they seem monotonous

Only the men remaining, able to breathe in peace, each on his own centre in integrated morning mood, the party held together by the ceremonial furnishings of the table and securely apart by the impermanent nature of the gathering.

Dorothy Richardson, Dimple Hill, 1938



Design (perhaps by definition) seems to guarantee outcome
Better yet
Each outcome is intermediary – the very purpose of pattern is to be reassuring
And yet, since they are saturated with psychial ‘pastness’
Patterns cannot claim limitless purity
Patterns amplify reality because they both modulate and prophesy our perception of them
Where at first they seem monotonous they soon become monstrous
Then is all organization portenteous and narrative


Lyn Hejinian, A Border Comedy, 1997

jackals, rhinos, cloud-elephants

For the rest, I was hardly in the mood for coquetry at Weisenbach; a melancholy wind blew under the doors and through the passages of the inn: when the wind blows I am in love with nothing else.

The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand, vol. 6, 1850, tr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos



This lake, even a mustard seed’s too large to sink in it,
But everyone comes to drink its water.
Deer, jackals, rhinos, cloud-elephants are born,
And, barely born, fall back into the lake.

Poem #130, from I, Lalla, the Poems of Lal Ded, 2011, tr. Ranjit Hoskote

[before our own comprehension] (preliminary

Death being the first form of Life which we have had the power to Contemplate, our entrance here being [before our own comprehension] (preliminary to our own) an Exclusion from comprehension, it is [strange] amazing that the fascination of our own predicament does not entice us more. With such sentences as these directly over our Heads we are as exempt from Exultation as the Stones –

Emily Dickinson, worksheet jotting, published in The New England Quarterly, 1955



Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
Which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
Of fear to the horizon

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, from the title poem in The Heat Bird, 1983

the dense bush

The village itself, like most other villages, was made up of clusters of several hundred small round mud-and-thatch huts, which were scattered all over the plateau. The majority of the people, again like any other villagers in the land, were subsistence farmers by trade. Their lives revolved around their fields, which spread out on the eastern side of the village, across the valley. Also closely involved with their everyday way of life was the dense bush which almost enclosed the village in all directions but the east. Somehow, everything: the village, the valleys, the thick bush and the fertile brown fields were all in turn surrounded by hills and mountains.

Wilson Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, 1976 (”Not for resale outside Zimbabwe,” says this Longman reprint from 1988.)



That we are ourselves and that our leaders in space-time do not in fact exist; that there is sufficient peace in each of our deaths to maintain a universe of light; but we retain a compartment of loathing in each as a weapon; that we would as soon kill a leader as follow one; that to kill means to negate you before us, to void your identity so it is like ours, though less rich (your great ignorance) if you interfere at all with our lives, now passed in voluntary negation; that we also retain certain ancient shamanic or visionary powers, which allow the projection of images in public arenas, that is mind space, for the purposes of haunting, cursing, omenizing, and terrorizing those who would harm us or innocent others. this is not a fiction as document: it is proposed as vision to be deployed for instruction, weapon, solace, or nothing at all, we want you mindful that we see you, in all ways previously ascribed to omnipotent deity. i will continue to present the range of our power our syntax our marks our reflections and conversations, as scribe, as names, as light, as seer and as creature owl. you will do as you wish but may yet be affected, for you are not in control of all matter, and we are forceful and capable of changing the particles, for example, of thought and ideation. you may not be able to bear it; we hope you cannot.

Alice Notley, How the Dead Women may operate, from Negative Space, from Alma, or the Dead Women, 2006

repetitions and variations

We can observe these forms everywhere in nature, and we see how easily all forms of matter on earth – so why not the human consciousness as well? – will yield to what I’m calling the regulating effect of chance. In this way, we can find comfort in imagining that it’s possible to write as easily as frost creates its fernlike repetitions and variations on a window-pane, or as concisely as the flesh of kiwifruit clings to the black cardinal points of its seeds, and even that it might be possible to write completely gray on gray, as when a large cloud, without edges or breaks, will very slowly, as it spreads, begin to reveal a consistency and a direction.

Inger Christensen, The Regulating Effect of Chance, from The Condition of Secrecy: Essays, 2018, tr. Susanna Nied



Shudders of cold convulsed her. Her teeth chattered in an icy frost, full stop. Her shapely ice-cold hands lay still (as in a deep frost, shuddering with cold, slender woman with eyes wide open, renowned silk sheets), full stop. Her shining eyes wandered flickeringly in the dark, and her quaking lips breathed, colon, open quotation marks, capital o-aitch Helena, em-dash, em-dash, Helena, em-dash, close quotation marks, rotation marks, flotation marks.

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929, tr. Michael Hoffmann

our look is what keeps (forever)

The black is a cruel tangent to the little girl’s forehead and cheek. We can never escape from the other, grown-up face that has to deal with our looking and has seen our type before: we are intruders, we feel the pressure of the pages – the possibility of imaginative freedom – against our fingers; our look is what keeps (forever) the pages unread.

T.J. Clark, in his preface to the revised edition of The Painting of Modern Life, 1999. The painting he's describing is Manet’s Le Chermin de fer, 1872 – 73.



Here nothing is decided but only here can the power of decision be tested.

Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1948, tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

strolling grandly over the roof

For weeks he had forced himself not to look for Isobel, but this effort of will was no longer needed. He was like a man who stops writing letters to a friend he is soon to meet in the flesh.

Jessica Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, 1963



Mid-May had passed, and after the bell he heard the cry of a kite.
“So it’s here again,” he muttered to himself, listening from bed.
The kite seemed to be strolling grandly over the roof, and then it flew off toward the sea.
Shingo got up.
He scanned the sky as he brushed his teeth, but the kite was nowhere to be seen.
But it was as if a fresh young voice had departed and left the sky over the roof serene.

Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain, serialised 1949 – 1954, tr. Edward J. Seidensticker

between them are mixed ashes

The Poet is dead in me – my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been my imagination) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stick of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with Flame. That is past by! – I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy – but I have beaten myself back into weight & density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element.

