Rabinovich's "Murphy Laws" for poetry.

The Murphys Laws of Poetry

Poetic Murphy’s law: When someone thinks he can write a poem, he always does.

Murphy’s Law of Duality: When someone thinks he can write two poems, he’ll end up with a triptych.

Corollary of Archimedes: A poem expands to fill the entire volume.

Exception to the Murphy’s law: Any fool can write free verse.

First corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Any poem can be printed.

Amendment to the First Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Any poem can be printed, even unprintable.

Second Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: All poems, however unprintable, will end up on the web.

Sequelae to the Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Not a single poem will be read.

Murphy’s Law of Thermodynamics: Editing makes everything worse.

First Principle of Poetic Evolution: “...so peerless amid all the Amazons. com...”

Conclusions of the Emergency Orthodontist: Rhymes, teeth, and barstools fly Saturday nights.

First Axiom: Any poem can be set to music.

Corollary (the all-thumbs rule): Of the myriad tunes, they will invariably choose the one guaranteed to do the greatest damage.

Second Axiom: There’s a doggerel for every tune.

The Law of Poetic Frequencies: Anthologies automatically open on the page with the host’s poems.

The Cardinal Rule of Poetic Merit: Real poetry is what I and my friends write.

First Rule of Literary Criticism:: Shakespeare is dead.

First corollary to the First Rule of Literary Criticism: Hecht is also dead.

First Law of Publishing: The shelf life of a book is inversely related to the poet’s expiration date.

Second Law of Publishing: Publishing in the vanity press is better than vain attempts at finding a publisher.

The Main Rule of Literary Criticism: I don’t like your yellow blouse.

The Law of Humpty-Dumpty who sat on Wall Street (next stop Bowery): One writes for children the same way one writes for adults, only worse.

The Law of Poetic Linearity: The author’s enthusiasm is directly proportional to the reader’s dismay.

Poetic Relativity (e=mc2): Poems travel with the speed of blight.

Third Law of Publishing: Poetic license comes with a flea and tick collar.

Mikhail Rabinovich translated by Anna Rozenshtein

*

Mikhail Rabinovich was born in 1959, in Leningrad, where he worked as an engineer. He came to New York in 1991. Here he works, of course, as a computer programmer. Rabinovich is his pen-name, though his real name is also Rabinovich. His works came out in print in four countries, ranging from "The New Russian Word" to Odessa's "Fountain" and from the "Slovo/Word" journal to "The Independent Newspaper". Mikhail was a collaborator in ten prose and poetry almanacs, published on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. He is a winner of the Internet competition "Russian America" (as part of "Tenet-2002" project). He authored two books: Far Away from Me, a book of short stories, as well as In the Light of Unclear Events, a collection of poems.

More from Mikhail Izrailevich Rabinovich in translation.

Roland Barthes' "contretemps" and Akhmatova's glove.

Anna Akhmatova’s glove is already there on February 17, 1911, at Sarke Isala, where it sits at the end of a first stanza:

the door is half open,
the linden smells sweet…
on the table, forgotten,
a riding crop and a glove.

And then again, in the same book, it is the image which dominates "The Song of the Last Meeting,” on page 87, where the poet, pulled the sleeve the glove for my left hand line break onto my right. "

Song of the Last Meeting

My heart was chilled and numb,
But my feet were light.
I fumbled the glove for my left hand
Onto my right.

It seemed there were many steps,
I knew – there were only three.
Autumn, whispering in the maples,
Kept urging: 'Die with me!

I'm cheated by joylessness,
Changed by a destiny untrue.'
I answered: 'My dear, my dear!
I too: I'll die with you.'

The song of the last meeting.
I see that dark house again.
Only bedroom candles burning,
With a yellow, indifferent, flame.

And all the earth colludes in wanting to vanish, in the disorder of the mind, and the maple leaves waging her to die with them, in the season of dead love which feels like autumn. September 29, 1911.

The seasons of Akhmatova continue. In March, in the spring, March 18-19, on Wednesday at 3 PM:

my ring finger was stung
by a buzzing wasp.

