Month: January 2003

Jordan “Blogman” Davis, the only one to respond to my call for questions!, writes:

Nada: vis a vis ornament. Have you read Mary Karr’s attack on ornamental poetics, mainly Ashbery and Merrill as I recall, that ran in Parnassus back before she became Stephen King’s Favorite Memoirist? I guess I don’t think of ornament as a gendered attitude, but isn’t that what everything from The Yellow Wallpaper on has been beating into our thick routines? that the apparently trivial details are the handholds, the judo leverage. What does that mean, I don’t know. I think I learned everything I know about martial arts from Charles Schultz (and Susan M., come to think of it). Anyway I’ve been thinking about that quality that you’re pointing at, and it keeps coming back to me in a negative definition, i.e. including material extraneous to the structure, embellishment, etc — which contradicts my own understanding of this quality, which is to take the most direct existing route to whatever emotion it is I’m following.. to create a filament that loops and coils to give off light, magnetic energy etc.. (blah blah Breton blah blah Soupault blah blah) which may look baroque and in a vacuum, fair enough. And fragile. Not that I can protect anything by changing its name, but the whole ‘ornament’ category sounds a lot more decadent than anything I’d know how to defend. Unless all this ornament is just a decoy, and I’m putting it out to divert attention from a real story, which now that I think of it (I’ve been using that phrase a LOT lately) may be just what I’ve done. So what’s the question. The question is, have you read Mary Karr against Ornament, as printed in Parnassus back when? xo, J

Jordan, I haven’t read the Mary Karr. I don’t think I’ve ever read Parnassus that I can remember. I’ve been so ghettoized in the inno-po world for so long that, well, I don’t think I’ve even ever read an issue of Fence all the way through. Not saying this with any kind of braggadocio, rather admitting the mind-forged manacles of my own cultural lexicon. So that answers your basic question, however abruptly. But to get to what is really interesting in your missal above, that beautiful description of the process of making things (poems) manifest themselves… I was reading today an article about Alan Watts, from which (tho it’s admittedly sorta half-baked)I quote briefly here:

Watts viewed the body as nothing less than a particular flowering of the Universe, frequently stating “You did not come into this universe, you grew out of it, like a leaf on a tree.”… of course the implications are gigantic, as our whole social and economic structure is based on the illusion that float around inside our heads and are “confronted with a world of alien objects,” that we don’t belong here, that we’re a mistake.

If we transpose Watts’ idea onto the body of the poem, the negative idea of ornament as extraneous unnecessary embellishment evaporates. That is, poems are not abstracted out of the world but are of the world (c.f. my letter to Brenda about the ornamental quality of the many things that can hang off a tree — apples, dewdrops — and her response) (cf also what is culture? what is nature? termite hill? skyscraper? what’s the diff? why do we loathe ourselves so?) (cf also a naked body — even naked we’re decorated, right? and our “parts” are hardly useless embellishments. I’m really talking about SUFFICIENTLY CAPTIVATING FORM) . And therefore, there are no objects (words) alien to a poem’s *potential* [an important qualification — and duchampian at heart — that is, ANYTHING can be material for art] microcosmic universe. However, if the objective, in making a poem, is to create or follow or trace back or spin out a particular emotional (or rhythmic?) filament (and I agree that it is), and to limn or fabricate its inherently necessary-to-its-being loops and coils and tendrils, then surely there are words, phrases, grammatical constructions, lineations and phonic patterns that either do or do not contribute to said creation or following or tracing back or spinning out. And that’s why we have editing. And that’s one reason why certain poems do not for certain readers allow more than a glimpse (if that) of that luminosity you allude to. Of course, those very impediments can also be part of what makes the poem compelling. Let me always admit impediments!

But I ask you all, whence the “decadent” association with ornament? And isn’t it egregious? There is no human culture whose members do not decorate themselves and their surroundings. Even the puritans had their buckles, did they not? I am in the possession of a zen priest’s summer over-kimono — it’s black and sheer like a negligee. As a child, did you or did you not play dress-up? So why, why, why do we punish ourselves for something we seem to be hard-wired into doing, namely manipulating the forms of our selves and surroundings into shapes that please and stimulate us?