Coleridge in a letter to William Godwin, March 1801

It seems to those who cry that all is lost, almost all almost lost; worse still it seems on the one hand that all has been lost by me, on the other hand that all has lost me; a double mourning then spreads itself over the earth like two sheets, one black, one white, one feminine, one masculine, one easterned, one westerned, and between them are mixed ashes, showing now carmine now grey,

Hélène Cixous, Neuter, 1972, tr. Lorene M. Birden

a step when it is taken

Read this year.

What is a sentence. A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value.

(Gertrude Stein, How to Write, 1931)

“We will advise you to take any step you have decided on,” said Miss Luke. “It must be advisable to take a step. There is more point in a step when it is taken.”

(Ivy Compton-Burnett, More Women Than Men, 1933)

as if she was

As I was looking at three translations of Norwid’s Fortepian Szopena I noticed that everybody had translated one of the phrases, “co chwila, co chwila,” with a different set of words. One of them liked “moment, by moment,” another one “each moment, each moment,” and the last one, “from beat to beat.’ That was Teresa Bałuk, later criticised for being too nice and smooth by Agata Brajerska-Mazur, who said that in order to translate Norwid well you need “extensive knowledge -- not only of the translated text but also of the but also the whole of the author’s works and ideas.” (I don’t have any of that and I’m still disturbed by the infidelity to Norwid’s comma.) Arie Gallas, who co-translated the “each moment, each moment” version with Jerome Rothenberg, lists Polish among the Foreign Language Skills on his C.V., but their poem still comes with an afterword that claims he is “hard to conceive for those of us cut off from him by language.” Rothenberg, Gallas, and a third writer who has just entered their article, Jeffrey C. Robinson, prove their point by quoting Polish writers who agree on “the impenetrable obscurity of [Norwid’s] style and his jarring syntax” (Czesław Miłosz). Their list ends with Bogday Czaykowski, who believes the dead poet “thought of himself as a reader of signs, of traces left by God for human beings to recognize and decipher.”

All of the Polish-English dictionaries I could find told me that “chwila” meant either “moment” or “instant”, with the Cambridge Polish-English Dictionary adding another suggestion, “while.” If, for some magical reason (say aliens cast spells on you), you needed to translate Norwid’s “chwila” as “while,” would the phrase have to become “in a while, in a while”? But then we’re always looking forward to a piece of future scenery without inhabiting our own moment and that seems to be the antithesis of those three real translations by Bałuk, Rothenberg, Gallas, and “moment, by moment”’s Danuta Borchardt.

Translation was on my mind. When I walked upstairs from the Norton Simon’s Ellsworth Kelly exhibition to the Henri Rousseau painting of monkeys in the galleries above I imagined the pointed leaves in Kelly’s Suite of Plants Lithographs were being echoed in Rousseau’s jungle. I remembered how happy André Gide sounds in his journals when he notices that his dislike of Alexandre Dumas is shared by an author he admires, Colette. It’s good for him to see his sensations removed from obscurity in another person.* On Monday, after I had stepped away from Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure, 1950, to watch Agnes Varda’s 1968 film, Lions Love (… and Lies), I had to put the book down for the rest of the day because Viva, one of the Lions characters, was reciting Blanchot’s lines in my head every time I came back to them. I had been reading a chapter that describes the condition of Anne, who is, argues Kevin S. Fitzgerald, a kind of Euridice removing herself from Thomas, who is an Orpheus. “[F]or Thomas's limit-experiences resemble the near death experience of Orpheus in Hades.”

“Then, suddenly,” writes Blanchot, in this translation by Robert Lamberton, “with the noise of a tempest she entered into a solitude made out of the suppression of all space, and, torn violently by the call of the hours, she unveiled herself. It was as if she was in a green valley where, invited to be the personal rhythm, the impersonal cadence of all things, she was becoming with her age and her youth, the age and youth of others.” Although I wouldn’t normally have seen a connection between Thomas and Viva, I realised that if the Warhol star really had begun saying those lines it would not have sounded wrong. The movie, in which people often borrow phrases from Shakespeare, or from Michael McLure’s 1965 play The Beard, or, in one scene, from St. Augustine, would have made sense of the words as they came out of her Buster Keaton stoneface, and the translation from one place to another would have felt legitimate.** Varda’s works are arguments for the carrying capacity of movies, all except Vagabond, 1985. (People who like Vagabond will talk about the personality of the protagonist rather than the filmness of the film.)

Instead of reading Thomas I wached the Melbourne Cup and fooled about, trying to fit the word “translation” around the death of Cliffsofmoher – translated from one of the three hopes of Ireland into nothing or something stupid like that. In light of the dead horse it seems strange to see all these live people running around.




* Originally I wrote “his hatred of Alexandre Dumas” which was nice but I was working off my memory of the passage and “hatred” felt like too much when I looked it up.

After Bella-Vista, which is quite recent, I take up La Maison de Claudine, which I did not yet know. I enjoy reading in it: “Neither my brothers’ enthusiasm nor my parents’ disapproving amazement got me to take an interest in The Three Musketeers.” Yes, I am glad not to be the only one who failed to lose his heart to Dumas père when his companion in boredom is Colette.” (11th of February, 1941. Translated by Justin O’Brian.)

Hatred was not really honest. “I can’t say hatred,” I thought.