She addresses the lover who is absent.

She stares at her ungloved hand and wonders if she will weep over this men whom she calls "the strange one”.

The question is critical to the poems turn, as is the address which combines both the lover and the poet, like the effect of looking in a mirror while planning what to say to someone only to find that you were speaking to yourself.

Will your countenance smile at me?
Look! Now on my ring finger
there is a fine smooth ring.

The sting is in the ring.

The blood beats ever stranger
in a body wounded by desire.

She wrote this in “The Fisherman” on April 23, 1911.

It is these bourgeois markers—the rings, the gloves—which Akhmatova uses to signify loyalty and romantic enclosure. She lays before us the enigmatic objects which enable the subject to ask questions, or which ask those questions themselves, but which cannot answer them, or be cinched by particular claims.

Fragments in favor of archaic language.

What is the subject of this photograph?

How can you tell?

What is in the foreground? The background?

Does the photo have a middle voice?

Who is speaking?​​

How is the effort to sound familiar or comforting a form of deception?

*

The caption above the photo— “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in the novel” — comes from the first page of Roland Barthes’ alleged autobiography, which is titled Roland Barthes.

*

“Alibi and alias: everyone generates their own, is their own. We have names and some sort of permanence and halos left behind like salt rings in a sauna.”

Ander Monson writes in his essay, "Index for X and the Origin of Fires.”

Is the caption the alias or the alibi?

How does the subject’s relationship to the foreground or background alter the as if of speaking?

*

In a garden just outside London, John Berger listens as his friend speaks about an odd flower, a flower "like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song." The flower, a birthwort, comes from Brazil, but its Latin name is Arista Lakia elegans, which sounds like "a person, unique and singular. "

If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name— which Berger thinks you wouldn’t do, if you knew it as birthwort. Archaic language is singular – it jostles and demands attention, it asks to be seen and tasted as unique.

*

Black cherry (Prunus serotina) represents immortality in Chinese lore; its wood wards off malevolent spirits.

Humans acquire values from cultural events that tell us something matters. We are socialized into valorizing certain things, like baseballs, hot dogs, barbeque.

Vervain was a divine weed for the Romans; it cured the plague, stopped rabies from progressing in animals, halted the damage of snake and insect venom, and reconciled enemies. It had the power to draw out poison or evil. Annual feasts, the Verbenalia, were held in its honor. These feasts created relationships between young Romans and the plant, vervain. A village woman in Romania told me that she placed a wet rag with vervain over the foreheads of women in labor.

*

“If you love something, does it need to love you back in order for you to feel connection? Think about the story of The Velveteen Rabbit: loving the doll so much that it became real.”

- Markie Louise Christianson Twist in an online presentation on digisexuality

*

Robert Walser’s sentences are extraordinary. His short piece, “Fragment” (translated by Tom Whalen) constantly shifts between speakers and places and situates the reader inside the mind of writer exploring a story. Or picking up a thread, and dropping it for another. Lifting a lens, staring through it, and then setting the scope back on the table.

There are no transitions—and no paragraphs. Notice how he gives us the “noselet” in describing a character he invented:

She has turned out a bit thin, strong nose, a noselet would suffice. With its feather plunging down in back, her hat makes an impression. Skirt short. Magnificent how he succumbs to her threat. Since then I can't shake free of this Edith.

The writer is diddling, piddling, playing with thoughts, but the characters obsess him, which is to say, they intrude in his life. He would like to meet them. Or, as Walser continues:

Recently I sat in a restaurant and stared out into the street in the hopes of seeing her pass. But it didn't occur to her to show herself, which I found proper. There are wishes we don't wish to see for the filled because they are too to to us. If they were fulfilled, they would be lost. The desire to see her means more to me than her appearance.

A beautiful frame inside this collage of fragments.

I fear greatly for my hero. No hair do I leave unharmed on the one sauntering across fields, who perceived nothing more important on his ramble than a peasant woman swerving off to where, from time to time, we all discreetly swerve. It was night, and with the good book in his head—thus intent on generating literature—he paced slowly back and forth in front of a façade, drawing the attention of cabman to his Renaissance behavior.

