Month: December 2002

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I have a cold that’s wallowing around in my chest like a melancholy yak on codeine and it’s slowed me down a bit, but Bernadette advises us to write through our fatigue, so here… I … go …

Kevin Davies, one of the most enthusiastic readers and perspicacious writers I know (in a community of enthusiastic readers and perspicacious writers), makes the following delightful characterization and sends along a question in response to my statement that “I loathe structure.”:

So: you hate structure but like, not form, but forms, is that correct? You do seem pro-forms but not inhibited or contained by them. I attacks on the mind sorry TAXONOMIZE you as counter-hegemonic lyric discourse with opals and ornithography liable at any moment to flip a coin and go postal on patriarchy, yeah that’s it.

[this para also from KD — sorry, I haven’t figured out how to format this blog properly yet and have forgotten my html, which I’d got pretty good at before the stupid injury two years ago. i’ll review it, I *promise*] Kept thinking of Alan Davies’s thing in Signage where he talks about hating structure. [“I, a private and concrete individual, hate structures, and if I reveal Form in my way, it is in order to defend myself.”] But the emphasis, as I think Alan would probably agree now, is on hate rather than structure. But what _about_ Alan? He is one of our mutual passions. His work, that is. Do you ever find him insufficiently “ornamental”? He seems to, at least sometimes, want to get at the stripped-down emotional “facts” of what’s in front of him to write, which to my Asperger-addled mind (truthfully, I could use a little _more_ Asperger) might put him at odds with your pro-ornament argument. (I wonder how “pro-ornament” would come out on the software.)

[Nada again] I’m happy to report that “pro-ornament” came out as “pro ornament”, hyphen-less but accurate. But what _about_ Alan, indeed? To talk about him and ornament in the same mental breath I’m seeing that I need to hone my terms a little better. Either that or expand them to define “ornamental ™” (if I really am going to latch on to that term and make it “mine” — ugh) as “what I like”. Maybe I need to clear up the misconception that “ornamental” always means “frou-frou.” I’m not using “frou-frou” pejoratively — I’m one of the few people I know who actually *likes* Fragonard — but just as a delimiter of a certain kind of ornamentation. Actually, there’s a type of ornamentation I prefer that may be best exemplified by an anecdote:

The first time I went to France I had been living in Japan for a couple of years and was thoroughly imbued with Japanese sensibilities. I found the France I had dreamed of for so many years disappointing. I had been spoiled by the subtle asymmetries and striking combinations of elements that I lived among in Japan. The rococo gold ornamentation I saw in France seemed very “done”, almost dead, in comparison. I almost couldn’t see it. I’ve come to a more balanced appreciation of both European and Asian modes since I’ve come back to the USA (that is, give me anything but Americana, please!), but for the time I lived in Japan I was quite certain that there was no place where the objects were more beautiful.

Here’s a definition the Japanese notion of “kazari” (or “ornament”) from the

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I had an exceedingly interesting childhood. I have made many stabs at recapturing it in prose, but I have never been satisfied with the results. Maybe because I’m not Proust? [O give me a room/lined with cork…] The closest I’ve come so far is an autobiographical long poem modeled after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”. It’s all in loose iambic tetrameter and I didn’t get past age 7, but I think I begin in it, despite all its happy mannerisms, to evoke the subcultures of the 60’s and 70’s that nurtured me. I really ought to get back to work on that poem.

One of the many lovely things about growing up in Northern California in the 1970’s was the energetic if simplistic feminism that surrounded me. My freeschool took a trip to an our bodies ourselves-type women’s clinic where we had the option of peering into each other’s specula: “Anyone want to see what a virgin looks like?” In both junior college in grad school I was fortunate to study with two feminist Janets (Janet Thormann and Janet Adelman), both Shakespeare scholars. I still notice in myself sometimes a knee-jerk tendency to blame everything on ” the men” although I know better, that I should think it through. But sometimes that’s just too much trouble.

