Word & Ear: Beckett, Markson, Olson, Louis Armstrong, Calvino, Argueta, Kafka, Cid Corman [by suggestion] & Miss Pond's Oyster. . . ,

There's a lone sentence in the novella Che that speaks from the forest and the tundra in the same moment: "To realize, of course, is to give word." The line is its paragraph's only voice, so to speak (there are also other one line paragraphs in the novella but they are the rarity). I suppose, in this context (one word, one breath; one space of time), I've been thinking about David Markson (his brilliant and lovely, I think, This Is Not A Novel)--and Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar (a favorite of mine since roughly 1985). With these, I've been re-reading passages of William Empson's opposite-of-critical Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson "states a case" in the way inventive novels do, in the way most poems do; the way a garden does! When a person pursues his or her own construct(s), a person enacts the daily renewal that would seem to sustain their thinking, engagement, sense in place. I've been editing the next Across Borders journal and I came across this line, in a musician's assessment of Louis Armstrong's writing using Charles Olson's perspective: "verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisition of his ear and the pressure of his breath" and "of the breathing of the man who writes as well as his listening." This last part interests me the most and refers to something else I had written on this blog ("on" this! --as if this is the deck of a boat, yes?) but which I cannot exactly call to mind without having two computers before me (one can only "jump" back and forth so much in one mode, one mind, one time-frame). So we listen to the hand, the hand remaining, the slate given and to wipe clean.

When we listen to what we read we read it again, instantaneously with slight echo, and we hear the breath of the voice--not only the artifact of the word.

Lately I've been reading passages of the novella "in Irish," in my Irishness, realizing a fluency--or maybe a result of a tendency, aural inclination, propensity--from an influential time in my life. Teaching, to the extent the writer teaches, Beckett brought the joy of the realization of each word (as a lengthy music, in each breath, bearing--) back, entirely. The emotional lyricism, the traveling melody within the smallest units of narrative, the breath-pause--which is the mental-emotional-ontological pause--become fully comprehended only as a listener. The writer is a listener, choosing her or his words sound by sound--and not unlodged from the sound of bay, the solid of mountain base, and yet willingly giving that up for the sake of getting on, to travel in the line or the narrative, to tell the parts of it--in melody and refrain--as a body with eyes and ears and lungs does. This is the kind of text I mean. If text had skin, brain, chemical; it "gives" if we are open to listening for that. Like Kafka's hunger artist below the straw, barely heard and--until then, at the end the whisper confirmed--completely unseen (in fact, thought to be disposable).

While a listener (and reader) at a cello lesson, I found a book I'd not seen or opened before: One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta. What I was able to read there, in the moments of music, were these (and I certainly hear their breath): "The dog is my brother." "A cloud is wrestling with the sun." "Until you appeared. . .you have brought fresh air."

You have to get and bring fresh air. You do it in living, why not do it in reading.

I listen to the lungs of text.

I was stopped in "my tracks" when I read Markson's lone line (among many there), repeating history--without any feeling of being dated: "Please, sir, I want some more."

The words ask a simple request. The writer lived-dying in this simple moment of request, line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable, sound by sound, breath by breath.

In this morning's paper a person writes to complain about children using "frozen trout" for an art project (prints) at a local public library. "In this economy!" the citizen chides. I have to admit to admiring the letter writer's name. It is "Pond." I want to write to her, via the paper, saying, "Dear Miss Pond, The word is your oyster"--(["hoist ear!"]; Why not world and word at the same time? It's possible!); and a painted fish is an opportunity in a child's imagination. This will feed nations, eons, even the embers. And so, we take a breath. Breathe, and listen to what breathed. Make a life of this. Discover text, breathing.

Language as Necessary Spectacle

The new language--like late 20th century/current film and dance--mix-mashes jump-cut, mind-leap (hydrogen jukebox [to quote my teacher, Ginsberg]. . . a reality sandwich [AG]--minute salad, pod speech, hyperlink (that old term!), cosmic display, multi-atmospheric birdsong in real time, hybrid of samples, contxtualized, yes?