The male narrator has a love interest, and his wooing comments mock the posturing of courtship, the strange gallantries of puffed-upedness:

He continued: “I climbed through a concantenation of encouraging constellations, apparently high into life, in order, apparently, to fall. One is what one presents.”

*

Anachronism and archaic language expands temporality; it brings to prose the broadness of poetry and photography. Obviously, this isn’t an argument. It is merely what others have called an opinion.

Poetry, collage, and bleeding between subjects.

1. The dog in the room

My head was whirring today—-everything blurred inside it. So I sat with my youngest child, who was busy making collages of our dog, Radu, from old literary magazines. Something about the wordy dogs she created made me think about language, about shapes, about fragments and vessels and colors and detritus.

The anxiety of a prior day's drafts, the loom of deadlines, the paralysis of procrastination—these are not unusual in the writing life. One way to move past them is to enter the work (and subject) sideways through collage, using the peripheral vision or sidereal eye in writing, staring less at the subject than into the space around it. 

Collage is a vehicle that helps reveal the nonlinear. And nonlinearity is poetry’s starter fluid.

2. Mark Jarman’s “Unholy Sonnet 1”

To inventory in a nonlinear way—this is also how the collage works in a poem. A list that doesn’t need to be read in order to mean something. A cloud of images collated from other places, whether the mouths of others or folksay.

Mark Jarman’s “Unholy Sonnet 1” makes the reader aware of its constraint from the outset: we know this will be a sonnet. Beyond that, it cuts and pastes, or inventories the names for God.

So we have a simple white paper background, or a material basis that doesn’t want attention. (A sonnet seeks to blend itself into the poetry landscape; it uses the field in a manner that accords with out expectations.) What Jarman does is bring a mixed diction, a blurring of holy and profane, into the poem.

3. Staring at a collage can generate poetry

This is just another way of saying that collages make me want to write. The layers and juxtapositions—-the fragmented nature of the visual encounter—-can lead to ekphrastic poetry, whether one acknowledges the ekphrasis or wanders off into a different imagined space.

There is a woman on his hand….

Joel-Peter Witkin, Le France et le Monde, 2011.

4. Collage unsettles the distinction between uses and abuses

Collage can be used as a discursive tool to prompt conversation—or extend existing conversations in uncanny ways— as well as a subversive tool which undoes the settled object relations in our minds.

Like a poem, the composition of a collage depends on its entirety, or the whole. Working too closely distorts the view and foregrounds the parts over the whole.

In both poetry and college, I think the best view is one that alternates between moving up very closing and stepping back, up close and then back, again and again, until both the whole and the parts are radiant.

5. Max Erst is a must for every writer’s notebook

I save collages and illustrations by Ernst on my desktop to needle me towards unusual words and images.

Max Ernst, Approaching Puberty… (ThePleiades), 1921.

5. PICTORIAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY: a collage exercise

For this, you will need a print-out of a comic triptych with three panels. You will also need a glue stick, some magazines, scissors, and colored pencils (optional).

Once you have your materials, draft three collages in cartoon-like triptych. Each panel should depict the following phases: 1) childhood 2) teen years or adolescence 3) adulthood. Flip through the old magazines for ideas. Consider how you could represent yourself symbolically as a character, a chair, or a fox or maybe a cockroach. Let the images and materials in the old magazines shape how you tell the story of your life.

Georges Hugnet, Mademoiselle Lachèvre, 1947.

6. DIRECTED COLLAGE: a collage exercise

Assemble the following materials (piece of cardstock paper or old cardboard; colored pencils, old magazines, scissors, glue stick, acrylic paints or watercolor, paintbrushes) and then follow instructions without thinking too hard about why you're doing what you're doing – go-with-the-flow – work fast; go by instinct. 

1. Use a large paint brush to cover one half of the page with the paint color of your choice.

2. On the unpainted side, use a colored pencil to scribble the names of 24 people in your life who were important or significant, however you choose to define that.

