think. It exists as a kind of desperation or at least ill ease whilst trying to read or write poetry (or come to grips with any art form). The artistic experience suffers (I use the verb guardedly) a randomness, in which the artist doesn't know if what he/she does is 'The Real Thing”, and the one partaking doesn't know either. Not in the classic 'I know pornography when I see it' way. I mean, okay, top of the head blows off, that's a good clue, but I don't think even Emily had that surety all the time. Certes she fussed her poetry, equivocated. Perhaps a collaboration does illuminate the thinking here, insofar as half the process goes on beyond you and me, each singly. Speaking clearer (would that I could), I mean we throw leaps at the other that aren't easily mapped. I wonder how you got to some point, and vice versa, and we, collaborating, feel we must make up the distance and try to continue. Which we do. We make our artistic decisions but Monster seems to develop on its own. We do not, in distinction from some collaborators, have much discussion as to how to proceed. Even if we did, there's still you, me, and the thing itself, creating the Monster. We each have only so much control of the reins. I think I agree that the poem is what the poetic wants, and the poet goes along for the ride.

77

2006-06-14T16:20:00.000-07:00

JH: I think that occasionally plowing ahead regardless of the content of the preceding installment helps Monster power along. One can always return to the content later - and who knows? maybe the installment is informed somehow by the previous seemingly-unanswered installment. Is any poem alive if unpublished? It's alive as long as at least one person - the author - reads it. A body of poetical work - whether it's one poet's amassment of poems or a large poem (such as Monster) - informs a poet's thinking as much as extra-literary personal memories. Do you agree? How few of one's poems are needed to be a part of one's memories? A single poem may do, with lines and words giving the ambiguity and complexity needed for mulling. One may compare a poem with another poem, but can one compare lines and words of a single poem without the poem losing coherence and falling apart into a collection of words and lines (the lines now becoming sentences... how few lines before the lines become sentences? - is enjambment the magic key?)?
AHB: Powering ahead despite content I guess is a way of staying loose, off the rail. We've mentioned already a sort of vamping that we do occasionally, riffs that don't push this content but nonetheless add a tension, as well as a curious stretch. I have a lot of poems sitting on the hard drive, and a terrific amount in notebooks, that I have never looked at since I wrote them. Most of them I have no memory of writing. When I make my occasional treks thru those exhibits, some of these poems come alive. If I tried to make a list of my poems, one's that I can really picture (I have none by memory, that's for sure), the number would be, what, twenty? Well, perhaps more, but those others are if not dead at least inanimate, until that Frankenstein scene I already alluded to. The work is all learning, I'll admit that. With my early writing, muchly what I'd hope for in a poem is a line or two that I liked, the rest of he lines just gave evidence of my lack of skill. But those few lines, they are direct evidence of my not just wanting to write a poem, but taking steps toward. Young writers are hopeful that they will indeed make a poem. At some point, clarity of task insinuates itself into the process. Enjambment and disjunction are important to my sense of poetry, by virtue of their non-prosaicness. Ugh, what would be a better way of saying that? The simple trick of enjambment brings metre or breathe into the writing. Our vamping phrasal riffs in Monster, which don't make sense re the content, sound (two meanings there) a poetics. The rhythm section takes over for a few bars, but not to say melody and harmony are over. Are you as cool about writing as you seemed? I'm a nervous nutty wreck.

76

2006-06-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

JH: An ending to Monster could, at this point, only be imposed from without. It would not be dictated by the poem. The very fact of characters vanishing, seemingly forever, in this poem seems to drive it on further. Were the most-recurring characters - Wormswork and Ophelia, to name two of them - to disappear forever - but what is forever in this poem? - other characters would step to the fore of the stage. Often, I think, the main characters are but allusions (as in an elegy, it now occurs to me) - but then they become solid characters again. Do our theories of the poem, of poetry, as we've discussed on Antic View, hold true for the collaborative poem (in general, and Monster in particular)? Do the poetics need altering when we speak of the collaborative poem? What happens in a collaboration - is Monster a poem or a collaborative poem? I think of Monster as being as much a self-sufficient poem, with its own nature and demands, as a solo poem - but cannot explain, yet, as to why.

