*
some of the worksheets from my transversion of a Follain poem, with a brief preface:
*
. . . . from Clive Wilmer's review (TLS June 1/07) of the new Ted Hughes compilation Selected Translations. . . . :
"Daniel Weissbort, who edited this selection, tells the story of Hughes taking another poet's translation of a work by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhasz and, without any knowledge of the original language and no Hungarian speaker to advise him, turning that version into a thrilling poem that drives the existing versions off the map."
*
Like Hughes in the case of Juhasz, my transversions are based not on the original, but on translations. . . .
But of course my parlor pastiches will hardly "drive the existing versions off the map." Nor is that their aim, really . . . they're more like exercises, as painters and composers will often attempt "variations on" . . .
*
In the case of this poem "by" Jean Follain, I have worked from translations by Merwin and Romer (they are appended here below my drafts). I'm assuming both their versions are accurate literal renderings of the original's content. Reading them, you can see what I've changed or added, in particular how I've "put back in" references to the biblical characters Adam and Noah, which Follain carefully left out.
It may seem odd that I've taken a poem which is not rhymed even in the original French version (I don't have the Follain text, but based on every poem of his I've ever seen I'm confident this one is similarly not end-rhymed)—why have I taken a vers libre and done this to it. But his poems are often sort of sonnety in their way. Stephen Romer writes: "[Follain's] poems, very rarely more than fifteen lines or so in length, are vignettes . . . " This is from the Introduction to 20th-Century French Poems (Faber, 2002) edited by Romer (see below for more Romer-on-Follain). That "fifteen lines" phrase struck me, and I suddenly wondered if the typical Follain could be read as a sonnet in subterfuge, and if so why not try doing a transversion in that mode . . .
As a further incentive, I worked to make each line decasyllabic.
*
Note: the drafts appear here in reverse, sort of, with the most recent ones above the earlier . . .
*
THE RETURN (after Follain: from Merwin/Romer)
The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
in ways for the stranger who's late to come,
but he whose force was never sure of home
may not even pause when faced with its gates.
Clothed wholly in the mendicant's threadbare,
his headwear the tin lid of a trashcan,
he will know to announce himself as man
the prodigal: Hey guys it's me! But where
the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat burrs dark
and the pig guards the last milk it laps at,—
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can augur storms, they have formed their own ark.
Unyielding the response to him must be;
the same it has been since edenity.
*
*
Perhaps for the stranger who's late to come,
It seems for the stranger
At times for the stranger
In ways for the stranger who's late to come,
Ostensibly the stranger late to come,
The one whose force was never sure of home,
Who may not even blink before its gates—
Will he know to announce himself as man
He will dare to announce himself as man
Will he dare to
May not even wince/smirk as he nears its gates—
May not even wince to approach its gates
May not even pause to approach its gates
May not even wink or pause at its gates
May not even pause or blink at its gates
May not even blink at breaching its gates
May not even blink as he gains its gates
as he goals its gates
entering passing
May nonchalant pose before its gates
May strike a nonchalance before its gates
May not even blink when faced with its gates
May not even blink as he nears its gates
May not even blanch when faced with its fates
May not even care when faced with its gates
*
the mule grubs for food, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule mulls root-cud,
the mule cuds up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
thorn-roots/ weed-roots / wheatshoots /
the mule grazes grass /
the mule drools cudstuff,
the donkey drools cud,
the mules grubs for / spuds for grub
the mule digs / probes / roots for fodder /
the mule gnaws barley, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps root-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps herb-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses herbs, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule sniffs herbage, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat grows dark,
the pig guards the meager milk it laps at,—
the pig guards the milkcurd it laps at,—
where the pig guards the weak milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the bare milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the meek milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the mild milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the last milk it laps at
The mule chews herbs and the mare in her dark
Coat broods, where a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
Can foretell storms, they have formed their own ark.
can augur storms, they have made their own ark
they have cast their own ark.
they have borne their own ark.
where the dog bears a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms, they have found their own ark.
the mule gnaws herbs and the mare's coat grows dark—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms—they have formed their own ark.
the mule gnaws grass and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig slurps the milk it sips at—
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms—this farm is like an ark.
coat nods and the pig smears the milk it laps at;
coat broods and the pig laps at a milkmat
coat broods and the pig licks at lumps of milkfat
the mule gnaws herbs and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig swigs curds of milkfat—The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
can foretell storms: they have formed their own ark.
the pig laps up a milklet;
the pig laps a milk tricklet
the pig drinks at a thin spigot
coat broods and the pig licks a butterpat
the pig drinks thin its milkfat
Coat broods a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Coat broods and a meager milk is lapped at:
Coat broods and a meager milk gets lapped at;
Coat broods and a meager cream goes lapped at;
where the pig finds meager milk to mouth at
where the pig looks for meager milk to lap at
where the pig pursues a meager milk to lap at—
where the pig finds/has a meager milk to slurp at/splurge at
to lunge at/ to surge at/gush at / gnash at / nosh at/ gorge at
where the pig roots a/roots for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig has a meager milk to nose at—
where the pig roots out meager milk to lap at—
where the pig drools for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig hogs the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig hunches over
where the pig hoards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig defends the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is afraid someone will steal the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is jealous /cautious/ wary/
*
The donkey nibbles through sweets/hills/mallows of thistle
And the mare in her dark coat deepens/becomes/
The mare as her dark coat grows to leather;
the pig burps after milk in a trickle,
the starfaced dog, the cat uninured to weather . . ./
the starfaced dog, the cat who weeps at weather . . .
the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to weather . . .
the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to storms.
Coat broods and the mild pigs-milk is lapped at
and the mare in her dark coat—and the pig
who burps his meager milk—and then the dog
with starred brow—the cat sensitive to storms.
the donkey nibbles thistle and the horse
stands in its dark coat and the pig burps at
his meager milk and the dog and the cat
bare starry foreheads and bark at storms.
can fore-sense storms and the dog's forehead
bears a star.
the cat can fore-sense storms
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms
the donkey nibbles grass and the mare _____
in her dark coat and the pig's milk mustache
*
WELCOME
The sun has washed with white the farm too late /of late
Always for the stranger at last to come, /too late to come
The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
Stunned if the stranger should finally come
But he whose roots were /force was /never here at home
May not even blink as he nears its gates—
The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
*
So their response to him will be the same
It has been for ever before he came.
It has been ever since before he came.
These animals' response/answer to him will be
The same it has been since antiquity./eternity.
So therefore/even their response to him will be
So the only response to him will be /must be
The same it has been since they left that sea.