3. Tear a number out of a magazine & glue it to page. Add another number near a name.

4. Find the following and tear and glue them: an animal, a vessel, a form of motion.

5. Pick up yr black or dark paint. Just hold it for a second. Now put it down. Put it down.

6. Rip out an image of a map or a diagram from a magazine and glue it on the opposite corner from the animal. When I say rip, I don't mean cut with clean edges; I mean remove with the hand in a way that reflects the imperfection of borders when we try to remove anything by force.

7. Text your ex. Or pretend to text your ex. Don't text your mom. Don't text your mom's ex.

8. Keep working. Push yourself to the limit even if you feel lost. Find ways to evoke or create relationships between those names. Paint over some of them in light paint, if you want. Use colored pencils to connect or displace. 
   
   

7. Additional collage techniques to enact slippage between subjects

• Dropping spots of bleach onto tissue paper with an eyedropper allows white to bulge, creep, and contaminate the material in unpredictable ways.

• Using tissue paper as paint—think of stained glass windows, and how the layers of glass create new hues in relation to light.

• Bleeding colors at the border of tissue paper resemble the shoreline on a map.

• Crumpled and flattened tissue paper in the collage translates the wrinkles into slender traceries. It can be used as an overlay, or an underlay.

• Small sraps of paper scribbled with pastels or watercolor paints are also fragments that can be added to unsettle or alter the collage.

• Old maps and tourism brochures, wallpaper samples, trash, fabrics cut to the shape of buildings or flowers, inventory of bird beaks, thesaurus entries, diagrams from a science magazine, the shape of people dancing cut from maps and bombed buildings, tourism brochures.

• A splash of coffee or wine.

• Scribbling over the paper with wax crayons or with a candle before painting over it and watercolor adds texture, creates a sort of ghost writing in the background.

• Always consider the contrast, the juxtaposition, the brushstrokes.  Move by deformation.

Noah Davis, Frogs, 2011.

8. Collage Paste Recipe (vs. glue stick)

If you’d like to make larger collages, there is a certain paste that people create for this purpose. You need a bowl and some white Elmers glue and a brush. Dilute the white glue with water until it has the consistency of milk, then brush it on the back of the paper and also on the surface. This diluted glue brushed over tissue paper creates texture, like a layer which absorbs light, adding density. Unlike a glue stick, the glue paste enables you to paint over the various objects and layer from above (rather than underneath, which is how we use the glue stick). 

Babi Badalov, Schizopoetry collage

9. Assemblage

An assemblage is simply a collage made with 3-D objects rather than fabric or paper.

Tate Museum traces assemblage back to Pablo Picasso’s cubist constructions, the three dimensional works he began to make from 1912. An early example is his Still Life 1914 which is made from scraps of wood and a length of tablecloth fringing, glued together and painted.

But Dadaists (and Surrealists) made the most interesting use of assemblage, in my opinion. Kurt Schwitters’ “merz” technique relied on scavenged scrap materials from the streets themselves, from dumpsters and trashcans. It was degenerate in the most controversial sense of the word.

In David Lynch’s assemblage, the golden frame evokes a sort of childhood nostaglia for framed family portraits—and Lynch makes use of this frame to unsettle the ordinary. The juxtapositions create the associative language, and the nightmare grows from these associations.

10. Zine Folding

Since much of this play came to me while prepapring for Zine workshop sponsored by Sarabande Books, I wanted also to share their video for how to fold a simple zine from a sheet of regular paper, and to consider how this can be used as a medium for collage as well.

In praise of the cento, with free PDF at-home workshop.

The cento is a poetic form that relies on appropriation. It is a collage built from lines taken from other sources.

In Latin, cento means ‘‘patchwork’’, evoking the collage-like nature of combinations. In a patchwork quilt, the creative freedom comes from two places:

1 the choice of fabrics (i.e. the lines selected)

2 the particular stitching between patches, or how the poet combines the various lines (i.e. enjambment, spacing strategies, fragmentation, use of the field, etc.)