AHB: I see Monster as unended, possibly unendable. But is this monster alive if unpublished? Or does it await the thunderstorm, the opening of the ceiling, the direct effects of the world? The distinction between poem and collaborative poem interests me. With collaboration, we have a thing between us. You see it your way, I see it mine. It is both! A collaboration makes itself. I've remarked before that I often can't tell which part you wrote and which part I wrote. I need little clues such as that you use the ambersand and I use English spellings to identify the author of a section. You and I disappear, replaced by The Author of Monster. The work is a living thing. It is also a snaky path we follow. Sometimes I cue directly from what you write, and sometimes I plough forth almost as if I hadn't read the preceding. I assume a similar experience on your side. I think this giving over to the work is similar whether in collaboration or solo. Of course with the collaborative process (at least as we've defined it), we depend on the other's response. With distractions lately, I haven't been as quick replying to your installments as formerly. The collaboration is written in its own time, a combination of yours and mine. Ornette Coleman did a recording in which he had two bassists. One or both (as usual I'm fuzzy on details) f the bassists were recorded elsewhere with no idea what the rest of the combo was doing. Which I offer as a different vision of collaboration. Disappearances and reappearances.

75

2006-06-03T06:37:00.000-07:00

JH: "hurdling our confused sense of language into the zone of release" is a very useful and provocative phrase! The zone of release is separate from language, as are emotions? We all think in much the same language, despite our tongue (or species, even, if you want to get elemental). Calling thought (instinctive, for lack of a better word, rather than intellectual) a language is a function of language (words), which tends to fashion all in its image. Much as "the shades of 231 literary giants persuaded / Virginia's last ashes to their assorted psalms". Psalms are poems, persuasion is a function of language / literature, shades (ghosts) and ashes (remnants, funerary) are, in reality, the ultimate fictional characters in that such leavings refer to what came before. In poetry, shades and ashes are the imaginary leavings of imaginary beings. The 231 literary giants appear in four of my poems written in a four-month period (2004 and 2005). I had considered giving a few names, either actual or invented, of the 231 literary giants. Perhaps my Sainte-Beuve is one of them, and perhaps Herr Bibliothekarius. Time will tell, or not. "Faucet Hill" is a fictional town that appears in one other poem. "Faucet Hill Pharaoh-Gazette July 8, 1891" suggests that the poem is based on a newspaper account (or the poem was published in this newspaper). Where do such fictional characters go? Why do some disappear, and others remain? Is it simply a matter of the author's interest? Are some characters less of a draw for words? You have used several characters in your poetry, and some do not return (it was good to see the return of Lenin in your "plans to make plans, and how!"). Can one even speak of a return in a body of work - isn't it all set in place, being in that body? What was to be ephemeral is promised permanence of a sort, such as Virginia in the psalms of the 231 literary giants, but the river carries it away. Three page cards are presented to the reader out of several thousand - why are the others not presented? Wouldn't it still be a poem, no matter how long? Why are the 231 literary giants unnamed? Why not a complete history of every object (and etymology of the words) mentioned in any poem? Why is compression important in a poem? Does it have to do with the celebration / lamentation of the fleeting? Or would an attempt at comprehensiveness expose, upon examination, all that was forgotten or deemed insignificant in that poem? How to celebrate or lament comprehensively if there are omissions? Can there be such a thing as general elegy - doesn't the capacious live on, immortal, despite parts (though these parts be counted in the billions) that fall away?

AHB: I think the body of work inhales the entire possibility of _______. characters come and go, but even the fleeting built something. I may be infinitesimal, it may be many. This discussion lets me bring up something on my mind. We have a collaboration together, which is I think 4+ years running now, correct me if I'm wrong. I don't even have a tally of page count, but safely it is hundreds of pages. Will it end? Can it partly end? My questions arise from the sense of fleetingness. Characters appear thru out the thing (yclept “Monster”). Other characters make brief appearances. Doesn't, as you say, the capacious live on? What is the life of this work that you and I know, and few others? It's been noted that of the famous great long works of modernism and post-mod, only Zukofsky managed to finish his. Do you think your questions above relate at all to that fact? can we finish “Monster”, and should we???