It’s true that ornament may be the wrong word for what I’m talking about, too. I may have chosen it for the sake of polemic, because I was feeling limited by something or someone and I don’t like that feeling. It makes me want to argue, kick out, and ululate.

I don’t know if ornament “divert[s] attention” from the “real story.” Couldn’t ornament actually be the real story? Would there be any art(ifice) in that real story, if it could be proven to exist? At any rate, I don’t think poetry is about a real story. Do you? If you were really hot for the real story, wouldn’t you be doing something else?

Here are some more “think” questions:

Are anklets extraneous to a kathakali dancer?

Or false eyelashes to a drag queen?

Wouldn’t we all be less ornamented if we had no names?

Isn’t language itself the ultimate ornament?

Can you imagine yourself living inside a perfect white box?

Aren’t even “whiteness” and “boxiness” decorative qualities in contrast with NOTHINGNESS?

I’m feeling all heady with abstractions. Thank you for the question, Jordan. Do you have a copy of that Parnassus you could lend me (or as my students say “borrow me”)? More fuel for the polemic is (as the Japanese say) also good.

It’s my birthday in one hour and one minute!

I love Laura Elrick’s tough, frustrated poem in The Poker.

Other things I have been reading lately that I really like:

Nick Piombino’s Theoretical Objects (awesomely observant & permissive)

Clare Pollard’s Bedtime (really adept audenesque rhymes that just miss being doggerel!)

Sparrow’s Yes, You ARE a Revolutionary(hee. hoo.)

Jules Boykoff’s poems (the ones beginning with lines from other contempoets)in the new Combo

Barbara Cole’s poem in the new Combo

Alexei Kruchenykh’s Suicide Circus (inventor of ZAUM! — trans. Jack Hirschman)

It’s 3 in the morning! I drank too much black sesame-flavored tapioca tea in Flushing. Must try to sleep. And perhaps, just perhaps, I will get around to talking about some the works I just listed.

But I feel like answering some questions.

I will take questions now.

Oyasumi nasai!

[this poem — except for the two lists — is supposed to be in three-line stanzas]

FANCIER

As with a yellowish couple

sanpaku green Hypnoscheinwerfern

one radiates. It wishes only my energy —

it to require they suddenly sometimes,

like a demandingly plaintive kid speech,

which why ask? why? why?

if it wishes an activity or

wet wet with food with the place,

cuddle-vermischt.

Sometimes, if I make house things,

I do not feel you as I’m, which plays a role,

this it’s really I comète besprinkling

or the counter wiping off. I am another woman

cleaning-ram. Having Dante is an attractive doofus, smiles,

which rubs upward and prancing for the food? Food? more more food?

smiles sniffle to mine red it at lips, purrs.

Its fur is from clay/tone differently brother’s

smoothes its deeply with a grey flaumigen undercoat.

The separate gland oil gives it the places clumpy.

During it assied on me it smiles itself and my fingers licks:

lick if you lick lick, grignotent, gnaw on gnaw on, lick.

It shifts, it is, under the charm of

something kinetics or buglike

with much effort.

dante is divine

dante is lost

dante is off again

dante is back

dante is born

dante is apprehended by commander pyre of the tsars’ own scarlet wraiths

dante is an interesting and articulate guest on radio and tv

dante is guided through hell and purgatory by virgil and by beatrice through heaven

dante is really very popular

dante is the real deal

dante is very frightened and nervous by virgil’s presence as you can tell by his response towards virgil saying “have pity on me

dante is at the gate of purgatory proper

dante is the closest thing to an answer

dante is joyfully reunited with beatrice

dante is known for peopling the comedy with his acquaintances

dante is an agile and quick athlete

dante is sitting on the floor

dante is trying to reach his boss on the phone

dante is full of fear as he enters the gloomy halls of the inferno

dante is also able to probe the minds of others

dante is 290 pounds and he’s 6’4″

dante is the darling of my life

dante is my spiritual food

dante is a great poet

dante is one star in the entertainment business who doesn’t need a press agent to hype his many accomplishments

dante is full of life and full of himself sometimes

Nemo has that willfulness and insolence

which extends outside, the Lord of blackening.

This nervous intelligence. Is presented I to consider to him of Skull.