** If I were Varda I would be making a joke about Viva’s stoneface being a stoned face, but it needs a French cadence and I’m not French. It would suit her general way of using words, Mur Murs, Faces Places, and so on.

destroying rocks

“Poets are routinely and shamefully used by their society to have a culture,” wrote Alice Notley as she was describing the life of her friend Steve Carey, “to have a culture at all.” She went on to add that Carey was “the product of society’s use of him”. He was dead. As soon as you read this you remember that part of the earth from Cyprian Norwid’s grave was transported from France to Poland one hundred and eighteen years after his death and buried in a crypt under Wawel Cathedral along with sixteen kings, two saints, a cardinal, a general, the Queen Jadwiga who lived from c. 1373 to 1399, the Queen’s daughter who lived for three weeks, and Adam Mickiewicz. Whatever else you may say about the United States, they have not shifted the remains of Steve Carey. Let’s say something nice about Max Richter, Jean Paul’s son, who resisted his father’s constant lectures about respecting poets, when “someone” (tr. Eliza Lee, Life of Jean Paul Richter, 1850) asked him what they would do if his parents died and he answered first, “We would weep,” but then “We would go out a little into the street,” pushing back (I say) against the initial desire to sound poetically moved and instead rethinking himself into a prosaic reaction, refusing the temptation to borrow his intelligence from poetry, in spite of his father, who, when his characters in The Campaner Thal, 1797, tr. Juliette Bauer, reached an elevated point in the Pyrenees, brought out a dictionary of contemporary poetic bliss and said that they “looked again towards the heavens, lo! all its stars were gleaming, and in place of rose-woven wreaths, the mountains were clad in extinguished rainbows, and the giant of the Pyrenees was crowned with stars instead of roses.”

The characters in Campaner Thal have been discussing the likelihood of immortality as they climb the mountain – what does Kant think about it? – and God? – is Uranus populated by nuns who like the dark? – until they reach the summit, where the scenery joins their imaginations to create a complementary argument for a mutual and comprehensive appreciation of the subject that has been skewing them.

[I]n this moment it was with each of our enraptured souls as if from its oppressed heart earth's load had dropped away; as if from her mother's arms, the earth were giving us, matured in the Father arms of the infinite Creator; as if our little life were over! To ourselves, we seemed the immortal, the exalted. We fancied that our speech of man's immortality had been the prophecy of our own, as with two great and noble men.

In the preface to the story Jean Paul has already told us that “Poetry alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre which commands these two destroying rocks to rest,” so now, here, poetry is landscape; poetry is in the appreciation of landscape, the sublime knowledge that the stars, heavenly burners, are also substitute roses.

A hot air balloon is nearby and why not. The character Gione, longing to match her physicality to her mind’s desire for beautiful solitude, mounts to the stars in the basket alone. Just near the beginning of the story (many pages ago) she appeared to die; her devastated friend Karlson wrote a poem “entitled, Grief without Hope, which declared his disbelief, for he had never broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to Hippocrene's spring of health.” Miraculously Gione recovered and her fiance could respond to Karlson’s gift of the poem with a letter to let him know that he’d read it to the person he thought was deceased. Out of this miasma of events she had become “the immortal one,” a nickname that seems respectful, playful, and awestruck. Richter, or so the legend goes, wrote his first worthwhile book after he’d had a vision of his own death at the start of November in the year 1790, a destructive upset that killed off the earlier self who had advocated against ornate writing. “The writer who produces many comparisons, who composes in an ornamented style, appears to me to have little depth,” he had written in 1779. His American translator Eliza Lee points out the joke. “The passage in which Paul speaks of florid and ornamented writing is remarkable, as he condemns a style that was afterwards so singularly his own.” He was saved to make poetry: saved, rescued, hooray: he lived until he was sixty-two. Max died at nineteen. Ha ha, we laugh.

happenings, trivia, misfortunes

Cyprian Norwid sees “sorrow, sorrow, from end to beginning”* in addition to the partitioning of Poland between Russia and Prussia, but the Polish aristocrats themselves precipitated it, he says in at least one poem: it is not all the fault of the Prussians and the Russians, who, in 1863, went into the Pałac Zamoyskich on Ulica Nowy Świat and threw the piano of his dead friend Frédéric Chopin out of a window. Why? “Because there is no place on earth where intellectuals are more dependent and more humiliated than in Poland. All the people who work with their brains are someone's clients, they are teachers of children, hangers-on. ... without well defined positions, and their undertakings are either feeble or not well thought out - abnormal in fact! Since history does not tolerate a vacuum, [Polish historical space] is filled with accidental happenings, trivia, misfortunes - every fifteen years.”** (Marian Sokołowski read that in a letter she received from him on January 27th, 1864, shortly after the piano incident.)

If you were being selfishly reasonable you could point out that no one was using the thing at the time but once it had crashed viciously through the window it provoked into existence “Norwid's masterpiece” *** and“perhaps his finest lyric”**** Fortepian Szopena where it is able to represent both the desecration of intelligence and the spark of future action ("The Ideal – has reached the street –").

Therefore -- you state rudely -- it was more use out of the window than in.

I mean, he was dead. (1810 - 1849)

By transferring the energy of an irregular piano-self across that rectangular window-boundary, we (the universe personified in a person or mob, or, if you pull back further, the Tsar whose army it was) precipitated the further energy of a p – etc.

Thank you to the Tsar.

But no one should ever excuse their own cruel behaviour by arguing that their actions are hypothetically inspiring some poet somewhere, not when you can find the most important thing everywhere, Lal Ded says in I, Lalla: the Poems of Lal Děd, 2011, translated by Ranjit Hoskote, who discusses the scholarly and extra-scholarly struggle that brought Lal Ded to this point of understanding. “No orchard bears fruit for the barren mind,” she may have said, although her corpus expanded after her death and so who knows; she was inspirational like the piano. Whoever thoughtlessly heaved that instrument out of the window (I’m guessing it was thoughtless: a "barren mind" and no fruit), they are about on the level of the dog that gave Ron Padgett an ending for Dog by barking in the street at 6 a.m. -- if any dog did so – proving that it was alive for no reason when his friends Ted and Erwin, mentioned earlier in the poem, were “no longer here”. Some necessary energy has departed with them: no one will ever replace them. Chopin’s playing, says Norwid, was like the apparition of a Antique Virtue in a larch-wood country manor. (Borchardt)



* My Song, by Cyprian Norwid, tr. Danuta Borchardt, from Poems: Cyprian Norwid, 2011
** Quoted in the Volume XIII, Number 3 issue of The Samartian Review, translation credited to the staff of the magazine
*** Adam Cedro in Vol. 30 of Studia Norwindiana, 2012
**** Joshua Wilson in the New Republic, May 29th, 2012

“along various” “dirty pathways”

Thinking of Scott G.F. Bailey’s suggestion that all books should be judged by the Four Humours, I tried it out.