The stark response to him will be
The stolid response to him will be
*
/the stranger of me to /that stranger of mine to come
Always for the stranger I am to come
/ never mine
Wearing a rubbish-bin's tophat/tin cover as crown,
Wearing a trash can's tin cover/ coverlid as crown,
He will know to enter/declare the scene his own,
Declaring again/in first-person Friends I am here. Where
in first-person Friends I am here. There where
Declaring Friends your Noah's here! Where
Loud prodigal: Friends I am here. But where
Mere prodigal:
Forked prodigal:
He will know to announce himself as man
The returning prodigal: I'm here! Where
Comeback prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and proud: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and loud: Friends I am here! Where
The prodigal pride: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal with pride: Friends I am here! Where
Pride and prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Pride prodigal:
/
THE RETURN (after Follain: from Merwin/Romer)
The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
in ways for the stranger who's late to come,
but he whose force was never sure of home
may not even pause when faced with its gates.
Clothed wholly in the mendicant's threadbare,
his headwear the tin lid of a trashcan,
he will know to announce himself as man
the prodigal: Friends I am here. But where
the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat burrs dark
and the pig guards the last milk it laps at,—
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can augur storms, they have formed their own ark.
Unyielding the response to him must be;
the same it has been since edenity.
*
*
Perhaps for the stranger who's late to come,
It seems for the stranger
At times for the stranger
In ways for the stranger who's late to come,
Ostensibly the stranger late to come,
The one whose force was never sure of home,
Who may not even blink before its gates—
Will he know to announce himself as man
He will dare to announce himself as man
Will he dare to
May not even wince/smirk as he nears its gates—
May not even wince to approach its gates
May not even pause to approach its gates
May not even wink or pause at its gates
May not even pause or blink at its gates
May not even blink at breaching its gates
May not even blink as he gains its gates
as he goals its gates
entering passing
May nonchalant pose before its gates
May strike a nonchalance before its gates
May not even blink when faced with its gates
May not even blink as he nears its gates
May not even blanch when faced with its fates
May not even care when faced with its gates
*
the mule grubs for food, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule mulls root-cud,
the mule cuds up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
thorn-roots/ weed-roots / wheatshoots /
the mule grazes grass /
the mule drools cudstuff,
the donkey drools cud,
the mules grubs for / spuds for grub
the mule digs / probes / roots for fodder /
the mule gnaws barley, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps up roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps root-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule chomps herb-cud, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses roots, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule noses herbs, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule sniffs herbage, the mare's coat burrs dark
the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat grows dark,
the pig guards the meager milk it laps at,—
the pig guards the milkcurd it laps at,—
where the pig guards the weak milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the bare milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the meek milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the mild milk it laps at,—
where the pig guards the last milk it laps at
The mule chews herbs and the mare in her dark
Coat broods, where a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
Can foretell storms, they have formed their own ark.
can augur storms, they have made their own ark
they have cast their own ark.
they have borne their own ark.
where the dog bears a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms, they have found their own ark.
the mule gnaws herbs and the mare's coat grows dark—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
where the dog has a starred brow and the cat
can foretell storms—they have formed their own ark.
the mule gnaws grass and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig slurps the milk it sips at—
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms—this farm is like an ark.
coat nods and the pig smears the milk it laps at;
coat broods and the pig laps at a milkmat
coat broods and the pig licks at lumps of milkfat
the mule gnaws herbs and the mare in her dark
coat broods and the pig swigs curds of milkfat—The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
where the dog's brow bears a star and the cat
can foretell storms: they have formed their own ark.
the pig laps up a milklet;
the pig laps a milk tricklet
the pig drinks at a thin spigot
coat broods and the pig licks a butterpat
the pig drinks thin its milkfat
Coat broods a meager milk goes lapped at,—
Coat broods and a meager milk is lapped at:
Coat broods and a meager milk gets lapped at;
Coat broods and a meager cream goes lapped at;
where the pig finds meager milk to mouth at
where the pig looks for meager milk to lap at
where the pig pursues a meager milk to lap at—
where the pig finds/has a meager milk to slurp at/splurge at
to lunge at/ to surge at/gush at / gnash at / nosh at/ gorge at
where the pig roots a/roots for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig has a meager milk to nose at—
where the pig roots out meager milk to lap at—
where the pig drools for meager milk to lap at—
where the pig hogs the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig guards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig hunches over
where the pig hoards the meager milk it laps at—
where the pig defends the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is afraid someone will steal the meager milk it laps at—
the pig is jealous /cautious/ wary/
*
The donkey nibbles through sweets/hills/mallows of thistle
And the mare in her dark coat deepens/becomes/
The mare as her dark coat grows to leather;
the pig burps after milk in a trickle,
the starfaced dog, the cat uninured to weather . . ./
the starfaced dog, the cat who weeps at weather . . .
the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to weather . . .
the starfaced dog, the cat sensitive to storms.
Coat broods and the mild pigs-milk is lapped at
and the mare in her dark coat—and the pig
who burps his meager milk—and then the dog
with starred brow—the cat sensitive to storms.
the donkey nibbles thistle and the horse
stands in its dark coat and the pig burps at
his meager milk and the dog and the cat
bare starry foreheads and bark at storms.
can fore-sense storms and the dog's forehead
bears a star.
the cat can fore-sense storms
the dog's forehead bears a star and the cat
can fore-sense storms
the donkey nibbles grass and the mare _____
in her dark coat and the pig's milk mustache
*
WELCOME
The sun has washed with white the farm too late /of late
Always for the stranger at last to come, /too late to come
The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
Stunned if the stranger should finally come
But he whose roots were /force was /never here at home
May not even blink as he nears its gates—
The sun has washed with white the farm that waits
Stunned for the stranger to finally come
*
So their response to him will be the same
It has been for ever before he came.
It has been ever since before he came.
These animals' response/answer to him will be
The same it has been since antiquity./eternity.
So therefore/even their response to him will be
So the only response to him will be /must be
The same it has been since they left that sea.
The stark response to him will be
The stolid response to him will be
*
/the stranger of me to /that stranger of mine to come
Always for the stranger I am to come
/ never mine
Wearing a rubbish-bin's tophat/tin cover as crown,
Wearing a trash can's tin cover/ coverlid as crown,
He will know to enter/declare the scene his own,
Declaring again/in first-person Friends I am here. Where
in first-person Friends I am here. There where
Declaring Friends your Noah's here! Where
Loud prodigal: Friends I am here. But where
Mere prodigal:
Forked prodigal:
He will know to announce himself as man
The returning prodigal: I'm here! Where
Comeback prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and proud: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal and loud: Friends I am here! Where
The prodigal pride: Friends I am here! Where
Prodigal with pride: Friends I am here! Where
Pride and prodigal: Friends I am here! Where
Pride prodigal:
*
*
W. S. Merwin:
Welcome
On the farm in its full color
it is on a day of bright sunlight
that one awaits the stranger.
Dressed in fine black fabric
and wearing a top hat
he will push the gate open
saying friends here I am.
The donkey nibbling the blue thistle
the mare in her dark gown
the pig drinking sour milk
the dog with the starred forehead
the cat who can sense a storm
before him will be the same
as in hard Antiquity.