There are many cento strategies, and the form really allows you to be creative about spacing, attribution, interlocutors, line breaks—it’s a wonderful form to use in order to study poetry more closely.

A cento has the thrill of a logic puzzle, or labyrinth, without a particular ending. There are many persmissions in the cento form, and each permission is a creative opportuntity, or a way in which things could be otherwise.

Play with lineation/enjambment so that selected lines are not always one complete line. Mix different source lines by stitching together fragments. Change tenses (or not). Add conjunctions/prepositions(or not). Use the original punctuation, or add your own. Use the original capitalizations, or change them to fit your plan for the cento.Use the cento in a novel way to create a tribute to a poet or school of poets…

Anyway, here is a free PDF you can download and share to play with the cento. Just click on the image below (whose illustration is by Alice Notley and part of one the writing prompts) and enjoy.

And here’s a sample writing prompt from the cento fever workshop.

Mary Ruefle: The Utmost of It

“The most of it was her handwriting.”

Mary Ruefle is the poet of the Utmost of It.

Or, that’s what I call her in my head, and on the pages of the notebooks where I address her, or question her, or simply continue the dialogue my words find with her own work, and how she sees the world.

Technically, Mary Ruefle is the poet-prosodist of The Most of It , "her first book of prose" titled after one of the 30 pieces, which is titled after its own first line: "My Aunt Miel, who never married and whom I never met, was eccentric, and the most of it was her handwriting. "

Aunt Miel was Mary’s mother's sister. The most of it was her handwriting. Miel worked as a Singer sewing machine model who sat in windows and doorways to demonstrate the aura of electric sewing to others. She was beautiful, alluring, and she wrote long letters that arrived on Thursdays which everyone wanted to read but no one could because her lettering was too large. Those too-big letters, that too-big life, that ginormous persona imagined by the speaker who remembers a game she loved playing when she was six.

The game involved standing inside of Miel's O's, and then lying down, allowing them to encircle her perfectly, hopping from to to o in "soon,", while her own sister “crucified herself” on the t's.

Both girls "would like our letters side-by-side"when the word "Tom "appeared the sisters are performing for their mom but also sharing in the letter from their aunt.

And the question about letters is how one can live in them, or how one can relate to them across time. Miel’s 25-foot letters couldn't be kept or preserved, but they are also the combination of every child's dreamed freedom — page 63.

”The most of it was her.”

Confession: I love taking one of Ruefle’s claims and cutting off the end to see how the claim walks afterwards. The most of it was her handwriting. But the most of it was also her, somehow, this woman named Aunt Miel who was living in a world the child could only imagine.

“Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips.”

Here is how Ruefle qualifies that metaphor.

From Ruefle’s My Private Property.

Ruefle’s irreverent reverence is epistemologically contagious.

I mean: one way to play, or to write, or to do whatever it is we do with a pen and paper, begins with borrowing the head of someone’s else’s statue and building your own torso, maybe adding hips, or even fleshing out feet.

I mean: “Blue sadness is sweetness cut into strips…” is where you begin.

“Fear has only the word ear inside of it.”

Ruefle frequently uses a word as a starting point for a poem or essay, and then circles it, poking at it, shining light on it, setting child minds around it, exploring the ways in which the word relates to life.

Sometimes, she leaves this word in the title.

Her essay, "On Fear," is wonderful; I return to it constantly, particularly her articulations of dread. And I’m excerpting this portion just to emphasize how Ruefle literally plays with etymyology —- how she treats etymology as a form of human play rather than scholarship.

From “On Fear” by Mary Ruefle.

“I want to go into the forest and collect lichen.”

"How could I recognize the dead lichen among the living lichen?" Ruefle asks in "Lichen" when trying to find a way to collect forest lichen without causing any harm by "kidnapping a lichen mother".

“I had to admit I could not tell the difference between the living and the dead,” the speaker acknowledges.

Because the poet knows the lichen is "not of " her species, she knows that she does not know the shape of their lives. Nor could she know the shape of their death – although she concludes that lichen "certainly did not bury their dead" because she seems to associate this burying only with humans. The evidence that lichen bury their dead would likely look similar to evidence that lichen did not bury their dead, which is to say—- how would a human know?