74

2006-05-13T04:30:00.000-07:00

JH: I think everyone fails poetry. That we can speak of poetry apart from the poem is a failure of poetry or of the reader? Or did the first poem put forth the idea of poetry in order to replicate itself, to stow away in the idea of poetry? Are all poems, and the idea of poetry that allows them to be composed, just the first poem in different guises? To fail to exactly recreate this first poem and so discover how to write a second poem, unique and distinct from the first poem, is an instance of how we have failed poetry. Sooner or later we'll get to that second poem. Linguistics have failed, and always will, to find a base for language through empirical methods. But poetry is irrational, and, luckily, self-referential - so it's feasible that the first poem could be blurted out. But how to know this first poem when it is written? This question is similar to a question I posed in January (about the lost texts of the world appearing again in new works of literature, word for word, and how could we know), but in this scenario those lost texts are but versions of the first poem. Would a completely new poem, unlike any other - and there have been plenty of attempts throughout history - be the first poem or the second? Do we even need a second?

AHB: There's just one poem, an exultation. Which is lofty sounding: but I'm not aiming for the Paris Review. But there are moments of absolute, of language fully attested. It's a dream state that we remember. You know, you have ideas of poetry as you write or read, and glimmers of the manifestation. But something misses, fails. To be an artist requires facing that fact constantly. Perfection, hahaha. A poem is a statement that is amazement. I return to Emerson saying that every word was a poem once. Blue is blue as blue as it can be, where you can even bring in the idea that colour is illusive, that things aren't coloured, the reflected light is, but not really. Whatever the science there, my point being that a word is an enclosure with worm hole possibilities. (My son, with Star Trekky awareness, sees wormholes and such as normative parts of the world). Casey Stengel once told the troops, line up in alphabetical order according to height. I don't do Zen, and koans make my brain go yikes, but I can cop to hurdling our confused sense of language into the zone of release. That's where poetry heads, or it leads us. okay, ponder all that, and meanwhile, some poems by JH at Otoliths. can you name the 231 persuasive literary giants? This poem “Faucet Hill-Paraoh Gazette—July 8, 1891” is absolutely curious with reference and syntax. What are you up to? Why do I like it?

73

2006-05-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

JH: I don't do translating per se, but I am assisting a poet in translation of some of the plays of Elena Garro. I assist strictly and accurately, ideally. Have you also translated in traditional fashion? I really admire your translation via altered texts. as I've commented here before. Speaking of your poems, let me say how much I like your latest poems (very much!). Your "patr 1, his early, middle and late" is excellent:

Look, here's the latest history of Ted Berrigan. He was born in Tulsa, Rhodeland. Here he wrangled with a strict attention to how they sound. On each street he sees more guys, and people, and he struggles with temperament. He's just a lad in a groaning place. He learns to pay attention, but you can't buy much with that. Moving to Provider, Oklahoma meant that he was in charge of the next few years of American history. He fought in the war against the naming of other things by the names intended for these things of which we all are said to be familiar with. He got plug ugly with teachers, wrassled on the home team, left some places in a rush. He met Ron Gallup and Dick Padgett. Inside of minute they were fast friends, tho nowhere near the record. The record began with Motown beat, familiar and yet. They moved quickly and suddenly it was New York, honest. Have you fucking seen New York? It's like one grand toaster oven. Each piece of white bread you stick in that oven, it becomes its inner piece of toast. Same possibly could work for whole wheat, rye and other sorts of bread type conveyances but that resides out of the purview of this study. We're at the point when the story gets exciting. Here goes, in no particular order: Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Frank O'Hara, Larry Rivers, Anne Waldman, Joe Brainard. Already the list seems old fashioned, but poems used to include them like anything. His kids and all, stories, Pepsi, the choice of generation, etc. then some other stuff, written in that way that says: this is written this way. Then some other means of conveyance, cup, siphon, prodigy, off gold. Then dying in the last expanse.

"patr 1, his early, middle and late" has more dimensions than a piece I've always liked by Joe Brainard called "Van Gogh":

Who is Van Gogh?
Van Gogh is a famous painter whose paintings are full of inner turmoil and bright colors.
Perhaps Van Gogh's most famous painting is "Starry Night": a landscape painting full of inner turmoil and bright colors.
There are many different sides to Van Gogh, the man.
When Van Gogh fell in love with a girl who didn't return his love he cut off his ear and gave it to her as a present. It isn't hard to imagine her reaction.
Van Gogh's portrait of a mailman with a red beard is probably one of the most sensitive paintings of a mailman ever painted.
It is interesting to note that Van Gogh himself had a red beard.
When Van Gogh was alive nobody liked his paintings except his brother Theo. Today people flock to see his exhibitions.
Van Gogh once said of himself: "There is something inside of me - what is it?"