Choucas, 1927, by Zofia Nałkowska, tr. Ursula Phillips
This Polish humanitarian Zofia Nałkowska brings characters from different nations together in a mountain sanatorium. All dispossessed in some way. They are afflicted with illness; they are afflicted with hatred for other nationalities. The narrator wishes that the suffering of the human race would end but it will not. Her observant resignation orients Choucas towards winter and decreases sweating. The choucas-birds, acting out a representation of the crowd inside the building, increase phlegm by removing heat from the humans and displacing it into the enigma of animals. The sincerity of the author generates a consistent, light black bile, but underlying warmth (quick feeling) improves the story’s health, removing digestion problems and clearing the bowels. Concealment piques the melancholy and keeps excessive phlegm at bay. Overall a hardy book though the liver is small.


Titan, 1800 - 1803, by Jean Paul Richter, tr. Charles T. Brooks
A prince’s proud, eccentric, excessive, unfortunate, sometimes secretly malicious, plotting friends and associates show him how to be a balanced person as he observes their personal disasters, e.g., dying, going mad, whatever. The author’s temperament is natively sanguine; we assume his hair was thick ditto urine. The aim, in spite of his constant airy digressions, is still ultimately phlegmatic. Titan’s desire for sanity rejects choler, melancholy, and dryness. (Counterpoint: should the habit of punishing other characters be diagnosed as choleric impatience? Could the digressions be described as fevers? This line of enquiry is not totally convincing.) Expect a shapely stool while reading.


Inside the Head of Bruno Schulz, 2013, by Maxim Biller, tr. Anthea Bell
One of the real Bruno Schulz’s former students remembered him saying, “We [artists] can turn day into night and night into day. We may cover snow-capped mountains with luxuriant foliage. That is our, the artist’s, freedom, and such is artistic truth, which we can demonstrate through our works.” Maxim Biller’s Schulz doesn’t know anything about that. I think Biller would like his fanfic to be brunette and lithe with a fresh complexion like the stories real-Schulz wrote, but the calculations he goes through – the insertion of Schulz-facts and bits from the stories and the faithless strangulation of Schulz’s air-infused methods (the artist’s “freedom” becomes hallucination, people really are birds) – are too anabolic.


ULULU: Clown Shrapnel, 2007, by Thalia Field
Field’s tireless invocation of flexible performance (both in startling poem-text acrobatics and in the mutating characters) gives this book a healthy youthful physique, though the examples she uses (without violating them) are rooted in the first half of the last century or earlier – Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, 1895, 1904, Alban Berg’s opera adaptation of Lulu, 1935, Louise Brooks in the Lulu film Pandora’s Box, 1929, the modernist-beloved circus structure – suggesting an attachment to the past indicative of melancholy. Anxious activity is tempered by a refutation of repressive internalisation that, while manifesting violently, has the potential to produce sound sleep. Both the sleep and the likelihood of heavy sweating can be read as phlegmatic. The book is addressed outwards, to the audience and the same audience in implicated in the activity (ULULU: You, Lulu), placing the sociable sanguine elements in a dominant position.


The Descent of Alette, 1996, by Alice Notley
Alette’s fate is to enter a receptive state that will reward her with symbolic advice and totems while she looks forward to an event that functions as some sort of summary and as an arrow to the reader. This is an essentially pre-modern way of regarding a narrative, redolent of Romance of the Rose, Dante, etc. There is a high degree of catabolic reactiveness baked into the text by the poet who breaks down her lines into bursts of words separated by inverted commas.

“I walked into” “the forest;" “for the woods were lit” “by yellow
street lamps” “along various” “dirty pathways”

Naturally the catabolic style can be identified as choleric, these bursts of artificial presence are like flames; at the same time it is vocal and sociable, therefore sanguine. (Is it in danger of consuming too much? Also, looking back at ULULU am I in danger of diagnosing all poems as sanguine?) Both of these values coexist unproblematically with the melancholy self-questioning of Alette. Imbalance enters when we think of phlegm. Readers should consider a cool, wet climate. Eat cheese.

according to a pattern drawn from a patchwork quilt

When you mention advertising of course you can't forget the way that Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage comes, after a while, to begin a passage with a sentence about some person or event you have not encountered yet, speaking about the thing as if there is already a large context all around it and filling you with the desire to be up to speed with the rest of your compatriots who are now standing around you, holding a discussion you are excluded from.

It is as if they all have a Fiat!

There is, for example, the first sentence of Clear Horizon, 1935, the eleventh book, “Between herself and all that was waiting to flow in and settle upon this window-lit end of the great empty room, was the sense of missing Lionel Cholmley.” As if you knew Lionel Cholmley. You have never met Lionel Cholmley. Lionel Cholmley? Then there are three pages about Lionel Cholmley. Cholmley! He was worth knowing! Cholmley! He exits forever. “Having paid him tribute while pouring out her tea and getting back to the window-end of the long empty breakfast table, she bade farewell to Lionel Cholmley.” His radiation lingers – it is the idea of speaking without posing, intensified – “And instead of going to face down the room from the hearthrug, or to pose with the curve of the near-by grand piano, he remained in his place and said his poem as if he were a momentary spokesman, like a vocal testifier in a religious gathering, and, although his poem was heroic, his voice was only a little fuller and more resonant than usual, and quite free from recitational ‘effects.’ So that the poem prevailed …”

Soon afterwards, Miriam watches as a stranger rises in the crowd at a Lycurgan Society meeting, “slowly stammering out his simple words, annihilating the suave pseudo-Nietzsche on the platform,” and Amabel next to her says, “Mira! He’s real!” The man is not Lionel but he is a continuation; he is a Lionel-tentacle, and Amabel is the one who invents a new phrase for he is quite free from recitational ‘effects.’ The radiation is still there, spreading its ad of realness, so that soon (with the whole atmosphere presaging) Miriam will stop going to Lycurgan meetings and veer towards Quakers.