We reinterpret the "Stuff As Dreams" (SEE New York Times, Theater [Isherwood], 7/11/10) in spectacles. . . be them waves of rap and warp of sound/image. . . or the book, the novella, the poetic existential trail of making the essential expression of now. Yes?

Teens and Perseverance and Courage: Super Hero Qualities; Humane, Literate--A Kind of Beat Transcended

Today's paper has an article about "What America's Teens Admire Most" (possibly what all teens admire--around the globe--decade to decade): "Perseverance" and "Courage" (plain and simple?). There has to be an age (ages. . . ) wherein we can be idealistic, dreamy and undaunted. Maybe this is why we feel comfortable suspending disbelief while we imagine and accept the qualities and character of the Super Hero. (It's also useful to read between the lines, to observe how the Super Hero was empowered [SEE James Sturm's Unstable Molecules (Marvel)--in which Vapor Girl reads Peyton Place, and the Human Torch is schooled benevolently by a Beat-spouting bonfire poet who speaks Kerouac]). I mean to say there is a humanity that informs such perseverance and courage most of all. There is, too, a literacy in all this extra-exceptional experience.

Bill Morgan's new book (The Typewriter Is Holy), featuring our friend Ginsberg, is given a generous spread in the current issue of Seven Days magazine, under "State of the Arts": "The world actually needs some poets and people like the Beats to come around now, when we're becoming more conservative and scared. . . " (my emphasis). In the Bill Morgan article, I'm grateful Seven Days brings in the new: ". . . a copy of Che.: A Novella In Three Parts, by Peter Money, a former student of Allen Ginsberg. . . While the author doesn't call his work 'neo-Beat'. . . Money's novella, closer to prose poem than narrative, features the kind of continuously flowing imagery that many people associate with the more spontaneous modes of Beat writing."

Thank you, Seven Days. Here's to "independence": to courage, perseverance, and renewal--by text, and [humane, inventive] living.

Che the novella is a small press fiction Best Seller

Readers, I thank you for making Che.: A Novella In Three Parts a fiction Best Seller.
http://www.spdbooks.org/Pages/Item/229/fiction-bestsellers.aspx
I count Leslie Scalapino and Jane Unrue as especially friendly shelf mates.

We can encourage literary--and herefore cultural--evolution by challenging those we know to read writing that is itself the writer intensely-reading passages of attention anew. (There's a good bit about Borges' writing-as-reading in today's New York Times Book Review I recommend.) I'm grateful to the intrepid readers and writers among us, who bear in it what's human and most lasting.

The page almost quivers (I don't blush saying so) to be film, to be dance, to be love loved and given to. The breathing thing, uplifting, to be part & entire. Summer night. . . and even the bedamned skunk musk is almost perfume. Refuge, hunger, thirst. A drop placed where it belongs. You who are reading it now. . . I thank you.

Jackie Saccoccio: Motherwell, Balcomb Greene, film; and the novella as such. Begin Again, Be New.

I almost passed over them. Page 152, New York magazine, the images within and amalgamation of Jackie Saccoccio's wall to wall 15' painting. What seemed mostly spray, blurred subway car graffiti, became a shape of movement, and then movements themselves, scenes and cultures freeze-framed in their 21st Century. They are somewhat Syriana montage, Balcomb Greene ("Champs de Mars", "Thunder Over the Sea", "Gertrude", "The Island" and Greene's women), or Robert Motherwell's Spanish Elegies. And in the wee spaces: some stilled-breath like Stieglitz saw, Pollock peeled open to the brain for pictures inside, a filmography of confusion, love, war, perfection, imperfection, restlessness, the post-post-post modern eternity; shadow of body, ghost, [K]lansm'n, breast; a city's trance dance at the peak of its inability to turn back.