If you stated yourselves to contradict GET DOWN you,

Dante craven narrows, but Nemo will neglects me simply,

activity of wild brilliant force on its face

I found, by playing the its lady of cleaning,

looking at window on the gray neu-angekommene coolness,

“of which things koestliche thinking we do have to eat this case?

and presenting, to ask around Gary,

“that things koestliche became to want you to eat you this case?”

… claustro-coziness the house.

Are the cats, like a matter of writing,

folded back and kitsch, right-hand side?

Here, kitschy, kitschy.

Awaking me the night for kibbles, sleeping on my head,

creating horrible stinks. But they not, as so much of what I meet in this world,

incur in me the resentment, the weariness, agitation, or violence.

Nemo has a certain manner of operation on those appears like

“herumspringendes”– he’s that a goat. I note that I think sometimes the goat of him

like left milkless, a child of Lucifer and me.

Herumspringen normally precisely accompanies Quietschen

by a chirrup or Teenybaby mew, to exceed. When it isn’t with that ardor,

he is restive added drug, excited. It was perforated.

It wanted to expire in Hallway, therefore I, said OKAY,

let’s expires in Hallway. It schnueffelte approximately courageously to be,

when another housing opened with door,

however ran of return him more terrified, mewing,

with our door, and raye, left return inside.

Its fragile névroses are exact at me.

Is it indeed my child? mine trusts it?

or a certain extrusion of me? Ne-MOIS. of holy Karneval person,

who belongs to Nada, household carnivore.

Two moistens syllables, which shift the mouth grimace,

which became at an astonishment zero stretch outside. Smoothes

the gameness, light of my living piece: iranai of ANIMONATEN ireba of anataga.

nemo is nifty

nemo is to improve the life long learning

nemo is an extendible stellar dynamics toolbox

nemo is a stellar dynamics toolbox for users as well as pro

nemo is the ideal forum for musicians

nemo is designed to improve the quality of life for anyone with

nemo is not digesting squid that he has eaten

nemo is based on a concept of concentrated and localizated reinforcement

nemo is exciting

nemo is the star of a new book bearing his name

nemo is a lightweight

nemo is latijn voor ‘niemand’

nemo is gecastreerd

nemo is quite the snuggle bunny

nemo is as astonishing now as when first published

nemo is incisive commentary on the world we live in today

nemo is where you want to be

nemo is a young new yorker who is carried off by a giant blimp to slumberland

nemo is so awesome

The need something I don’t, Has I they my society animal, my possession,

my possessed animal of the society prance of the high continuous,

unsheathed crazy firm view the claw.

Add little smeared sign a D, in order to go well to the Daemon.

Dante likes wallow in my newspaper and steals my luminous ray of the attention.

Its very large haarigen hulk lolls in the sides,

its ears withdraw slightly and anticipate GET DOWN

It looks at also assured however unlenksam. It thus does not become

that lunk it shifted, maintenance me me that in it him petting,

all distorts it manner like a Russian hat mussed and fluffed.

Its halls undercoat gray ends in wispy clouds,

hanging far far its back or from the nose.

Nemo is worse. If the cry in him or me refuse something with him —

he disappears and the bullies his brother. He’ll persecutes it with howling

much mutual and of the groups of the skin of the flight.

Dante never does this in Nemo, although it is larger as much.

Both have gelatinous a mullido underhanging additional belly,

like lions or NANDI (cows with sagradas) of the zoological gardens.

The question is to know how I can be everywhere open to turbulences

of the worlds poetischen of others. Or need which I include/understand even of them

like turbulences. But it is, like I feel it.

Your breath has this odor, of Saeugetieres (animal fleischfressendes)

and the ocean. Your heads, particularly in the place behind the ear,

in which them softer fur rises together in two directions in a top, odor like the cocoa.

This whole conversation “of the widening of the field.” What arrives,

if the field receives thus, you extended don’t would like or lives inside

to fold you more him? Wide field = a kind attacks territorial. Masculine marauders.

A head of cats is right the just format in order to seize, as a orange or a breast

of the smallish. Part of great design of nature’s? Task continuously to as you we it

is going to die and of like my cats has breath. Their nervousness.

I watch the breath of Dante to move in its body like He hairs.

There’s a point on its voluminosa belly that increases, scatterers,

increases. The bands deform a po ‘, radically when it moves more completely.