*
by Stephen Romer:
Welcome
In the freshly whitewashed farm
it is a sunny day
to be waiting for the stranger.
Clad in thin black cloth
and wearing a top hat
he will push the gate
and say friends here I am.
The donkey grazing on blue thistle
the mare with a dark coat
the pig drinking thin milk
the dog with the starred forehead
the cat sensitive to storms
will be the same before him
as in hard Antiquity.
*
*
Here's Stephen Romer on Follain:
Follain catches the instant and preserves it in aspic, or behind glass that is absolutely transparent: the speaker casts no shadow on his poems, which are rigourly impersonal in presentation—not once does Follain use the personal pronoun 'je', preferring always the neutral 'on'. . . . Perhaps no other poet of the century can suggest, with equal economy, such vertiginous and often desolating temporal perspectives. Follain is also a crucial figure in providing a viable alternative to Surrealism, which he claimed to 'admire' but knew to be inimical to his own genius. . . . By reasserting the possibility of a poetry anchored in the world, and by inventing a new type of lyric poem, scoured of sentimentality and subjectivity, Jean Follain may prove, indeed, to be the major influence on the best [French] poets of the latter part of the century. . . .
(quoted from pages xxxiii/xxxiv of Romer's introduction to 20th-Century French Poems)
***
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
if knott, then not
*
here's Luke Hankins protesting a review by Joan Houlihan, over at the Contemporary Poetry Review site:
". . . I am quite surprised to hear your idea that end rhyme shows up mostly in light verse today, which I’m guessing must be based more on what you personally choose to read than on objective observation (exceptions, off the top of my head and in no particular order: Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, A. E. Stallings, Paul Muldoon, Ernest Hilbert, Ashley Anna McHugh, Melissa Range, Natasha Trethewey, Morri Creech, Erica Dawson, Adam Kirsch, Geoffrey Hill, Fred Chappell, Gjertrude Schnackenberg, Sherman Alexie . . ."
*
Gee I wish my 128-page book "Ear Quire: Selected Rhyming Poems" was good enough to have Hankins add me to that list of contemporary poets who use rhyme, but of course it's not.
Besides their poor quality, my rhyming poems can also be downloaded free (in PDF form) via Lulu.com, as can many other of my books,
and in a capitalist society merit/value is based on price:
if my books cost nothing, then ipso facto they're worth nothing.
Luke Hankins knows my rhyming (and nonrhyming) verse is worthless, and he's right.
///
update: by not including me in hits lst Hankins made me realize how worthless my book of rhyming poems was, and so I deleted it from Lulu,
//
here's Luke Hankins protesting a review by Joan Houlihan, over at the Contemporary Poetry Review site:
". . . I am quite surprised to hear your idea that end rhyme shows up mostly in light verse today, which I’m guessing must be based more on what you personally choose to read than on objective observation (exceptions, off the top of my head and in no particular order: Seamus Heaney, Richard Wilbur, A. E. Stallings, Paul Muldoon, Ernest Hilbert, Ashley Anna McHugh, Melissa Range, Natasha Trethewey, Morri Creech, Erica Dawson, Adam Kirsch, Geoffrey Hill, Fred Chappell, Gjertrude Schnackenberg, Sherman Alexie . . ."
*
Gee I wish my 128-page book "Ear Quire: Selected Rhyming Poems" was good enough to have Hankins add me to that list of contemporary poets who use rhyme, but of course it's not.
Besides their poor quality, my rhyming poems can also be downloaded free (in PDF form) via Lulu.com, as can many other of my books,
and in a capitalist society merit/value is based on price:
if my books cost nothing, then ipso facto they're worth nothing.
Luke Hankins knows my rhyming (and nonrhyming) verse is worthless, and he's right.
///
update: by not including me in hits lst Hankins made me realize how worthless my book of rhyming poems was, and so I deleted it from Lulu,
//
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Sunday, June 5, 2011
thanks to Johannes Goranski for posting this on his blog
*
Atrocity Kitsch: Bill Knott and Daniel Borzutzky
by Johannes on May.16, 2011, under Uncategorized
This will be a short post but I wanted to say something about Bill Knott, not so much because he’s left grumpy comments on this blog but because I think he’s a fantastic poet and I wanted to join Kyle Minor’s Bill Knott Week at Htmlgiant, but I couldn’t because I was bogged down in work.
1.
First I’m going to make some generalizations about Bill Knott. I think Bill Knott is a great poet, one of my favorite American poets of the second half of the 20th century. I also think he’s incredibly important: important in the sense of very influential. I see his influences on heaps of poets. Yet, Bill Knott is also a poet who’s almost never mentioned as an “important poet.” When people mention their “influences,” he’s very seldom on the list, even when he’s an apparent influence. I don’t think that’s an unimportant point to make about Knott: it’s part of his authorship.
2.
At the Htmlgiant special, there was a lot of comments made about the fact that Knott self-publishes his books and booklets. In fact, I first came across his work when one of my grad school classmates handed me a booklet. Perhaps this method of distribution could be said to be beside the point, but I think it does suggest something like an approach to writing/publishing that has something to do with his work.
Sure, a lot of poets have and continue to self-publish, including the best ones ever (Whitman, Rimbaud etc), but something that interest me about Knott’s self-publishing is the way it is done in such a make-shift way. Though the poems are great, the booklets look pretty un-fancy. Further, by self-publishing he kind of takes himself out of the “respectability game” – as a very influential and – to a lot of people – awesome poet, Knott should probably instead of going self-publishing (and in such a large quantity) try to edit himself and get people to write about him etc. This is especially true in this age of “too much”. But instead Knott aligned himself with the “plague ground.” (This can be seen as the opposite to say Kenny Goldsmith who’s made his anti-kitsch opposition to the shit, the “creative writing” and “expressionist” poetry of this plague ground a central argument for his own special-ness, his admirability.)
3.
I wanted to pick up on a few things Kathleen Rooney says in her interview about Knott. To begin with, she notes that Knott “kills” himself in his poetry; at first by inventing a persona (who not only dies but is also a virgin); and he names one of his books “Corpse and Bean,” further suggesting the deathiness of writing. For Knott Art and Death are fundamentally intertwined. It seems to me this deathiness, this self-killing is part of an engagement with kitsch, a disposability, an anti-immortality.
4.
Rooney also points out that Knott’s writing is fundamentally in bad taste in many regards. I agree: it’s maximalist, it mixes atrocity and kitsch (art is not only tied to death but violence). At the same time as it’s incredibly fun and interesting to read, it’s not the kind of poetry that people refer to as “the Greatest” or “Most Influential” (though personally I would pick it over just about any living poet’s work any day). It simply is “too much.”
Rooney points to the following piece of poesy:
Nuremberg, U.S.A.
In this time and place, where “Bread and Circuses” has
become “Bread and Atrocities,” to say ‘I love you’ is
like saying the latest propaganda phrase…’defoliation’…
‘low yield blast’.
If bombing children is preserving peace, then
my fucking you is a war-crime.