Here's how New York magazine's Jerry Saltz put it: "located somewhere between a flickering film still, a weather system, and an ammonia-filled primal swamp. Angled sheens of color and foggy white transparencies, echoing dripped latticeworks and vertical pillars of brawny painting, provide structure and organize it architectonically and symphonically, with repeating motiffs, perceivable progressions, and. . . you go figure out the rest."

Guernica, Picasso. This sort of thing. I don't know Saccoccio's work beyond this. But I trust the one interaction, as I would hope a reader would trust a page, a passage, a word.

And I think, after having almost passed it by--returning to find what is found there, what human beings suffer and die from the lack of each day/ decade/ century (you were on to it, William Carlos Williams, doctor that you were--), that these still-blurs are what can center us again, unite us, reveal the common bond--by lust or lack, by devastation or deed, by myth and memory/ memorial. Through our friendships or through false foes: an inkling, inkwell, wellness through it all--finally. Celebration. A wet celebration, surmounting.

D.H. Lawrence, Garrison Keillor, Charles Wright: As Clouds Go By

First there were these words, by D.H. Lawrence (my compadre in general resemblance, I was once told by someone who was hooked on Lawrence): "[W]here the still warm air is full of the scent of pinks, spicy and sweet, and a stack of big red lilies a few yards away. . . ." The "painterliness," the attraction to "the scent of pinks," and the fact of a spring more like summer and summer now full in spring in Vermont presently told me once again Che is part of a lineage.

Then, this (a rare Almanac piece about language itself, and in expressionistic terms): "The world's an untranslatable language/
. . . It's a language of objects/ Our tongues can't master,/ but which we are the ardent subjects of." the speaker in Charles Wright's poem says. "If tree is tree in English,/ and albero in Italian,/ that's as close as we can come/ To divinity, the language that circles the earth/ and which we'll never speak."

The "divinity" of the tongue has always quickened the heartbeat especially in the gift of eyes. I believe we arrive there--"there"--where we make lush anything that will agree in that tension. The textual is made vivid in a sense-world for whom those keys and pads, windows and textures, are a vital drumming: A vitality layered in an accumulating sensuality, be this textuality or painterliness or the long extended nuanced--dance, say; sniff at tides, spray of wave to lips, memory and connection that is instant and sustaining.

I return to Che for this purpose, even as its author. I'd like to share the affinity.

Several years ago one of my poems was aired on Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" and, since then as before, I listen to his delivery when I can (in 1994 it was the sound of Billy Collins' poems over a radio on the top floor overlooking San Francisco Bay where I worked, and I thought--at the time--that the man behind the poem, or anyone with a name like "Billy Collins," must be a long since retired Merchant Marine, perhaps no longer with us [I would come to realize we were both little-enough-known poet-teachers in the same system, at the City University of New York; former colleagues, in fact]). Although my office radio mysteriously disappeared after many moments of pause while The Writer's Almanac aired at work over that year, what's found there frequently meets me where I am and provides impetus, springboard, connection with what needs to be done next.

Wolfgang Borchert & Williams' "perpetuum mobile" expressed

I find // in Williams' notion of "perpetuum mobile" by expression & text (and day to day: Ginsberg's the ordinary made extraordinary). . .and today, while reading more Wolfgang Borchert, the expressionism "in perpetuity"--necessarily layered (and whittle down) is the language to which I was always attracted and which evolved. "Sometimes Otherness is just the point where human happiness merges into a human dream" wrote Stephen Spender about Wolfgang Borchert's work ("Is it dream? Is it reality?). It is Borchert's "of sun, of sea and honey" or his--necessarily by contrast--"Horrible, the snow crunches exactly the same, just exactly the same. He lifted his feet up and stalked through the snow like a bird, purely to avoid the crunching." This kind of consciousness, grateful present-past-in-future combined; a celebration, a lament, a meditation. . .amid fear and enlivening. The grateful word, the telling, the loved moment and the moment loved. And here it is "for ever."

I listened to a concert of violin and cello in my field. The mountain turned red--plums & peaches--in the late day, blushing, under a moon, exactly under the one ceiling light of emerging evening, this pyramid & triangulating spun a moment's perpetuity.