Gary releases the keyboard keys, the mouse. Radar of the ears of Dante

approximately in nature. Dante is “simple”. I mean, purrs him if him straight lines

sight with him or, if you handle to seize your capacity, to bring him.

Nemo which, purr not always deigning each proud occasion, however there subtle,

time, when it me with desperate to require clay lunges, for on my box finding

or its head in my hair strong to confuse, its pure, almost violent one.

Dante is very sensitive to my “strange” action.

I passed by a phase to carry a Chinese mask of pig of character of animation around the house while dancing around an extravagant manner of the song length to Maria Callas.

Dante would function until me and entreatingly with eyes full with the timid concern

would look at me. Which connection could be there between these “portals”

and “the vortices of the poetic worlds of others”?

And why am I so tilted to penetrate one but not the other?

One of my first sexual experiments was with sticking.

The cats are my harem, my hysterical odalisques. hold you luminous I’m. naked

your asshole of small smooches, smaller than dimes, like a fraction of penny foreign coin.

ALL THE GLAM VERVE

I was going to dress up… but someone totally shot down my ego… and now I don’t now if I really want to go or not… Fuck humans…

What Kind of Anime Character Are You?

I tryed that free writing were you let your mind blank and write and some scary shit came outta that pen

and he went to there and said ahe snaerm kerasd ehreh gerty-o lare kaltae mine wertgo ahders lopend up lasteas y ustedew krastica ignus auqua cairo lunas terra stellas eins eistas tentro nuesnet tempus vernom

five things I’ve always really liked and very likely always will:

1. Love

2. Reading a good book

3. Music

4. Kitties!

5. Good friends

They proceeded to poorer areas that night and took out a box of eggs. As they sped through the streets, they threw the eggs at unsuspecting victims. One was a little child by the road, whose face was hit. My husband recalls looking back at the little one’s stunned expression – it must have also hurt the child quite a bit. Another was an old man who was on his bicycle. Others were to follow much to the twisted delight of these boys.

My husband tried to stop them but they were having way too much fun. He remembers feeling anger and shame… he remembers saying “astaghfirullah!” over and over again.

“an ode to boy shorts”

they are nice

they are groovy

they are comfy

and cover your pubies

Breaking down:

My faith – I think about God 24/7. I wish God was always in my life, but he’s been driving me away from my intelligence, deep thoughts, and my freedom to daydream. God is first… God is always first. I always think about him. He’s been tatooed to my mind.

Cheney has lied again. “The fact is that 54 million Americans own stocks that pay dividends.”

N? R? SELL ME DRUGS!!!

so, i’m getting off the subway today, and as i’m walking up the stairs this guy is running down and he says to me “could you tell me which train i just missed.” i say, “the train to manhattan.” the guy says “yeah, but was it the N or the R, or was it the E?” the E!!! it doesn’t even run in brooklyn! but, i automatically think “hmmm, maybe he was trying to tell me that he had ecstasy to sell to me!” and then i realized that i have a drug problem.

Kul 12 malam tuh aku dapat ring tone lagu Happy Birthday.Mmmmm..canggih sungguh, org takde..tepon pun buleh nyanyikan sekarang.

Then, it came to me that I could strand another yarn with the fur so that a) it wouldn’t be so sleazy and b) it would be a plusher and denser fabric, but still with all the glam verve i wanted from the vamos. OK!

ele nao aguentaria mais.. “girl, you’re rad” amei ouvir akilo, mas só entendi depois hehe conflitos de língua..

The nonspecific rage that filled me scant minutes ago has begun to subside. It might have something to do with the stuffed animals in my lap. Only time will tell…

*Totally Po-mo Poem Composed with Lines from Blogger.com’s list of Fresh Blogs: Try this at home!