At the same time there is something buried, something muffled, as there was when her mother died and the book waved its hands obliquely, leaving open the possibility that you would not find out. That muffled-ness points to a world somewhere where everyone does things unexpectedly, for reasons you will never know (as though her mother had gone on holiday).

There’s a different form of radiation in Nanni Balestrini's Blackout, 1980, tr. Peter Valente, when the author springs some phrase on you and then repeats it on the next page surrounded by different lines and then maybe again in two pages until you realise it could occur in any place at all and still justify itself through radiant penetration. Honestly the poem has no way of saving itself from its lines. Nobody will veer anywhere; they are immediately present, because the line, “you persecute your persecutors with the truth” can occur after or before (as if on top of) the line, “meanwhile this occasion has unmasked all the petty tyrants who swore to me that they would eviscerate our friendship” (p. 26) or after or before the line “redirect your letters from Nice to Provence because tomorrow I’m leaving for France and who knows I may travel much farther” (p.27) until it is always unmoored – it always has the atmosphere of meaning something ... He put the poem together, says the editor, by “arrang[ing] the book’s text

according to a pattern drawn from a patchwork quilt with strips sewed at 45 degrees across a checkered base, developing a chart […] indicating which borrowed fragments would be placed in which numbered sections, in varying ratio depending on the cut.”

You are always waiting for a line-reappearance. It will be the same thing but in a new setting like a repeatable horror jewel. It is as if Lionel Cholmley kept coming back in as Lionel Cholmley, not as an anonymous stammering Lycurgan meeting man or as a Quaker or a statement from Amabel. What do monsters advertise, these M.R. James yūrei that stalk after you?

taste, any taste, so long as it's strong

Reading the tweet by Robert Minto in which he tells me, us, that “increasingly I enjoy the aesthetic opinions of people with *a* taste, any taste, so long as it's strong and they're articulate. Those people are the ones who show you new ways to be" -- I thought, oh, advertising, we want advertising; we are unhappy when it manifests itself insufficiently, when the brand is not evident – this is bad for me -- I will never show anyone a way to be, my taste is very very little, I am less than a new car or a box of butterless butter – and if a person does not have a taste then they are not even flesh, they are cardboard. Even Frankenstein's monster had an opinion.

I should find a thought and espouse it ... I will be angry at texts that do not feature farts. There is a manifesto in that. "Farts are part of LIFE," I write, "why are they not ALSO part of literature?" Every piece of text must have at least one anal utterance unless it is an academic paper: those I will excuse. I write, "A fart is as intimate as we can be with the divine element, Air, and does not the position of the emittance indicate a relationship also with Earth? Throwing open the skylight we establish a deposition to the ground. Nearby there is Water." I’ll follow this up with water wisdom of some kind -- quote: Shelley, Percy B (do you pron. this Bish?): "A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight." A Defence of Poetry, writ. 1821, pub. 1840: posthumous. Everybody will be impressed but we want something more contemporary. Adrienne Rich, why not. "I have always wondered about the leftover | energy, water rushing down a hill | long after the rains have stopped," use that, from For the Dead, found in (as in, I opened the book and looked for the word "water" because the title sounded as if it would lead to water) Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971 - 1972, pub. 1973, "Co-winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, 1974." Water: done and sounds unassailable. Water is life and poetry. Fire, I don't know -- fire? I could fuzz something about the energy of life being essentially multiplicitous, composed of opposites and contrasts and everything in the middle, therefore firelike as well as waterlike (n.b., this connection to the convincing earlier extrapolations about water will be worth half the argument right here) and this energy runs through all of our bodies but especially through the anal-neighbourly presence of two clumps that do not pick anything up* or transport us anywhere and instead hang there with energy popping through the fat "as a flame leaps (leapeth sounds better? too pretentious?) between gum trees, therefore FIRE, the plump arse is a natural HOTBED, plural units cry out for transference and fire transfers itse" ... no, I dunno about Fire. I think I could get away with it though.


* there must be someone with good musculature who could do this.

root sprawl

Closing Susan Wheeler's meme, 2012, I looked at the title and saw -- because the mindset of a poet was still in the process of dying away inside me after reading, so I saw thoroughly for a moment, very rainwashed I was … -- I realised it said me, me. Reading an interview with Wheeler I decided (although she never says so or even mentions the word "meme"*) that me, me was unintentional "in spite," I thought, "of the incredible relevance of the word "me" to a publication that spends its first twenty-seven pages reporting the words of a character who does nothing but aim remarks at other people." "You get down off your high horse, young lady," the person says, and you realise she has to be the poet's mother. The daughter never talks back – she says nothing – no one in the poems speaks except the mother. "Years later," you think, "when her mother was dead, she wrote these poems." Why did I think the mother was dead? Because the poems don't seem to wonder if she'll read them. Later the interview confirmed it. I don't think you're ever not aware that this act of recording is an act of talking back or of somehow having her mother. Anyway, the daughter is being quiet and not-quiet. You can't say the same for the other people the mother speaks to, "Ray" and "Dan." "Ray, don't make it too stiff," she says. The poet has chosen not to have them, only her mother. And of course you're looking at these lines and thinking, "That's too perfect, that's not an accurate recording, it's an act of reconstruction based on some memory or impression of the mother" who was, according to the interview, full of slang.

Robert Polito: Your pleasure in our random, fleeting, and lost slang is palpable. How did you come to this absorption in vernaculars?

Susan Wheeler: God knows, as my mother would have said. I’m beginning to get an inkling, as I’ve been writing a series of poems that use her idiomatic expressions—she grew up in Topeka, and had a strong portion of Pennsylvania Dutch as well, but who knows where she got phrases like “busier than a cranberry bog merchant.”