"After father died, he said that dying had taken a longer time than he previously imagined possible." This is how she opens "Hazeline," trying to figure out when her father died if he claims to have died during surgery.

What happens to those who die and live? What does it mean to die for a minute? At what point does one become officially resurrected? Ruefle's interest in theology intersects with moments of human absurdity—and I love this aspect of her irreverence.

Look, sometimes the poet destroys us by redefining a word with an image. “Deconstruction” will never be the same.

Utmosting Our Way Through the Dark

I want to end by sharing the talk on bringing joy to your writing practice which Ruefle delivered at the Bennington Writing Seminars Commencement Address on June 11, 2022.

And to draw attention to how Ruefle plays with words in order to parse them, how, for example, she evokes the relationship between “poetry” and “poverty.” But also to note her respect for ruins—for the ruins of books, humans, stones, artwork, civilization, idols, “slow-motion cherry blossoms,” and anything we don’t see disappearing, anything which disappears without giving a damn whether we see them doing their disappear-tango thing.

I love her.

I love how she quotes Tom Cruise so that I can laugh and cry at the futility of this calling, or the absurdity of dreams, hopes, beliefs, hero stories, Tom Cruise in general…

“Words, words, words”—Ruefle, more than any contemporary poet, prepares me to write the incredible joy of not knowing anything at all, and watching in fascination as language rips open the seams and mouths bloom like a run in the crotch of tan pantyhose while standing in line, waiting for a sanctified wafer which may also be the body of a human who died.

Annie Ernaux on abortion (from IWWG free-write August 2022).

[This is an excerpt from a longer workshop given for International Women Writer’s Guild this summer. Other readings for this workshop included "Etiology" by Linda Gregg; "Short Talk on Defloration" by Anne Carson; "The Little Girl Dreams of Dying" by Cameron Awkward Rich; Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–1920, collage, mixed media; "Cut with the Kitchen Knife" by Rosmarie Waldrop; Carlos Drummond de Andrade's "In the Middle of the Road" (trans. by Elizabeth Bishop); Robert Desnos, "Dove of the Ark" (translated by Timothy Adès); Linda Pastan's "The Almanac of Last Things". If you’d like a copy of the handout, email me and I’ll be happy to share it.]

It Keeps Happening: Annie Ernaux’s temporal strategies

Each word has a unique history. The noun, vegetable, originated in 1582 when an author named J. Hester spoke of "The hidden verdures of sondrie vegetables, animalles, and mineralles." The Oxford English Dictionary gives us thirty-six varying contexts for the word vegetable from 1582 to the present, and each context offers a different shade or hue of meaning. 

My copy of the Scholastic Dictionary of Synonyms, Antonyms, and Homonyms lists the following for abortion:

Poems are made from words, and some words carry so much that it's difficult to read them, or to make sense of them. Abortion is one of those words — it means so many different things that aren't articulated or described in conversation. Abortion, in many ways, is meaningless when one says it because it's abstraction overwhelms its contextual reality. As a word, abortion is like God, nearly meaningless and certain to evoke strong emotions.

If anything is still interesting about abortion, it is this abstraction—this failure to mean what we expect when we use it.

Epigraph from Ernaux’s Happening.

One of my favorite French authors, Annie Ernaux, titled her book about abortion Happening.

In 1963, when she was 23, Annie Ernaux  found herself host to an unplanned pregnancy. Enter shame, and the fear of being marked as a social failure. Ernaux takes us through her efforts to get a safe abortion. She wrote the book 40 years later, to break the silence of shame. 

At a time when abortion was illegal in France, Ernaux attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died.

Happening is not the same thing as happened. The book moves across time so that the abortion is happening now, and Ernaux makes it keep happening, or maintains its ongoingness, by combining memories with diary entries from that time. 