I love this poem too. Rooney thinks comparing killing children to fucking is in questionable taste, and I obviously agree. But I’m not interested in taste, in fact most great writing is pretty tasteless (Genet’s maximalist baroquery about smelly transvestite criminals with religious names is obviously the best example of this!). Part of what makes this of questionable taste (though this isn’t necessarily the same as “tasteless” which is usually easier to deal with, easier to discard or embrace, more stable) is that it makes this extreme comparison between sex and war crime – but, perhaps more so, because there is an implicit pedophilia in the statement. If Killing children equals fucking, then perhaps it also equal fucking children. And in the insistence on metaphors and comparison, the baroque literariness of it, there seems to be a connection too between art and pedophilia; art is crime, artifice – as JonBenet Ramsey with her adult make-up and Michael Jackson with his fake face showed us – is equal to a kind of molestation.
5.
Here’s another of my favorites:
(Poem) (Chicago) (The Were-Age)
‘My age, my beast!’ – Osip MandelstamOn the lips a taste of tolling we are blind
The light drifts like dust over faces
We wear masks on our genitals
You’ve heard of lighting cigarettes with banknotes we used to light ours with Jews
History is made of bricks you can’t go through it
And bricks are made of bones and blood and
Bones and blood are made of little tiny circles that nothing can go through
Except a piano with rabies
Blood gushes into, not from, our wounds
Vietnamese Cuban African bloods
Constellations of sperm upon our bodies
Drunk as dogs before our sons
The bearded foetus lines up at the evolution-trough
Swarmy bloods in the rabid piano
The air over Chicago is death’s monogram
This is the Were-Age rushing past
Speed: 10,000 men per minute
This is the species bred of death
The manshriek of flesh
The lifeless sparks of fleshCovering the deep drums of vision
O new era race-wars jugular-lightning
Dark glance bursting from the over-ripe future
Know we are not the smilelines of dreams
Nor the pores of the Invisible
Piano with rabies we are victorious over
The drum and the wind-chime
We bite back a voice that might have emerged
To tame these dead bodies aid wet ashes
American poetry obviously has a long and troubled relationship to politics, to atrocities etc. The New Critics had no problem with commemorating the confederate dead, but they didn’t care for “the excesses of the 1920s” (see Cary Nelson’s famous Repression and Recovery). By the time Knott wrote these in the late 60s it was definitely OK to write political poetry. But one things that separates this from a lot of the poetry is that it doesn’t provide a clear place to stand, in fact it implicates art in violence (Another post: why Bly can write some awesome poems about atrocities but then turn around and write some awful nature poems.).
Art is atrocious in Knott’s poems, and in part (like Genet’s Our Lady of Flowers) this comes from its incredibly commitment to literariness, to artistry, to the baroque.
6.
But now I’m making it seem like I like Bill Knott for his transgressiveness or something like that. That’s not exactly true. It’s more like I love the way – as in Genet – the shitty, kitschy stuff intermingles with just stunning sentences and images. As I’ve said before, both the shittiness and the baroque or maximal have long been the most troublesome aesthetics to American poetry – literary devices used out of control is a kind of kitsch. His poetry goes all the way, it’s too much, too beautiful, too literary, at the same time as it gives us shit and corpses.
7.
For example in the “Were-Age,” he asks the reader to become intimitely involved inside Art that reproduces the kind of grotesque baroque of American atrocities: The constellation of sperm on our bodies is both vast/outer space and physical and sticky on our bellies; both historical and metaphorical and physical.
And in all of this: an utter awareness of media and its speed – “death’s monogram,” 10,000 men.” Or as Velvet Underground put it around the same time: “The dead bodies pile up in mounds.” In that song (“Heroin”) media enters the body through a heroin needle (or at least a “spike”); in Knott’s poem media enters like blood going into “wounds.”
And with media we’re back to self-published booklets. Bill Knott as the poet who entered the plague ground with every baroque gesture, and has come out – not as a famous poet of standing and taste – but one of the greatest jesters of the corpse heaps this shitty world has produced.
8.
Knott’s body is a very post-freudian body. These are bodies that are part of history, intertwined with history, but there is no “interiority,” no soul or essence there. Unlike Billy Collins – whom Knott supposedly loves – poetry is not an escape into a truer sphere (compared to swimming often or some other natural space). The bodies pile up like porn or horror movies. And it’s perhaps this that makes his poetry most tasteless of all: not only is there no place to stand, but we are not granted our own beloved interiority, our agency; instead we are piled up and intertwined with the unsavory violence of our world (and the crassly literary).
9.
Also wanted to mention a recent book that I find very much in line with this – Daniel Borzutzky’s “The Book of Interfering Bodies.”
In her (favorable) review of the book on Htmlgiant, Lily Hoang wrote about Borzutzky’s questionable taste: “For instance, I think pulling skin from flesh is something pretty cliché. The first poem in this collection, “Resuscitation,” closes with skin being pulled from the body. I started to read. I rolled my eye.”
There is something unquestionably tasteless about involving torture and art. And yet the two seem inextricably intertwined (see Abu Ghraib):
The soldier had taken my pants and all I had left was skin
I wanted to peel off my skin and dissolve into the tiniest voice
I started to peel the skin off my arms and worked my way up to my shoulder across my neck to the other shoulder along the arms down to the hand
Or:
Its impossible to read the Book of Glass without spilling blood. The reader pulls it out of the tower with special tongs.
Like Knott, history becomes involved with art and kitsch (in Borzutzky’s case a steadily accumulating heap of “books”). And the thing I hadn’t thought about until I compared Borzutzky and Knott was how they speak in a kind of bureaucratic grotesque. Bureaucracy is generally considered indeed kitsch and “banal evil” etc, but in both Knott and Borzutzky bureaucracy becomes very evil, grotesque and beautiful, seductive and repulsive at the same time.
10.
About this bureaucracy, Borzutzky has the greatest epigraph I’ve seen in some time:
“It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of the imagination.” (The 9/11 Commission)
///
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
an interview
otoliths
a magazine of many e-things
ISSN 1833-623X
20110531
Tom Beckett
An Interview with Kirsten Kaschock
Tom Beckett: Where did/does poetry begin for you?
Kirsten Kaschock: Where did it begin? Second grade, a haiku—the idea of compression combined with the idea of power. My haiku was hung up in the hallway beside my drawing of a willow tree, and the school counselor called me out of the room to tell me how deeply it had moved her. She was foreign—an adult—and my memory is memory and thus, inaccurate, but my memory tells me she was tearing up as she told me this. She had brassy hair clearly done up with large rollers and big, thick glasses that magnified her glassy eyes. This story continues to define my writing: my first poem gave me an intense face-to-face audience-experience with a heretofore stranger. The potency of that.