The mother was the outstanding slang-unit in the family. She was the one the daughter wanted to have. Wheeler even writes down statements that are not slang. "Go ask your father," is not a distinctive phrase but there it is. Somehow these lines are balancing the slang in the poet's mind, or she remembers her mother saying, "Will you take the broccoli out of the freezer," in a manner so amazing that it occupies the same place as slang when she writes it down. It continues the scolding tone. Her mother saying, "broccoli out of the freezer," was a memorable sound. Wheeler likes "broccoli" and "freezer" together. The two words have the same lengths but different personalities. "Language poetry," you think. You remember other poets who do this without their mothers being in the poems: Lyn Hejinian, you recall. Gertrude Stein herself has given Wheeler the strength to tell the whole world forever that her mother once mentioned broccoli and freezers. Or maybe the mother never did, but she has now. "A cushion has that cover," writes Stein in Tender Buttons, 1914, and a century later Wheeler utters, "broccoli in the freezer." But Wheeler has a different space in reality. The reader is convinced that once there really was broccoli in the freezer. They do not believe there was a cushion. If there was once a cushion then Tender Buttons has annihilated it. Even though cushions are as real as broccoli.

Stein's friendship with Picasso swims up. The half-secret grid in a painting like Ma Jolie, 1911-12, annihilates the woman figure. It is like shredding a tree and drying it into flat paper. There does not have to have been a woman. Allegedly it was the artist's girlfriend Marcelle Humbert but you do not need to believe in her. Wheeler, you realise (as you think of the Picasso), resists the ideal of complex flattening when she puts lines in a daughter-thinking voice at the centre of each poem, as though she is summing up some impression she had in the days when the mother was scolding her. "Avocados, toothpicks. Coleaus, root sprawl. | The diffident glints of a late-day sun," she recalls. I notice I didn't think of this earlier as the poet speaking ("no one in the poems speaks except the mother"). These lines are not uttered. Immediate publicity is not their form, as it is with speech. Real people might walk around asking, "Will you take the broccoli out of the freezer?" but they do not come up to you and say, "Avocados, toothpicks. Coleaus, root sprawl," with that careful punctuation. You would be disquieted, unless they were answering a question. "Susan Wheeler, what do you remember from your childhood?" you ask, and she replies, "Wallpaper, striped. A slippery floor." You assume these objects were given to her without asking.



*I have a memory of another interview in which she did say the word meme.

something of no apparent importance

Why should anyone like Phyllis for being a lump of rudeness that presents itself as a thing you can’t solve at a level where everything else is being solved instantly? I don't know why; it is as if she is sticking up for herself, "Like TISM," I think, "but their songs are all about their own irritated shame, or tall poppyism if you want to put it another way” --- “but it is preferable to the opposite”? (“Is her surname Tine?” joked someone this morning when I told them I had been reading a book with a Phyllis.) Chateaubriand’s little vase sticks up from the scene without an explanation when he could have said, for example, "it must have been the sound of some cavity in the ship filling with water." Why does Glanville want to bite the letter-writer’s hand in Charles Grandison? Where does Grandison come from? Where does Clarissa come from? She is a little vase, filling up. From another angle she is Phyllis. In the final part of the Temps Perdu, Proust tells you he has spent seven volumes interrogating a sensation that Chateaubriand remembers twice.

What profoundly modifies the course of their thought is rather something of no apparent importance which overthrows the order of time and makes them live in another period of their lives. The song of a bird in the Park of Montboissier, or a breeze laden with the scent of mignonette, are obviously matters of less importance than the great events of the Revolution and of the Empire; nevertheless they inspired in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre tombe pages of infinitely greater value. (tr. Stephen Hudson)

He mentions Nerval and Baudelaire.

I was seeking to recall those of Baudelaire's verses which are based upon the transposition of such sensations, so that I might place myself in so noble a company and thus obtain confirmation that the work I no longer had any hesitation in undertaking, merited the effort I intended to consecrate to it …

A thought says, “If those sensations are of “infinitely greater value” than the rest, then what if you made the entire book out of them?” What if there was a treasure box with no gaps between the treasures? But then Volker Schlöndorff reads your treasure box and the primary lesson he remembers is that he wants to make Swann into a movie and his costume designer takes Robert de Montesquiou’s grey suit out of the portrait by Giovanni Boldini and puts it on Jeremy Irons and you are back to the old drawing board, as the cartoon alien says

the multiplication of his failure all over the world

About two months ago (I haven’t checked) I told Twitter I would say something about Eleanor Dark's The Little Company. Everyone already knows that Dark wrote The Timeless Land, 1941. Little Company is different, not set historically but at the beginning of the 1940s, only a few years before it came out in 1945. It was set when Land was published. None of the Company characters bought the other book, however. They didn't hear about it.

Setting? Sydney, Outside Sydney, and the Blue Mountains: bushland, house, and waterfall.

People? Debating their positions on current events. What does it mean, World War II? What about Marxism? How should Australian society evolve? They fight overseas and water the lettuces. "A democracy without faith [in itself] is just a machine without power," thinks the novelist Gilbert Massey. The mental disturbance that stands in the way of his next book is a symptom of radiant global trauma.

He would not allow himself the easy mistake of seeing it of seeing it merely as a personal problem; of setting it aside; of saying, "How small a thing, how trivial in the face of a crumbling civilization!" He knew very well that the immobilisation of the creative mind was one symptom of that crumbling, and that the multiplication of his failure all over the world was no small and unimportant matter.

Dark was in one of those Leftist intellectual groups that gave a grounding to the Sydney Push; in Gilbert Massey you have a feeling for how they might have seen themselves or fantasised themselves: reasonable, serious, flawed, flawed but trying not to be in denial about their flaws, thinking about them instead. He is her Charles Grandison, her good man. (Saying this, you realise that Samuel Richardson was an alien.) Gilbert is self-reflective; he builds a fire so that he can think about his past for five pages (p. 15 – 20). His habits are useful to the author, that mercenary parasite. Gilbert's wife, Phyllis, whom no one can stand, never does anything like that; she is not one of the pre-Push people. She is resentful, petty, selfish, emotionally obtuse, frustrated, miserable, inattentive, intellectually stupid, vacantly respectable, provocatively dependent, passive-aggressively submissive, horrible, and an orphan. For her, Dark has put together a set of qualities that no author's lead characters will ever want to like. Alice Notley would not put her in a poem, even though she is obdurate.* Dorothy Richardson's Miriam would tell herself consciously not to be like Phyllis.