"Van Gogh" is almost a piece of found poetry (but re-written as in information regurgitated - someone asks "Who is "Isaac Newton" and the reply is, typically, a re-phrasal of encyclopediaesque entries), with some commentary. When I said your "patr 1, his early, middle and late" had more dimensions than Brainard's "Van Gogh" it wasn't necessarily a criticism of Brainard's piece, but "Van Gogh" has the sense of recital of information, instead of narration, with the commentary presenting itself as more information masquerading as a human speaker (the information realizing, in the mouth/pen of the speaker, that more words, with an appearance of the extraneous, are needed if it is to come from a speaker, instead of from a collection of data that had the human removed from it in order to be information). "patr 1, his early, middle and late" is poetry, dodging pure information and its masquerade. Intentionality is a (yet another!) bugbear of poetics, and procedure may or may not come into the consideration of intentionality. The poem is free of intentionality and procedure upon completion, though the poet has nostalgia, perhaps, for the process and intention, and a false idea of the poem, certainly, if he or she thinks of the poem at all -- True or false? Regardless, could you say a few words about "patr 1, his early, middle and late" (and about Brainard's "Van Gogh", if you want - does the reader, as well as the poet, have a false idea of the poem? Who reads poems? What are we in fact reading when we read the words of a poem? Has anyone ever read a poem?)?

AHB: I've doodled translations using my high school French, but aside from my wobbly skill in French, which makes it more of a casual game than anything literary, I'm not all that interested in strict translation. I'd be more interested in translation like Pound's Cathay. He was, first of all, trying to make interesting poems, rather than accurate translation. Arthur Waley may present a more accurate rendition of what Li Po wrote, but I'd rather read Pound's work. “patr 1” should really be part 1, it's just my typical rush typo as I sent the thing off to the Wryting list. But as you accept that spelling, you've given it coinage, so that I guess that that is how it should be. It is 'part 1' because I meant to write more, but so far have only writ one other section. And it is partly an informational poem, wherein slurred facts are presented (you can't get the news from poems). We've discussed using characters in our work, and Berrigan, with the facts that I impute (impugn) to him, is another. Brainard's poem brings to mind a couple of songs by They Might Be Giants. In one, the lyrics are taken verbatim from a children's book about the sun. All these robust, almost toxic bits of info about the sun are straightforwardly sung to the point of vapid ridiculousness. And yet. TMBG also have a song about about the electrifying James Polk (when I was young a cereal offered little statuettes of presidents in each box. I got Polk, which thoroughly disappointed me because I'd hope for a more interesting president like Washington, Lincoln or Franklin), again plain data concerning Mr 54-40 or Fight. I think those questions that you ask are apt insofar as Ted Berrigan is in our midst. I've been reading his collected, and his work confronts those questions head on and obliquely. His freewheeling play confronts questions of poetry (what is) and facts. And audience, oh my god! Sometimes I wonder if people have read poems, because in their exultation of having read something, the reaction suggests something different from the glowing conception in my brain when the word (capital P) Poetry comes to mind.. I don't mean that snobbily. It's more like that Poetry is almost more than we can handle, unless you're Dickinson (with the top of her head exploding) or some like. Do you find poetry more than you can handle? Do you find that you fail it, or it you, not just the writing but the reading?

72

2006-05-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

JH: Digging up my copy of the Penguin Nerval, I find that Sieburth quotes (translates) Nerval quoting (translating) Goethe's remarks on the subject of poetry being translated into prose: "In his preface to his 1840 translation of Faust, he quoted the Sage of Weimer himself in justification of this practice", writes Sieburth, and then he gives this passage (Goethe by Nerval by Sieburth):

"All honour no doubt should be accorded to rhythm and rhyme, for they are the primordial and essential attributes of poetry. But there is in a poetic work something far more crucial and fundamental, something that produces the profoundest of impressions and that works with the greatest effect upon our spirits - namely, that which remains of a poet in prose translation, for only this conveys the true value of the material in all its purity and perfection."