Where does it begin? Need. The need to rework experience with tools. I’ve learned two tools in my life fairly well, my body and my language. I’ve worked through all sorts of experiential knots with both. Living with others (my husband, my children) is also a working through. I wish sometimes I could just be, but then I don’t think I’d make as much. Probably if I were okay with just being, I wouldn’t mind that—but as it is, I’m not. My need to make is not shelve-able. I find it odd that the things I make are not concrete. Like maybe this is an accident. Like my choreography, and especially my poems, should actually be small carved blocks of would. (That typo is probably more accurate than its correction).
TB: To know one’s body and one’s language well strikes me as huge. And, in our culture anyway, rare. It’s a large part of what attracts me to your work—your ability to entwine these realms. Could you speak to how this works in terms of your practice?
KK: Experimenting with language and with movement is something children do until they are told to use those tools “more appropriately.” The disciplines of dance and writing as I learned them were about going deep enough into technique to earn that experimentation back. Later, I began to question if one needed to go through the rigidity to get to the freedom, but for me that path provided me with a sense of confidence as well as a needed attitude of surrender. Both. I know now I must be confident enough to surrender, to trust in unknowing.
Dance and writing have beautiful divergences, but retaining some of each while inside the other is my way to threaded-ness. So when I give a prosepoem circular or inverted phrasing, it is a formal device I’ve used in choreography. Even better are strategies that can’t be translated directly: to try to repeat a poetic phrase at different levels; to attempt a poetic line with a different facing; to attenuate the phrase in time. In dance, one might try to tighten-the-gestures, or to use the white space, or to converse, or to pun. Really, the crossovers are endless: form, content, approach, theme, philosophy. I don’t know if I write coherently about my desire to fuse these worlds.
TB: Tools and moods, beside having the commonality of double ohs, seem to me to be what we—as artists—don’t talk about enough. I really want to explore your sense of process. I get the sense, in reading your work, that motion and emotion exist on the same plane. I don’t know if this is a coherent observation, but it’s my excuse for something like a continuation of our conversation.
KK: Motion and emotion on the same plane—I like that. And the double oo (I have a list of double oo words that will eventually become parts of a poem). Making lists of words is part of my process. Insistent ideas are easier to express when I have a formal constraint—pressed through a narrower tube things flow more forcefully. Of course, I both create the tube and discard it if it proves unhelpful.
I like tasks. Games. So these small exercises (tools) I use to help me get into a state (mood) where what could be termed the content of my work is not so heavy, so molasses... I noticed in your aphoristic work, “Andswearving Fragmeants” in Otoliths, that short, almost-didactic statements seemed to send you flying forward into ideas that proceeded one-on-another’s heels. There is so much momentum in these numbered questions, answers, statements of belief. The form, in this case, not only allows but propels one into a contradiction of self—a way “to contain multitudes.” Of course, that’s just my take.
Form is not something I am precious about... it is the paces I put myself through to get beyond the formal. How to use words to try to break/get beyond language, to use movement to get beyond the body. By testing the specific limits of the media I try to find where those media are porous—transcendent...
TB: There’s a lot of stuff going on in your response, but I’m going to be a little reductive. On the one hand, you’re extolling the practical value of constraints—of creating, say, a constellation of vocabulary as a basis for establishing boundaries to react to/against. On the other hand, you’re trying to get beyond materials/media to something unknown, something beyond what you know. What I think you’ve described is the foundational dialectic of poetry writing—at least the kind of poetry writing I care about.
What makes you itch to write poetry? What gets you going?
KK: Frustration. Pain. I wish I could write out of joy, but usually when I’m joyful (I have brief spurts)—I don’t do much writing. Poetry is also a place where I bash heads. My own. Meaning: I find I disagree with myself often, and that I carry associative links around with me that bother, nay, obsess me. I sit down with these internal conundrums and try to play out a rhythm—multiple rhythms—hoping they will overlay into something I can live with. Right now, I am working on this connection that has been with me for a decade: domesticity and rectangles. I’ve written 26 poems so far about the shape of the rectangle (book, window, room, computer screen, Volvo, stage proscenium, bathtub, the family unit...) and how this elongated square relates to... women? the family? capitalism? I swear there is something there. I haven’t hit the root yet (another double oo—a favorite), but it’s lurking. I write also because when I stop writing for any length of time I am not myself. Writing accesses and coalesces thought in a way I am incapable of without it. I am a devotee. An addict. I don’t think I know any writers who do not suffer from this need. Are you free of it?
When I am not writing, I dance more. When I am not moving—my writing is more tortured. Balance escapes me. I am constantly making peace with my own asymmetry.
TB: I suffer too when I can’t write. I note in “Andswerving Fragmeants” that poetry is a form of substance abuse and that connections can’t be found often enough.
Domesticity and rectangles. Wrecked angles/angels? Is it a matter of exploring the ways in which our experience of the world is framed? The ways in which we are framed?
I love the way you create generative contexts to work from, the way you worry a line into revealing its rich associations. Your piece in the most recent Otoliths worked with the sentence “Time is a quality of movement.” Somehow I suspect you’re not yet done with that line of thought.
KK: Yes, framing. All art is incompletion. That is how art works for me—either by sculpting (a revealing by removal) or collage (revelation by juxtaposition of fragments). Creating something and saying “this is done” is an illusion and an act of violence, of isolating things/objects/ideas and pretending that they are whole, can stand on their own. I feel the same way about the concept of family in our culture. How family is used as a credo for greed rather than as an impetus for connection with a larger world. And yet I participate in both art and my family with fervor. I am a violent animal.
“Time is a quality of movement” is science (I am married to a scientist—an act of generative collage?). Meditating on this statement is yet another act of accretion—trying to think through its anti-intuitive ramifications on my life. On others’ lives. Physics is personal. As you wrote: “Lists and collage are my syntax and grammar. I come alive within active juxtapositions.” This is perhaps the fix. Finding the connections... how they light up when we do our work well... how the synapses crackle. You are right that I am not done with this phrase—I am in fact worrying it to death, as part of an attempt to braid my entire fragmentary life together: movement, motherhood, language.
TB: You have a novel coming out in a few months. What was its impetus?
KK: The impetus?—an art form that doesn’t exist: sleight. Sleight has no content (or at least none of which the creators nor performers are consciously aware). The art form is empty. There is no there there. Sleight is the setting, and in some ways also the main character. The novel is about the people who take part in such a thing, whose lives it is. It is about how everything they do, all their relationships, their identities—how all of it is colored and altered by something they can’t ever quite define or capture or understand.
It’s a tad autobiographical.
TB: I’m looking forward to reading it.
Do you see your writing as, in any sense, a social project? Are politics and/or philosophy important to you?
KK: Very important. I’m an unhappy capitalist. I think our democracy is failing, but I don’t know the remedy. I’ve read more pages of philosophy than poetry or fiction in the past three years. But I have a problem with philosophy, politics, and art— the creators of it do a hell of a lot of preaching to the choir. And nitpicking. And infighting.