Whenever I think of the book I think of Phyllis. I like Phyllis. She is so anti-.

You would grit your teeth at Phyllis. Phyllis would be in torment because you were gritting your teeth. There would be an unbreakable sense of pain everywhere. Phyllis wants to break and she cannot break. Only other unbearable, insensitive people would like Phyllis. But there are so few of them in the book. Leaping off a suicidal waterfall she lands on a close jut instead of dying. "She had bungled it," thinks Gilbert. "Poor Phyllis." Phyllis is a kind of excess in life: she is not needed, she is a failure, she is the one really insoluble flaw, no Pushes can cure her. "The stem of the vessel cut through the thick mass of waves with a hideous crash, and, at the helm, torrents of water flowed away eddying as from the mouth of a sluice. Amid all this uproar, nothing was so alarming as a certain dull, murmuring sound, like that of a vase filling." (Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1849 – 50, tr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos)


*I'm thinking of Medea in The Songs and Stories of the Ghouls and the desert woman in Culture of One (both 2011).

everything you need to know

I asked a Nebraskan if the descriptions of the countryside in My Ántonia sounded true. She said she had never read Cather but now she was remembering a book called Sarah Plain and Tall, 1985, about a woman who migrated to the central grasslands from the Maine coastline to marry a farmer whose wife had died. Within a few minutes she had recalled another childhood book, A Dog Called Kitty, 1980, the story of a boy who is bitten by a dog with rabies. The anti-rabies injections he receives are so agonising, the Nebraskan said, that he learns to associate dogs with pain. Some years after the rabies attack he bravely shows tolerance to a stray dog who comes to eat with the cats on the farm where he lives. He slowly recovers from his fear and learns that dogs can be a source of pleasure. One night when the pair of them are lost in the wilderness because of some cows, this dog, Kitty, has his intestines ripped out while he is saving the boy from coyotes. That part of the book is so horrifying, said the Nebraskan, that you are in tears because you think the noble animal is dead, but then you turn the page to the last chapter and they are walking along a road together months later with the dog healthy and peppy and you are happy again for a few moments until a piece of a building site adjoining the road falls off and Kitty is fatally crushed. Later, she added, they made us read Where the Red Fern Grows, 1961 as well, because they hadn't finished with us yet.

Old Yeller, I said, to show that I knew what we were talking about, though I hadn’t read any of the books and nor had I seen Old Yeller. I pictured a child going from Kitty to Red Fern but now, instead of sadness, when the dogs die, she thinks for the first time: this is genre. From then on she is in luxury, as, one after the other, all of the dying fictional dogs she comes across become new pieces in a resplendent puzzle. What habits are they teaching us, I wondered. Growing up, learns the Kitty boy, means that you can stop feeling your pain and start seeing it in other people instead. So the narrator of My Ántonia sees the pain of actually marrying Ántonia and being stuck in Nebraska forever, thrust away from him so forcefully that it lands on a man from Vienna. (I still have not read My Ántonia, only the closing chapters.) But this intelligent building site in A Dog called Kitty knows us well.* You notice it is not like an animal in that it will not let the writer make it suffer pain. Its strength is respected. The building will probably still be there when the boy dies of old age. For the rest of his life it will stand there saying, I killed Kitty. The rabid dog vanished from the boy's life and so did the coyotes. But the building endures and he has to put up with it. So much for flesh, says the building.



*After I had gone through all of this in my head I looked for some reviews online and found out that other adults were not interested in the words "building site" when they were describing Kitty's death. They preferred the word "pipes." One of them was specifically interested in "oil-pipe." This is their entire review:

The dog doesn't get killed in the heroic fight to save the boy. He dies in the next chapter, when an oil-pipe pointlessly falls on him. Those darn oil companies, eh?

This tells you everything you need to know.

(Amazon Customer, November 26, 2011)

(Kitty was written by Bill Wallace, Sarah by Patricia MacLachlan, and Red Fern by Wilson Rawls.)

and I knew that I must eat

Scott G.F. Bailey smartly follows my last post with two sentences about a chicken being eaten in a different story. The new bird comes from My Ántonia, 1918, by Willa Cather, a book I've never read but there are three copies of it at the Goodwill up the road so it must be on the curriculum at American universities. The lines he quotes are these: "While I was putting my horse away, I heard a rooster squawking. I looked at my watch and sighed; it was three o'clock, and I knew that I must eat him at six." This character, she has the mind of a French kitchen maid or pre-enlightened (if that's the word) upper-middle-class grandmother (Crevel, Babylon), I think when I read that, and then I look up the chapter and see the narrator is not a woman but a man or boy named Jimmy. The chapter seems interesting because nothing in it tells me why he is sighing. Nobody asks him to kill the rooster, as far as I can see, and he doesn't appear to know the bird personally, although that relationship might have been established in an earlier part of the book. Stop: maybe he has already been established as a chicken-killer and Cather knows she doesn't have to spell it out. All right, he'll kill the rooster, the little bastard. No wait, does the squawking mean the rooster is already in the process of being murdered? That's it: this is a death-squawk. Originally I thought it was just expressing itself. Oh I'm stupid. Whose rooster is it? "Cather takes predation and death for granted," writes Bailey. "The predator suffers, not the prey; the poor prey is fated to be relief for the predator, and there is only so far our sympathies should carry us." What a bitch this Willa Cather is, I think, which is interesting all over again because it puts me back in French kitchen labourer (Proust-Françoise) territory. World War II came about because of people like this Cather, I say to myself. Jimmy's sigh is offered up to his creator, the one who wants him to acknowledge his position of effort at the top of the food chain. The squawk was his last contact with the vital life-force of a unique bird, born in all its complexity from an amazing egg and going to all the trouble of eating seeds and muck for years only to die screaming at three o'clock so that this genuflecting creep can sink his teeth into him. Superbly horrible, looking at your watch. Is this rooster-slaughter inserted here to whet my mind for the anecdote Widow Steavens is about to tell Jimmy about Ántonia, who has been preyed on by a man in Denver? No one can mourn these birds innocently. "I am not a sign," rooster screams, "I am the present," but the predator sails on, seeing time ahead.