Poetry comes first in civilization, before writing. The act of writing is prose, once it goes beyond magical symbols. To write poetry is to visit the two (contrary?) spaces, of civilization and barely-human thought. Words themselves are prose, once they evolve past their first primordial utterance and come to have a quotidian utility, a use outside of themselves, no longer a song. Poems are built from this prose. If you build a palace out of bottle caps, people are going to see the bottle caps along with the palace. Prose is seen in the most hermetic or lyrical poem, since it is made of words. Prose is words considered as the act of writing, which is why words may be passed over and still the prose is read. Poetry is the words themselves (including the punctuation, with any lineation considered as punctuation), without reference to what lies outside the poem (any outer reference the reader sees is coincidental, due to a common language). Skip over but one word in a poem, you have not read the poem. There's a tension in the meeting of the poetry of the word and the civilization of the written text (prose). In poetry, lines or sentences are words in themselves. In prose, the word by word is dispersed widely in the process of getting the meaning across. Prose is allusion, rather than conjuring. Poetry is conjuring a scene that would not exist except as in a poem, even if the poem is a description of a sunset. The sunset in/of a poem is not outside the poem, it is the poem. In prose the sunset is the sunset that happens every twilight, no matter how specifically the sunset is described. Why does poetry refuse to be prose? For a poem to be prose instead a poem would be for the poem to never exist in the first place so it could pass into prose - the prose it was to evolve to, if indeed that is a naturally-intended progression, would have to allude to the poem, and once the poem is written, or formed in the mind enough where it could be written, it can only refer to itself. The poem as poem stops with the poem, and can only turn into prose from the outside, via commentary or translation. So, is there more tension (in the meeting of the poetry of the word and the civilization of the written text), more of a risk, even, in prose poems than in lineated poems? How about in prose translations of lineated poems?

AHB: It has been useful for me to consider these questions and angles that you propose. It is right yet odd to think of poetry coming first, then prose. I've gotten somewhat lost in poetry's vastness, the possibilities of poetry. Thinking of poetry as rhymed and metered writing proved simpler (and remains so for many readers). And then there's the generational fisticuffs as to whether this or that is poetry 'really poetry”. Which is an overly pop perspective, if you ask me. But anyway, prose as poetry is a fuzzy conception. Tho it goes the other way as well, by which I mean those poems that narrate stories, Don Juan, for instance. And it may be that what makes a prose poem poetry lies in the lack of utility in the prose: the words are not being put to a specific charge of meaning but are allowed to find their own manners. I don't like Ron Silliman's binary distinctions, his School of Quietude, but I know poems exist that partake of palpable intention. Once again I can reference Keats, the Egotistical Sublime. I don't know if prose poem runs a risk of turning prosy, prosaic. I think it is important to be open to irregularities when writing it, and not let the rules of prose write the poem. Rules don't write poems. Prose translations of lineated poems admit that the music is lost in translation. I think risk gets mystified in that process. The translator tries to render calmly the poem's dream, a difficult task. Do you translate? I often take texts and change words, so that a sense of the original remains yet the meaning is much altered. The original shows in shadows and memories, let us say. The risk in that, and also or prose translations of lineated poems, is in not forcing the complexion of a tendency, like adding irony or sentiment or such into and onto the original. Could you be content to translate strictly and accurately?

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JH: Certainly. I do like Jeff Koons' sculpture, which I think is called "Puppy" - over 40-feet tall and made of living flowers - something like a more whimsical instance of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Speaking of the essence of poetry, and, going back a bit, of translation, what are your thoughts on prose translations of lineated poems? I don't know how far back this goes - but Nerval was doing it in the middle of the 19th century in his translations of Goethe and Heine. Nerval writes (I'm getting all this from the Penguin selected writings of Nerval, edited by Richard Sieburth) that the essence of poetry is what can be transmitted via prose (prose translation, and paraphrase could be a synonym for translation, yes?)! This I found a bit alarming - poetry as not what survives translation but as what can be translated, and into prose at that. To me, poetry is in the order of the words as much as the words themselves, with punctuation playing a crucial part. If the poetry is lineated, I feel the translation should preserve the lines, in number and enjambment. Always having the original text next to the translation is indispensable to the reading of a translated poem, as it shows where the translator has added or removed words, punctuation, and lines. But this remark of Nerval suggests that poetry is ideally an earlier draft for prose. And indeed, poetry/song comes before prose in the development of a civilization - could it be that poetry stops before prose? Poetry plus more time would always be prose? Why then does a poem refuse to be prose to begin with? Why the halt? I'm using prose here in the simplest sense, as in the newspaper, this blog entry, and not in the sense of a string of words that fail to have a rhythm or quiddity of poetry. Is prose only a shape, or, more accurately, a lack of shape? The words are the thing?