Sighted, walking home from the station tonight after a fun field trip to Flushing and Steinway St:

corrugated box, empty

description of contents printed on side:

PLUSH DUCK HAND PUPPET

Topics left too long are tiresome, I know, and I apologize to you, Dear Reader, for the unsightly gap in these entries. I’ve been a trifle indisposed, what with what my friend Marianne calls “monstruation” and the need to watch Bollywood videos and help produce the Po-Proj newsletter. When last we spoke, I had posed a question (see previous entry) to Kevin Davies, about his use of the term “organicism” on a post to the sublist, in which he referred to a conversation he and I and Deirdre had had on the F train (and, as he remembers it, on the platform as well) about “organicist” vs. “formalist” poetry. He makes this extraordinary statement in his post:

In fact, the “organicists” are _the most_ formalist poets of the previous century.

and, in an e-mail to me, Kevin writes,

The last line was intended as a provocation but no one took the bait. [except, apparently, ME!] It is one of a series of statements I’ve made lately that range from the semi-serious (“The New York School had a profound effect on Canadian poetry”; “_nox_ is a long poem even though Ron didn’t think of it that way”) to the ridiculously arbitrary (“Language writing ended in 1987”) to the absolutely true (“Jack Spicer invented the clap-on clap-off lamp”). I would put the last sentence quoted above in the “absolutely true” category, despite the fact that it harbours yet another obnoxious binary.

Provocation for its own sake! I love it! Kevin, you’ve made me very happy with this admission. And as the only rainbow trout to go for this lure (I typed first “lyre” — groovy), I should say that the reason I suspect that we are using the terms organicism in different ways is that I, in fact, am not entirely sure of what it means when I use it. I have a sense of some kind of wavy, protozoic, membrane-y, shape-shifting, tentative & INTUITIVE (sorry, cynics) modus operandum. Not that the “”organicist”” (double double quotes for doubt’s sake) poem has no rules (rather it might generate them in the process of becoming), but that it doesn’t, as in a narrow, unreflective, and binaristic definition of formalism, have its rules and parameters as a starting point or a raison d’etre. I’m not against “proceduralism” — for indeed, what isn’t procedural? — and for that matter, what isn’t “formal”? — but I am bored with people falling more in love with HOW someone put a poem together than with the poem itself. And maybe not even using a term like “falling in love” with a poem in the first place, but rather someone saying he is “interested in” or “intrigued by” its “project,” etc. etc.

Inasmuch as I admit that I don’t know what my ill-defined notion of organicism is, I think that I have recently found it articulated in Madeline Gins’ and Arakawa’s Architectural Body. It’s a little frustrating to read sometimes, for all its genius, because, well, I’m a Capricorn — a double Capricorn actually (sorry Adorno), and although I have a lot of visionary and conceptually imaginative Aquarius in my chart, the Capricorn in me needs to see proof of the practicality and usefulness of ideas before I can really “fall in love” with them. Gins and Arakawa’s notion of the architectural body is extremely hard to visualize, although it makes me think a little of childhood trips to the Exploratorium’s “Tactile Dome” and of Batman costumes:

Everything that can be done in an ordinary house can be done in this one, but some maneuvering may be necessary to reach the point of sitting pretty. Each piece of material on the pile has ribs or spokes that open like those of an umbrella. Ready-to-be-activated expanding mechanisms lie at four-foot intervals. (p. 29)

….

[“Robert”, a ‘character’ experiencing the architectural body, says,]

If feels as if the material will go from only clinging to my back to fully engulfing me. With each thrusting of my limbs, or head and neck, or torso against the house that sits on top of me and drapes over me, I find myself in drastically changed circumstances.

When people, or “organisms that person”, in Gins & Arakawa’s terms, adjust their movements, they create the spaces for all of the functions of life to take place, including cooking, showering, etc. It’s ineffably nifty, and you should absolutely read this obdurately brilliant book, but I’m still not convinced of the practicality of the architectural notions contained therein.

UNLESS, of course, we are speaking of the architecture of the poem, in which case Gins and Arakawa make crystal clear perfect sense to me, obdurately brilliant sense. Here are some passages I earmarked as if to say YES YES, that’s EXACTLY what I wanted to say:

Because bioscleave {Gins and Arakawa’s re-naming of the biosphere ‘to stress its dynamic nature”] itself occurs as a demonstrably tentative constructing toward a holding in place, architectural works[poems] constructed into it cannot be anything but tentative; furthermore — and it is for this reason that we have chosen tentativeness as an organizing principle in our practice — it is not enough to know that in deep time all architectural works [poems] are fleeting things; it is necessary to construct architectural works[poems] that reflect bioscleave’s intrinsic tentativeness. An architectural work [a poem] that will serve the body well will maximize its chances of drawing on and blending with bioscleave, positioning the body in such a way that it can best coordinate itself within its surroundings. Simply, pretending that architecture[poetry] is not tentative is just that, only a pretense. Architecture [poetry] will come into its own when it becomes thoroughly associated and aligned with the body, that active other tentative constructing toward a holding in place, the ever-on-the-move body. The tense of architecture [poetry] should be not that of “This is this” or “Here is this” but instead that of “What’s going on?”