One puzzling thing about the men poets around me is their compulsion to attacks on the minds. Actually, that’s not what I said, but I’m using my voice recognition software and it recognized ” taxonomize” as ” attacks on the minds”. Hee hee. Texan enemy . my software just won’t get it : (hand-typing) Taxonomy! Feh. I know, fellas, it’s really chaotic out there, but no matter how hard you try * you won’t get a handle on it.* I wonder to what extent the impulse to austerity ( which I associate, perhaps incorrectly, with being male ) comes out of frustration and bewilderment with muchness, disorder, and curlicue. Jordan said in his blog that he scored very high on the Asperger’s syndrome test. Drew says that nearly all guy poets are at least borderline Asperger’s -” little professors”. I’m not that way at all. Although I suck in information eagerly as any boy I know, I don’t retain it unless I can use it for something . And hierarchical taxonomies often either don’t make sense to me or they make me angry, as for example when there’s a 10 best list that I don’t happen to be on (:-)). My simplistic feminist knee-jerk response is to look at the patrilineal system of naming and the doctrine of prima janitorial (that’s *primogeniture* to you) as, oh dear, I’m about to wax slightly ajar domestic (that’s *jargonistic* to you — ooh and a cliche to boot! — gee I love voice recognition): ERASURE of women’s contributions to culture, the family, history, and daily life. But I don’t feel like getting all post-structuralist now about webs of connections vs hierarchical ordering because, duh, we all know about that. But to what extent have we internalized it? I don’t, for example, seen many businesses run on the web model.

So that’s what I meant when I said to a group of poet guys (luminaries! Bruce Andrews, Bill Luoma, Michael Scharf, and Tony Torn, who is not a poet guy but a creative guy) after a reading at the Bowery Poetry Club, “I loathe structure”. They all leapt in to contradict me; “You do? No you don’t! You are very analytical. And what about the outfits?” I mean I love form and pattern and design and connections and responses, but the word “structure” carries with it a very unfeminine prison-feeling — the same one I get when I look at the American flag.

So, about this anger and this prison-feeling. I never feel I can state my poetics, but rather feel I have to defend them, based as they are on this very gendered notion of ornament . Studying Shakespeare with the two Janets , particularly the first when I was 14, made me aware of the kind of misogyny embodied in Hamlet when he breaks a feeling — make that “in Hamlet when he berates Ophelia.” Shakespeare’s works are rife with a misogyny often connected to artifice, decoration, dissembling, and ornament. So for that matter is lots of other literature further and further back in time, but it was in Shakespeare that I first really became conscious of it. Ornament, as a motivating principle for poems (or for life), is just as much under attack, just as trivialized, as it has ever been.

Whenever I hear the collocation “mere aestheticism” I bristle, and not just because it’s an automotized combo of words. Aestheticism (which I am defining here as the impulse to ornamentalize) is NOT (necessarily) decadent, class-based, or culture-bound. Rather it’s a UNIVERSAL human characteristic. “Mere” feminizes (think in FRENCH for a second) derogatorily. I’m looking at a paper by Nikos A. Salingaros called

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The impulse to decorate is, as always, very strong. One idea (please don’t steal it, but if you can think of any practical ways to implement it please let me know) is to do a series — I’m not sure of what — could be poems, or fashion items, or paintings — of urban wildlife: pigeons, squirrels, sparrows. Imagine, a 50’s style shirtwaist dress whose full skirt is imprinted with a faux sumi-e of sparrows on winter branches! It almost makes my heart palpitate to think of it. Allison Cobb (or was it Jen Coleman?) commented to me, on hearing my idea, “why not rats?” I suppose there would have to be rats, too. For irony as well as diversity.