My politics and philosophy provide of course a substrate for my work, but I try not to speak out of ideology. I’m not even sure what mine would be... transcendental-empathy maybe. I try not to be paralyzed by ideas. For example: any categorical word I know to be inaccurate at best (a box that bleeds), but I don’t want to fear using words. Break them a little bit, so that I can see the blood, smell it. But not shatter them beyond use, because I believe in communication. Imperfect though it is, any faith I have is in our ability to learn from one another and our world. (I just used the first person plural—daring, no?)
How could putting out ideas not be a social project? I do not want a boutique audience. I like engaging with people different than I am, who think differently than I do but also deeply and with love. Those people are not only poets, so I make an effort not to sequester myself inside my poetics.
TB: Who do you think of as your artistic forebears?
KK: Caveat: our ancestors do not always provide us with dominant traits but are inside us nonetheless. Some of mine are Rilke and Ponge, Basho and Bausch (Pina, a choreographer), Robyn Hitchcock, Marguerite Yourcenar, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Bill Knott. I have many other, current influences—but these are some of my longest standing associations, and they have marked me in the way family does.
TB: What, as an artist, worries you the most?
KK: Everything. Or, everything that worries me at all worries me as an artist. But I also find hope in art—art provides a skill set for re-invention when things go terribly curvy.
I worry sometimes that the art-I-love is invested in freedom-without-limit, in contagion and plague-states. Wanting to “make something happen” so badly it doesn’t matter what the something is. (This freedom seems akin to a new enlightenment-rationality—unquestioned in that way.) I worry about the ethics of artists, about my ethics.
I believe in mindful action, but I desire reaction. So I worry about contradiction, and being paralyzed by contradiction, and also, of course, I adore contradiction.
So I worry about madness, I guess—and the tyranny of sanity. And how to balance action with thought. And how to raise good people... and be one... everything.
TB: Thank you, Kirsten, for taking the time to do this interview.
Tom Beckett lives and works in Kent, Ohio.
///
a magazine of many e-things
ISSN 1833-623X
20110531
Tom Beckett
An Interview with Kirsten Kaschock
Tom Beckett: Where did/does poetry begin for you?
Kirsten Kaschock: Where did it begin? Second grade, a haiku—the idea of compression combined with the idea of power. My haiku was hung up in the hallway beside my drawing of a willow tree, and the school counselor called me out of the room to tell me how deeply it had moved her. She was foreign—an adult—and my memory is memory and thus, inaccurate, but my memory tells me she was tearing up as she told me this. She had brassy hair clearly done up with large rollers and big, thick glasses that magnified her glassy eyes. This story continues to define my writing: my first poem gave me an intense face-to-face audience-experience with a heretofore stranger. The potency of that.
Where does it begin? Need. The need to rework experience with tools. I’ve learned two tools in my life fairly well, my body and my language. I’ve worked through all sorts of experiential knots with both. Living with others (my husband, my children) is also a working through. I wish sometimes I could just be, but then I don’t think I’d make as much. Probably if I were okay with just being, I wouldn’t mind that—but as it is, I’m not. My need to make is not shelve-able. I find it odd that the things I make are not concrete. Like maybe this is an accident. Like my choreography, and especially my poems, should actually be small carved blocks of would. (That typo is probably more accurate than its correction).
TB: To know one’s body and one’s language well strikes me as huge. And, in our culture anyway, rare. It’s a large part of what attracts me to your work—your ability to entwine these realms. Could you speak to how this works in terms of your practice?
KK: Experimenting with language and with movement is something children do until they are told to use those tools “more appropriately.” The disciplines of dance and writing as I learned them were about going deep enough into technique to earn that experimentation back. Later, I began to question if one needed to go through the rigidity to get to the freedom, but for me that path provided me with a sense of confidence as well as a needed attitude of surrender. Both. I know now I must be confident enough to surrender, to trust in unknowing.
Dance and writing have beautiful divergences, but retaining some of each while inside the other is my way to threaded-ness. So when I give a prosepoem circular or inverted phrasing, it is a formal device I’ve used in choreography. Even better are strategies that can’t be translated directly: to try to repeat a poetic phrase at different levels; to attempt a poetic line with a different facing; to attenuate the phrase in time. In dance, one might try to tighten-the-gestures, or to use the white space, or to converse, or to pun. Really, the crossovers are endless: form, content, approach, theme, philosophy. I don’t know if I write coherently about my desire to fuse these worlds.
TB: Tools and moods, beside having the commonality of double ohs, seem to me to be what we—as artists—don’t talk about enough. I really want to explore your sense of process. I get the sense, in reading your work, that motion and emotion exist on the same plane. I don’t know if this is a coherent observation, but it’s my excuse for something like a continuation of our conversation.
KK: Motion and emotion on the same plane—I like that. And the double oo (I have a list of double oo words that will eventually become parts of a poem). Making lists of words is part of my process. Insistent ideas are easier to express when I have a formal constraint—pressed through a narrower tube things flow more forcefully. Of course, I both create the tube and discard it if it proves unhelpful.
I like tasks. Games. So these small exercises (tools) I use to help me get into a state (mood) where what could be termed the content of my work is not so heavy, so molasses... I noticed in your aphoristic work, “Andswearving Fragmeants” in Otoliths, that short, almost-didactic statements seemed to send you flying forward into ideas that proceeded one-on-another’s heels. There is so much momentum in these numbered questions, answers, statements of belief. The form, in this case, not only allows but propels one into a contradiction of self—a way “to contain multitudes.” Of course, that’s just my take.
Form is not something I am precious about... it is the paces I put myself through to get beyond the formal. How to use words to try to break/get beyond language, to use movement to get beyond the body. By testing the specific limits of the media I try to find where those media are porous—transcendent...
TB: There’s a lot of stuff going on in your response, but I’m going to be a little reductive. On the one hand, you’re extolling the practical value of constraints—of creating, say, a constellation of vocabulary as a basis for establishing boundaries to react to/against. On the other hand, you’re trying to get beyond materials/media to something unknown, something beyond what you know. What I think you’ve described is the foundational dialectic of poetry writing—at least the kind of poetry writing I care about.
What makes you itch to write poetry? What gets you going?
KK: Frustration. Pain. I wish I could write out of joy, but usually when I’m joyful (I have brief spurts)—I don’t do much writing. Poetry is also a place where I bash heads. My own. Meaning: I find I disagree with myself often, and that I carry associative links around with me that bother, nay, obsess me. I sit down with these internal conundrums and try to play out a rhythm—multiple rhythms—hoping they will overlay into something I can live with. Right now, I am working on this connection that has been with me for a decade: domesticity and rectangles. I’ve written 26 poems so far about the shape of the rectangle (book, window, room, computer screen, Volvo, stage proscenium, bathtub, the family unit...) and how this elongated square relates to... women? the family? capitalism? I swear there is something there. I haven’t hit the root yet (another double oo—a favorite), but it’s lurking. I write also because when I stop writing for any length of time I am not myself. Writing accesses and coalesces thought in a way I am incapable of without it. I am a devotee. An addict. I don’t think I know any writers who do not suffer from this need. Are you free of it?