Here’s one more relevant quote (but I’ll say it again, you really should read the whole book):

A person moving through a tactically posed surround will be led to perform procedures that may or may not be recognizable to her as procedures. All of a sudden, what seemed a group of disparate actions, the doing of this and that, may strike her as the steps of a procedure, If these procedures, which have a lot in common with medical procedures, elude their performers, they do so openly, or are constitutionally elusive. Always invented/reinvented on the spot, they exist in the tense of the supremely iffy. Not a fixed set of called-for actions, an architectural procedure is a spatiotemporal collaboration between a moving body and a tactically posed surround.

The time when we may be able to live in such houses may be far off, but at least we know that we are able to live in such poems. (some kind of musical flourish here…)

Hey Kevin Davies!

The grapevine has it that you’re correcting my binaries, too! Bad bad ikky binaries!

I think we actually might be thinking of different things when we say “organicism.”

How ’bout you let me in on what you’re saying about me on the sublist (to which I’m not subscribed) so’s I can respond?

Nada’s Bad Binaries

or

Williams as Satyr?

David Hess! writes in from the city of drive-thru weddings…

Dear Nada,

I’ve been enjoying your discussion on the question of ornament, especially since I just finished reading Modernism, Medicine & William Carlos Williams by T. Hugh Crawford (University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), which analyzes the “cleanliness/contact paradox” that runs like a fault line throughout WCW’s work. Crawford argues that “Williams’s poetic sensibility is permeated by a clinical sensibility: in essence, much of his writing is what Marie Boroff calls a practice of the ‘diagnostic eye’. Williams’s epistemology demands the exploration of the fetters to the clear apprehension of truth or objective clarity, and consequently it roots him in a deep historical tradition of medicine – the dialectical play between direct apprehension of the thing and the broader enframing of that data in a rational or theoretical field”(31). But this modernist desire to get words and objects “clean” – resulting in the dry masculine austerity you oppose to a carnivalesque feminine ornamentality — is countered by an almost sexual, satyr-like desire to be in touch with them. For Williams, visiting sick patients, being among members of the working classes and hearing their complaints and stories, was a source of excitement, not to mention poetry. Thus, “Williams attacked the academy because it tried to defend the English language from American and immigrant infection. Part of his motive is a sense that language (meaning) exists as it is used in a local context and cannot be owned. Its pristine purity cannot be protected behind the battlements of academic buildings”(82).

I think Williams’s prose, in general, displays as much descriptive richness and energy as the Rabelais passage you quote, if not on a noun level, at least on a verbal level – though I’d hesitate to call it ornamental (even as Williams speaks of the imagination’s role in embellishing daily life). Also, an argument, I think, could be made for the ironically ornamental quality of Pound’s poetry, especially The Cantos, with its treasure chest of historical facts and tidbits (I almost want to say gossip). In the Loy-pigeons poem you reprinted I detect lots of artifice but no ornament or decoration, which is to say no superfluous, digressive material. The poetry of Marianne Moore seems clean, as it did to Williams, but decorative, which is to say more oriented to relations between surfaces than depths. Coolidge, whose work ranges from minimal to maximal, is almost certainly ornamental, but I wouldn’t call it carnivalesque. Like much of Barbara Guest’s work, it comes across as pretty austere. Lush in a linguistic sense; dry in a human or emotive sense. So, basically, I disagree with the binary you construct between strict masculine form and free feminine ornament. One is always involved in the other.

Tidbits:

I read “An Andalusian Alphabet” – how strange that my interest in a more back-to-basics poem found its target in the emotionally direct and terse lyrics Lorca looks at in his essays on the deep song.

Alan Davies substitutes the word ‘glitter’ for ornament in his letter. I’d want to substitute the word ‘whimsy’ for both of them. You all NY-schoolers, right?