AHB: Seem like Nerval got it bass ackwards, and I'd say that to his face. For one thing, you lose the music that the poet heard. Which'll pretty much happen with any translation. Lineated poetry admits to different strictures than does prose, so there's a serious skew there. I too would take the prose (or any) translation if I also get the original, with which I might also tussle. And you're right, Nerval's idea suggests that poetry is a draft of prose. That prose being, I guess, what you would explain to your therapist. That's like so Harold Bloom. There is something about the shape of poetry, that it gets to play about the page differently than prose. Which almost says that prose indeed is about just the words. When I committed to prose myself (it was a solemn rite), it was something about not always being convinced by poetic form. You can think of a sonnet, that the poet is forcing the words into that box. I wondered long ago why so many poems by Robert Bly were made of numbered sections, usually three sections. I don't think he considered his form (the dope), it was some bland necessity, like voting the Republican ticket. So I allowed myself to write my poems in prose. And while I try to Strunk and White that prose, I also accept disjunction and “errors in good English” as poetic means. And yes, the words are the thing. Still, in prose, you pass over words. You don't stop at the word of and wonder what the heck it means. Whereas in poetry... Zukofsky's poem “The” (“the desire of towing”) forces (or suggests to) the reader to look at the determiner. Poetry has no alluvials. But you tell me: why does poetry refuse to be prose?

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JH: Is this ("Prose answers, but poetry doesn't") because poetry is closer to language as it was first formed? There's a lot of mythology ("mythology" meant non-pejoratively) out there about the origin of language, but there seems to be an agreement that the origin is not with us, nor its immediate environs. Is poetry (just) a gesture toward the origin of language? Often poetry is commentary on the origin of literature, or of writing (poetry or otherwise) in particular, which may be yet another gesture toward language. What are your thoughts on removes - Plato's ideas on art being a remove from nature which is a remove from the Ideal, and Hegel's ideas on removes of consciousness (self-consciousness from consciousness, and, I believe, various degrees of self-consciousness -- I don't know much about Hegel, but I recall that you've read quite a bit of him), for two examples? Is poetry a leap over the idea of removes - creation of a poem being an origin and thus a reflection or instance of the origin of language? If so, why would poetry be privileged above an utterance such as "Have a nice day"? Wouldn't poetry and "Have a nice day" both partake of the origin of language, though they are cluttered with historical removals and social codes? Poetry is exceptional as poetry, but when isolated as a mass of words, how then is it distinguishable from "Have a nice day"?

AHB: Yeah, Poetry is a gesture towards the origin of language. I get lost in removes, and in a way think they may get in the way. I mean, too much thought of how the bicycle works and not enough where it is going. Tho those are entwined, so I may just be excusing my lack of depth. In a sense, art is removed from nature, but in another sense, art is nature. Art has life and lives its ways, which are akin to but not the same as our lives. I've read Hegel, and the (weird) pleasure I've taken from him is as a leap over the idea of removes, altho in another sense his work absolutely is a remove, if remove means a distancing or separation. I read Hegel and hardly get it, but the work offers a similar pleasure to walking in the fog. I guess I walk the fog (not dog) as I effort to answer your queries. As Emerson says, all words were originally poems, excitement of a communicative discovery. “Have a nice day” can be a poem if someone (Captain Picard?) makes it so. if the words are uttered (written) as poetry, then they are poetry. (Not to enter any debate as to whether said poem is 'good'). Those words can be a sincere wish, a mindless gratuity, an ironic sneer, etc. poetry is intensity, but not just that. Lew Welch writes of wanting the same desperate intensity in his work as a yell he heard a tourguide yell at a child about to fall into a vat. But that's not to say the yell was a poem, just that its demand was essential. And poetry is that as of essences... I mean, this is a boggling question, really. Jeff Koons did a work, basically it was a Rose Parade float, a sickeningly cute cartoonish dog. In one sense at least it is indistinguishable from a Rose Parade float, even made from flowers. Koons' intent, however, is art, certainly it wasn't to make a mawkish float for a parade. There's something tricksy and perhaps overly hip here, but there's an adamant look present in the work. That look is what poetry does to language. Make sense?