When I am not writing, I dance more. When I am not moving—my writing is more tortured. Balance escapes me. I am constantly making peace with my own asymmetry.
TB: I suffer too when I can’t write. I note in “Andswerving Fragmeants” that poetry is a form of substance abuse and that connections can’t be found often enough.
Domesticity and rectangles. Wrecked angles/angels? Is it a matter of exploring the ways in which our experience of the world is framed? The ways in which we are framed?
I love the way you create generative contexts to work from, the way you worry a line into revealing its rich associations. Your piece in the most recent Otoliths worked with the sentence “Time is a quality of movement.” Somehow I suspect you’re not yet done with that line of thought.
KK: Yes, framing. All art is incompletion. That is how art works for me—either by sculpting (a revealing by removal) or collage (revelation by juxtaposition of fragments). Creating something and saying “this is done” is an illusion and an act of violence, of isolating things/objects/ideas and pretending that they are whole, can stand on their own. I feel the same way about the concept of family in our culture. How family is used as a credo for greed rather than as an impetus for connection with a larger world. And yet I participate in both art and my family with fervor. I am a violent animal.
“Time is a quality of movement” is science (I am married to a scientist—an act of generative collage?). Meditating on this statement is yet another act of accretion—trying to think through its anti-intuitive ramifications on my life. On others’ lives. Physics is personal. As you wrote: “Lists and collage are my syntax and grammar. I come alive within active juxtapositions.” This is perhaps the fix. Finding the connections... how they light up when we do our work well... how the synapses crackle. You are right that I am not done with this phrase—I am in fact worrying it to death, as part of an attempt to braid my entire fragmentary life together: movement, motherhood, language.
TB: You have a novel coming out in a few months. What was its impetus?
KK: The impetus?—an art form that doesn’t exist: sleight. Sleight has no content (or at least none of which the creators nor performers are consciously aware). The art form is empty. There is no there there. Sleight is the setting, and in some ways also the main character. The novel is about the people who take part in such a thing, whose lives it is. It is about how everything they do, all their relationships, their identities—how all of it is colored and altered by something they can’t ever quite define or capture or understand.
It’s a tad autobiographical.
TB: I’m looking forward to reading it.
Do you see your writing as, in any sense, a social project? Are politics and/or philosophy important to you?
KK: Very important. I’m an unhappy capitalist. I think our democracy is failing, but I don’t know the remedy. I’ve read more pages of philosophy than poetry or fiction in the past three years. But I have a problem with philosophy, politics, and art— the creators of it do a hell of a lot of preaching to the choir. And nitpicking. And infighting.
My politics and philosophy provide of course a substrate for my work, but I try not to speak out of ideology. I’m not even sure what mine would be... transcendental-empathy maybe. I try not to be paralyzed by ideas. For example: any categorical word I know to be inaccurate at best (a box that bleeds), but I don’t want to fear using words. Break them a little bit, so that I can see the blood, smell it. But not shatter them beyond use, because I believe in communication. Imperfect though it is, any faith I have is in our ability to learn from one another and our world. (I just used the first person plural—daring, no?)
How could putting out ideas not be a social project? I do not want a boutique audience. I like engaging with people different than I am, who think differently than I do but also deeply and with love. Those people are not only poets, so I make an effort not to sequester myself inside my poetics.
TB: Who do you think of as your artistic forebears?
KK: Caveat: our ancestors do not always provide us with dominant traits but are inside us nonetheless. Some of mine are Rilke and Ponge, Basho and Bausch (Pina, a choreographer), Robyn Hitchcock, Marguerite Yourcenar, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Bill Knott. I have many other, current influences—but these are some of my longest standing associations, and they have marked me in the way family does.
TB: What, as an artist, worries you the most?
KK: Everything. Or, everything that worries me at all worries me as an artist. But I also find hope in art—art provides a skill set for re-invention when things go terribly curvy.
I worry sometimes that the art-I-love is invested in freedom-without-limit, in contagion and plague-states. Wanting to “make something happen” so badly it doesn’t matter what the something is. (This freedom seems akin to a new enlightenment-rationality—unquestioned in that way.) I worry about the ethics of artists, about my ethics.
I believe in mindful action, but I desire reaction. So I worry about contradiction, and being paralyzed by contradiction, and also, of course, I adore contradiction.
So I worry about madness, I guess—and the tyranny of sanity. And how to balance action with thought. And how to raise good people... and be one... everything.
TB: Thank you, Kirsten, for taking the time to do this interview.
Tom Beckett lives and works in Kent, Ohio.
///
Sunday, May 29, 2011
update
*
those of you who noticed and responded to my two recent posts (now deleted),
thank you!
I have found an editor to help me with that project.
///
those of you who noticed and responded to my two recent posts (now deleted),
thank you!
I have found an editor to help me with that project.
///
Monday, May 23, 2011
attuned
*
from my COLLECTED SONNETS 1970-2010 (which like all my other books can be downloaded free via the link atop the sidebar here):
*
MARTIAL
Military sculpture is
to sculpture as
military food is to food,
if there are
any sculptors or chefs
left who have not
been conscripted, since
military verse
is to verse as
military noon is
to noon, the hands
straight up in rhyme.
And music—
music of course is war.
Note:
Anybody who reads poetry can see the ubiquitous self-doubts poets evince regarding the validity/value of their art. Compare that to the smug self-satisfied attitudes exhibited by the advocates and practitioners of music. They take it for granted that music is the highest art, the universal art, the only art that transcends all borders and biases. They never question that given assumption. The arrogance of composers and musicians is insufferable. They really believe Pater's dictum that all the other arts are inferior, that all the other arts "aspire towards the condition of music." But every military that ever marched out to murder rape and destroy was led by what art: were those armies fronted by poets extemporizing verse—by sculptors squeezing clay—by painters wielding brushes—actors posing soliloquies? No, the art that led those killers forth, the art whose urgent strident rhythms stirred and spurred their corresponding bloodlust, was the art to which they felt closest, the art that mirrored their evil egos. That's why they have always put music up there at the vanguard of their war-ranks, because not only is it the emblem, the fore-thrust insignia of their purpose, it is their purpose: it is the condition to which they aspire. But if music is what its hucksters continually sell it as, 'The Universal Language', what that means is that before the Babel Discontinuity there was no music. Music did not exist before Babel, and will cease to exist when a true universal language (and a true universal peace) returns in the form of digitaldata/pictovids exchanged instantaneously by androids cyborgs robots. Music will soon be as obsolete defunct extinct as humans are.
*
After I wrote the above, I was intriqued by its ending, and this short poem came about as a result:
[UNTITLED]
Before the Babel Discontinuity
there was no music, only poetry—
when we return to that prior state
as androids cyborgs we shall hate
this falsity called "music"; solilovids
will provide our numbered heads
with much truer means of commune.
Attuned we'll be without a tune.
*
As I tweeted the other day:
Not until the last musician is strangled with the entrails of the last composer will we be free from Walter Pater.