the blood of the chicken

Reading René Crevel's Babylon, 1927, tr. Kay Boyle in the afternoon, I believed that a line about "the blood of the chicken we were supposed to have for dinner" on page thirty of the Sun & Moon 1996 edition truthfully depicted the unseen side of the ending of Voltaire's dialogue between a hen and a rooster, which I had read the same morning in a translation by Theo Cuffe. It was good to see that the other partner in the chickens' experience - the humans - was exactly the way the rooster had predicted, a group of offhand murderers. The grandmother of Crevel's repressive household is hoping that the blood in the kitchen is that of the bird, not that of the cook, who has been tied up by burglars. These thieves have stolen a bracelet of the Empress Eugénie's hair. Startled by the sound of Françoise slaughtering a chicken, Proust's narrator tries to reconcile the artistry of the family servant with the irritation of this swearing killer who abuses the animal as it fights for life. Montaigne, looking at cannibals, observes that we are capable of many versions of rightness and all of them can seem alien to one another. Crevel, regarding Proust, said that knowing about the switch from an Albert to an Albertine in Lost Time made him "question the entire book and reject certain discoveries the author presented to me along the way". This was in My Body and I, 1925, tr. Robert Bononno. As I was reading Babylon, however, I thought the teenage girl's interest in the muscles of sailors might belong to a gay teenage boy. "The sailor's lips must be soft in that square patch of tan," writes Crevel in My Body as he remembers himself feeling roused at thirteen by the sight of a woman in the street kissing a sailor. Writing about the sailor's colleagues, he says, "Their necks have punctured their jackets and in the opening the powerful flesh is victorious." People will be free to love without worrying about European social mores, he suggests in Babylon: they should abandon their marriages, they should not mind being naked, they should be unconcerned with reproduction. In My Body he puts all of this into the figure of himself and stands alone nude in a field feeling sensuously aware and erotic. Then he is ashamed, worrying that a shepherd or cattleman might see him. The cook in Babylon remarks that the family has dissolved like butter in a pan. Voltaire put the point of focus on the greatest sufferers, the chickens.

ambling through silence downhill on a drooping nighthorse

David Campbell's Evening Under Lamplight, 1976, begins with lyrical language and no dialogue: "When horses gallop at night, the sound is mysterious. There was Billy, frowzy with sleep, ambling through silence downhill on a drooping nighthorse. The frost, after a week of rain, had sharpened the hoof-falls. The horse's paunch creaked, and Billy was aware of the silence. He was aware of the cemetery on the dark ridge where the owls moped."

After a page and a half this lyricism vanishes and people speak ordinarily:

"It was easy, he said. "When Len's sick, I'll get the horses in every morning. You're only a girl."
"I'm older than you are."
"That doesn't count."
But Janet only smiled.

So on until the end of the book, though it comes back again a little in the last story while a settler in the bush is contemplating a fox: "The fox lived its own life and he lived his. And the gold trees grew from stone."* Most of the stories follow Billy the child, who is said by the introduction and the blurb to be a fictionalised version of Campbell himself (did Campbell ever say so or did he only let them believe it?), and the later ones tell you about men flying planes in World War II, where he himself flew planes.

Why is the entrance of Janet at breakfast like an ice age that cuts off an earlier way of life in the book?

David Malouf, who wrote the introduction to the 1987 edition, never lets dialogue get in the way of the contemplative-lyrical tone in his own books; he ploughs on through, and you remember the castaway in Remembering Babylon, 1993, meeting his compatriots in Australia after a long time with the indigenous people and getting his words confused so that he says, "I am a British object," instead of subject. And that has a penetrative meaning.

But the dialogue words in David Campbell do not try to have any kind of penetrative meaning. I don't think it occurred to him that they should have one, even though Malouf tells you that prose and poetry are one in the mind of a writer: they do not separate them: "it is the same world he is moving in … however different the demands of the medium he is the same man, bringing with him the same sensory equipment." And this is true because the dialogue in Campbell's poems is as plain as it is in the book – see Outback (No. 1) for example.

I wonder if this is part of his New Bulletin past, this Henry Lawson idea that the lyrical meaning in dialogue should be conferred through narrative events around the spoken language and not through the language itself, as at the end of The Drover's Wife, 1892, when the son says, "Mother, I won't never go drovin'; blarst me if I do," which makes a strong impact in light of everything that has happened. So that if people are lyrical it is not because you have rudely gone inside them and pretended to express their thoughts, but only because you have pointed to plain things around them which could be verified by other observers, though there are no other observers for you are the author, the only one who observes; and yet you are behaving as if there are observers who might accuse you of rudeness or lies, and so you are protecting yourself from the accusations of these non-existent people, the ones who know that Janet would not speak like the woman in the book I'm reading at the moment, who describes river water "spilling over the oar with a pure metallic lustre, like blood" (Narcyza Żmichowska, The Heathen, 1846, tr. Ursula Phillips). But if you can say that Billy on the nighthorse can feel inside him that "to his heartbeats the horses were suddenly galloping," then you can have him wholly and lyrically.



*When I say lyricism I am thinking of that kind of gold-and-stone language in which things are made of beautiful, solid substances and the characters' attention to small, distinct things like creaks is noted; everything is sensation and fluid but there is also a suggestion of eternity as well as attention to the way that a word like "ridge" sits against "moped."