Our lives these days our over-designed (determined) but under-decorated. Kazari! Embellishment! My whole being rails against minimalism, austerity, pruning. Or simply the unconsideredness of public spaces which could have been extraordinary experiences in form and pattern. I always think this on the F train, with its 1970s Denny’s orange/tan/woodgrain scheme. Why the lack of visual imagination? What a contrast to the tiles in the 6 train stations. 86th Street it particularly stunning. I find myself transfixed before those exquisite combinations of pale chartreuse, brick-chestnut, and grayed purple. And I suppose I feel the same way, though I often have to suppress it out of practicality/expediency, about those quotidian pigeons. Mina Loy understood pigeons better than any poet who has ever lived. I recently taught her poem, “Property of Pigeons” in an introductory college writing course in a fly-by-night college in Bensonhurst. I found that my undergrads (Russian, Chinese, African-American, Jamaican, Italian-American) were all able to enter this rather difficult poem with its weblike language — maybe because its subject is so familiar to us:

_Property of Pigeons_

Pigeons doze,

or rouse

their striped crescendos

of grey rainbow

a living frieze on the shallow

sill of a factory window

Pigeons arise,

alight

on vertical bases

of civic brick

whitened with avalanches

of their innocent excrements

as if an angel had been sick;

all that is shown to us

of bird-economies,

financeless,

inobvious as the disposal

of their corpses.

Pigeons make irritant, alluring

music;

quilled solfeggios

of shrill wings winnowing

their rejoicing, cooing

fanaticism for wooing.

Their dolce voices

dotage.

Too and fro, frowardly they live

banishing each other’s

gorgeous halters

in the feathery drive

of preliminaries

to their marriages.

Pigeons disappear,

their claws, a coral landing-gear,

dive for the altar-stair

to their privacies —

a slice of concrete

fallen on a cornice

leading into darkness;

the slit adjacence of houses

where the caressive dusts,

the residue of furnaces

upholster the gossamer

festoons of intestate spiders

for nuptial furniture

Pigeons through some conjurous procedure

appear to reappear

upon the altar-stair

at startling instants

in the immature

torsos of their giant infants;

timid and unflown

stark of plume

naive in nativity

to peer into a vast transparency.

Google gave me a little present when I tried to find this poem online in the hopes of not having to type it in myself. Although I couldn’t find the poem, I found a mention of it on the University of Princeton site in a paper on the _Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol_translated by Peter Cole. It’s not clear to me who wrote the paper, but I learned that Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a Hebrew medieval poet. I couldn’t actually find the Loy citation, but I did find a section on ORNAMENT that dovetails (pun intended) beautifully with today’s message. Here’s the link: http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/s6933.html Go down to the section headed “EMBRACING EVASION: THE EXOTIC” to find exactly what I would have loved to have said if I were a scholar. I’m not supposed to quote it here, but please, please, go have a look! It’s not that I’m too lazy to paraphrase, but I haven’t eaten lunch yet and the passage is so well-written.

As to sparrows, I cannot rave enough about a volume entitled, _Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi_ (trans. Lucien Stryk. Takahashi was a dadaist poet before he became a zen poet. Zen, he says in an interview in the back of the book, saved his life. In recent years he has been writing fewer poems and more books on zen, but he says, “When I was writing poems, almost daily, what fascinated me was the possiblity of anything, everything being made poetry. Though I was hardly conscious of having an aesthetic program. All I wanted, truthfully, was for the poems to express the world’s vibrancy.” I really really wish more poets these days felt the same way. Everyone’s either got a program or they’re being told to get with one.

I’ve got a program too, and it has to do with the notion of ornament that I don’t have time to flesh out today. I have to have lunch. But before I do I will leave you with one of Takahashi’s sparrow poems:

_Flight of the Sparrow_

Sparrow dives from roof to ground,

a long journey — a rocket soars

to the moon, umpteen globes collapse.

Slow motion: twenty feet down, ten billion

years. Lightheaded, sparrow does not think,

philosophize, yet all’s beneath his wings.

What’s Zen? “Thought,” say masters.

“makes a fool.” How free the brainless

sparrow. Chirrup — before the first “chi,”

a billion years. He winks, another. Head left,

mankind’s done. Right, man’s born again.

So easy, there’s no end to time.

One gulp, swallow the universe. Flutter

on limb or roof — war, peace, care banished.

Nothing remains — not a speck.

“Time’s laid out in the eavestrough,”

sparrow sings,

pecks now and then.

Love,

nada

write to me at nada@jps.net