*
But going back to Pater: think how very different our (contemporary) relation to music is from his, compared to his experience of it. How often would he have heard music?
I ask that literally: how often and under what conditions would he in his daily life have physically heard music, ie real music as opposed to any tune humming in his head?
I would guess to answer that question by saying : not very often: on special occasions, concerts, recitals, probably church bells more than anything else, a street musician perhaps, though it's hard to imagine Pater walking on streets where such creatures thrived . . .
Now compare that to our current experiencing of music, how it ubiquitously presses in on us relentlessly from every medium, you can't make a phonecall without being assailed by it, every store you go into blasts your ears with it, every street is boomboxed and car-stereoed to death with its intrusive noise. . . in many cities you can hardly find any public space not polluted by amplified "buskers"—
there is no escape from it.
It greases the gears of consumer capitalism as much as the oil our government is currently killing as many as it can to gain control of.
If Pater had to hearsuffer what the average USAer is deluged with on a daily basis, I doubt he would reverence music quite as highly as in his pre-massmedia'ed cloistered Oxford. . .
*
Anyway, my poem above (with its note) is in the mode of hyperbole, and not meant to be taken entirely unsatirically.
But I can't be the only poet in the last hundred years who has chafed at Pater, and has resented the fact that poetry is not ranked first among the arts.
And yes, I would say it again, the complacency and arrogance of composers and musicians is insufferable. Poets are constantly questioning the value and the validity of poetry; do composers and conductors ever do that?
I have had no personal acquaintance with those in music—my view of their smug arrogant attitude is based on what I've read and heard them say in various media.
*another sonnet on the subject:
TRANSHENDECULOUS
Granted every poet "constantly aspires
towards the condition of music," that sphere
of perfection which Walter Pater declares
the other arts must humble themselves before:
so why shouldn't I kneel by the podium
and beg the conductor to leave her baton
propped upon my proselyte head like a sword
knighting me until I can hardly rise from
that ideal sill: one could have no grail beyond
that grace; could never long for that pated wand
to guide your own quest: its shadow bids us toward
the stead path still, sticking out over the brow
like some penile spitcurl: so why not die there
while maestro Mater makes his lowest bow?
Note:
"In music, then, rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or measure of perfected art." —Pater.Title: Trans(from poetry to music/from Pater to Mater)hendec(-asyllabics)ulous(ridic- of no-brow me to adumbrate the Great Pate).
///
from my COLLECTED SONNETS 1970-2010 (which like all my other books can be downloaded free via the link atop the sidebar here):
*
MARTIAL
Military sculpture is
to sculpture as
military food is to food,
if there are
any sculptors or chefs
left who have not
been conscripted, since
military verse
is to verse as
military noon is
to noon, the hands
straight up in rhyme.
And music—
music of course is war.
Note:
Anybody who reads poetry can see the ubiquitous self-doubts poets evince regarding the validity/value of their art. Compare that to the smug self-satisfied attitudes exhibited by the advocates and practitioners of music. They take it for granted that music is the highest art, the universal art, the only art that transcends all borders and biases. They never question that given assumption. The arrogance of composers and musicians is insufferable. They really believe Pater's dictum that all the other arts are inferior, that all the other arts "aspire towards the condition of music." But every military that ever marched out to murder rape and destroy was led by what art: were those armies fronted by poets extemporizing verse—by sculptors squeezing clay—by painters wielding brushes—actors posing soliloquies? No, the art that led those killers forth, the art whose urgent strident rhythms stirred and spurred their corresponding bloodlust, was the art to which they felt closest, the art that mirrored their evil egos. That's why they have always put music up there at the vanguard of their war-ranks, because not only is it the emblem, the fore-thrust insignia of their purpose, it is their purpose: it is the condition to which they aspire. But if music is what its hucksters continually sell it as, 'The Universal Language', what that means is that before the Babel Discontinuity there was no music. Music did not exist before Babel, and will cease to exist when a true universal language (and a true universal peace) returns in the form of digitaldata/pictovids exchanged instantaneously by androids cyborgs robots. Music will soon be as obsolete defunct extinct as humans are.
*
After I wrote the above, I was intriqued by its ending, and this short poem came about as a result:
[UNTITLED]
Before the Babel Discontinuity
there was no music, only poetry—
when we return to that prior state
as androids cyborgs we shall hate
this falsity called "music"; solilovids
will provide our numbered heads
with much truer means of commune.
Attuned we'll be without a tune.
*
As I tweeted the other day:
Not until the last musician is strangled with the entrails of the last composer will we be free from Walter Pater.
*
But going back to Pater: think how very different our (contemporary) relation to music is from his, compared to his experience of it. How often would he have heard music?
I ask that literally: how often and under what conditions would he in his daily life have physically heard music, ie real music as opposed to any tune humming in his head?
I would guess to answer that question by saying : not very often: on special occasions, concerts, recitals, probably church bells more than anything else, a street musician perhaps, though it's hard to imagine Pater walking on streets where such creatures thrived . . .
Now compare that to our current experiencing of music, how it ubiquitously presses in on us relentlessly from every medium, you can't make a phonecall without being assailed by it, every store you go into blasts your ears with it, every street is boomboxed and car-stereoed to death with its intrusive noise. . . in many cities you can hardly find any public space not polluted by amplified "buskers"—
there is no escape from it.
It greases the gears of consumer capitalism as much as the oil our government is currently killing as many as it can to gain control of.
If Pater had to hearsuffer what the average USAer is deluged with on a daily basis, I doubt he would reverence music quite as highly as in his pre-massmedia'ed cloistered Oxford. . .
*
Anyway, my poem above (with its note) is in the mode of hyperbole, and not meant to be taken entirely unsatirically.
But I can't be the only poet in the last hundred years who has chafed at Pater, and has resented the fact that poetry is not ranked first among the arts.
And yes, I would say it again, the complacency and arrogance of composers and musicians is insufferable. Poets are constantly questioning the value and the validity of poetry; do composers and conductors ever do that?
I have had no personal acquaintance with those in music—my view of their smug arrogant attitude is based on what I've read and heard them say in various media.
*another sonnet on the subject:
TRANSHENDECULOUS
Granted every poet "constantly aspires
towards the condition of music," that sphere
of perfection which Walter Pater declares
the other arts must humble themselves before:
so why shouldn't I kneel by the podium
and beg the conductor to leave her baton
propped upon my proselyte head like a sword
knighting me until I can hardly rise from
that ideal sill: one could have no grail beyond
that grace; could never long for that pated wand
to guide your own quest: its shadow bids us toward
the stead path still, sticking out over the brow
like some penile spitcurl: so why not die there
while maestro Mater makes his lowest bow?
Note:
"In music, then, rather than in poetry, is to be found the true type or measure of perfected art." —Pater.Title: Trans(from poetry to music/from Pater to Mater)hendec(-asyllabics)ulous(ridic- of no-brow me to adumbrate the Great Pate).
///
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