No, textuality is not dead. What seems to be gone from the discussion is the idea of a critique being the locus of avant-garde practice. If someone would pay me, I’d like to write an essay on “The Aestheticist Turn,” as the logical outcome and reaction against the politicization of language by the language poets. To paraphrase Steve Evans, what is the ‘shared conceptual horizon’ that presents itself now, after the turn to language? Nature? The ‘human’? Pleasure? The ‘mind’? Nope. Blogs.

Here, anything’s rhetorically permissible!

or

TExTUALITY RESUSCITATED!

Bob Perelman writes:

Ron’s blog just led me to your blog, which I began reading happily the other day. It’s always nice to see poetry alive and well. But, hey, when I read

–I

suppose I’m

going to have

to define

“ornament”

sooner or later

— I suppose it

has something

to do with

textuality,

which Bob

Perelman says

is “dead”

(yeah, right,

Bob. Any more

pronouncements

up your

sleeve?)

I felt put into a funhouse mirror a bit. Are you thinking of the time we chatted after my reading at Double Happiness? I have a sharper memory of you outlining some of the shoals of the current NYC scene; and a vague memory of me saying something to the effect that I wasn’t so excited by writing that seemed satisfied with self-contained text games. But all that was was a casual opinion, a blurry snapshot of what felt like my taste at that moment. I hate pronouncements. So, if it’s rhetorically permissible, can I non-pronounce that particular death?

Ornament, cont.

Whenever I hear yet another construction using the pattern “Whenever I hear _______, I reach for my _____________” I usually reach for my barfbag. But I keep thinking, “Whenever I hear the phrase ‘mere aestheticism’, I reach for my lipstick.”

Brenda Iijima writes:

I think that Alan likes ornament, very much in fact. And his poetry often ungulates like wavy lines caused by slight winds, and forceful winds too.

We were walking down Bergen Street and he commented to me that he liked the sign posted on the Sign Reader’s Shop. I said, “OH REALLY” because, for me, the sign was overly ornate and the snake headdress on the woman’s head swirled, all around the space of the blue sign–I believe it was gold on blue.

Now I walk by the sign and look at it with Alan eyes. Maybe there will be change.

and in a later e-mail:

I wanted to come up with a categorical statement about ornament and its usage but only realized this: the more ornament and ornamental feature is applied, the more I expect it to be of the most stunning, sensitive quality, so with ornament comes meticulousness and delicacy. Gesture and a certain primal crudeness can be rich, but somehow not, in ornamental overload. So was that said placard I saw with Alan. Still, there might be cases that blow way beyond my conception…I’ll look.

And my response:

Your comment about ornament seems right, but then I think about, I don’t know, the accidental ornament of a bazaar or a cluttered curio shop or even that place at the corner of Elizabeth and Grand that sells lamp parts — remember? Or the ornament of a tree (not an Xmas one but a real one) heavily laden with flowers or lichen or dewdrops or big fruits — to the point that it’s “too much” — like the outfit of the dancing courtesan in “Devdas” — and then I’m not sure. It’s true that the Arabesque forms of ornament tend to be meticulous and precise, but I think ornament can be offhand and rakish, even unintentional, too. And it’s not always “sensitive” — I think of the big Russian matrons at Brighton Beach with their puffed-out bleached hair and bubblegum-colored lipstick and nails — though they are stunning, and full of the wonder of the world. Not that I’d want them in my living room, but you know what I mean.

and again from Brenda:

Sure, you can post my comments about ornament. I guess I was differentiating between natural forms that could be then called ornament and consciously constructed instances of ornament. In my comments I was not including those found in nature. One stunning phenomenon, at least in the visual arts is that anything that is found in numbers, multiplied, –repeated, becomes, almost by default, visually beautiful or interesting. This too, I was not thinking of, when I wrote what I did to you as addendum. I revel in the contentious statement or the categorical or the deterministic, because instantly energies of the contrary swirl and the richness of what IS comes forward so easily. That’s how I find Alan’s book, SIGNAGE. The book is not about agreement or consensus. It is as if it is its own opposing force grounded in language. It is fodder for the continuation of ideas, that they cannot be housed in a single statement.