Although the book includes a memoir, it has been called an "eponymous novel." Ernaux's oeuvre expands fiction to include speculative nonfiction, or the errors of memory. One could debate genre in Ernaux for decades. But abortion is the subject today—and abortion is a topic that haunts the author —it is a stigma, a word related to the stigmata of nail wounds through the hands of a crucified Chist. Throughout the book she wonders about the presentation of the material, of how one deals in writing with such a happening, of how one recalls and reshapes it. Happening is itself like an abortion, she realizes, and when she releases it it will become public, completely beyond her control. 

*

Am I the author of my abortion? I have asked this question of the writer who uses my name. It is a question I love for its frictions.

Two more thoughts:

1. "I shall have no more power over my text," Ernaux writes. Writing about it will also have its aftereffects—this reference to future time, and to being exposed or misinterpreted is common to Ernaux's writing, particularly since she reinterprets the self again and again over time, across novellas.

2. "This thing had no place in language," Ernaux says of abortion. It is also something she feels compelled to record, even so long (nearly four decades) after the fact, going so far as to state about writing this account: "(...) if I failed to go through with this undertaking I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy." 

This thing with no place in language is a gauntlet the writer picks up—to carve space for the unspeakable, the marginalized. 

To quote Ernaux's book:

I want to pause at this invisible ellipsis—or the breakoff point—the cliff labeled “This investigation” which waits for you to stand at its steep edge and look down. There is no “correct” moral response or sentiment: I laughed during my abortion. I laughed at the absurdity of suddenly finding myself fallen. A “fallen woman” may find the fall interesting.

The war and W. H. Auden: Britten, Mann, and pacifisms in poetry.

In the spring of 1939, at a talk sponsored by the League of American Writers, W. H. Auden fell in love.

Hair tumbling over his eyes, jacket wrinkled, Auden read "Elegy to Yeats" aloud as the much-younger Chester Kallman listened with interest. After the reading, Kallman used Thomas Rogers, Auden's  favorite Renaissance poet, as currency to begin a conversation. One conversation later, the two became lovers.

"I am mad with happiness," Auden gushed in a letter to his close friend,  Benjamin Britten. 

Auden and Kallman.

Auden and Kallman set out to travel across the US by train and bus.

Auden expressed his hatred for the "unspeakable jukeboxes... the synonymous cities besotted with electric signs" as he worked on a prose treatise, "The Prolific and the Devourer," addressing the question of artistic duty during wartime.

On a stop in Los Angeles, Christopher Isherwood told Auden that, like Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, he had become a pacifist, rejecting the impetus to kill the young German men he had once loved or cared for. "The trouble about violence is that most of the punishment falls on the innocent," Auden wrote, channeling Isherwood. In this treatise, Auden concluded that the works of war should be left "to those who believe in them," but he didn't draw a hard line against soldiering, or the artist who felt called to serve in uniform.

*

Klaus and Erika Mann issued warnings of what they had witnessed. In 1930, the Nazi press denounced Erika as "a flat-footed peace hyena". She was committed to fighting fascism continuously. Klaus had lost his German citizenship in 1934 for publishing Die Sammlung,  a journal by artists exiled in Amsterdam. His brother, Thomas Mann, was still (cough) figuring things out.

"Culture must take sides and turn militant, or it is bound to perish," Klaus Mann wrote from the house in New York.Austrian novelist Franz Werfel was married to Alma Mahler, who had brought a suitcase carrying Mahler's scores, Bruckner's Third Symphony, and Warfel's manuscript in progress. The Emergency Rescue Committee helped bring them to safety once they passed through the Pyrenees. While American intellectuals debated liberal responses to tyranny, Hitler demanded absolute unity from Germans. 

When Hitler's armies invaded Poland, it was clear the European war had begun.

Auden wrote the poem, "September 1st, 1939" in commemoration of that day which represented, for him, the  immensity of history. While he supported the war against Hitley, Auden also saw the Hitler in each of us, meaning that war would not resolve what education failed to alter. 

*

Edward Mendelson expands on the two sides of Auden in “The Secret Auden”:

At times, he went out of his way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.

Certainly, Auden used poetry and correspondence to untangle his thoughts. (A critic described Auden's poems as "colloquies between various quarters of his mind.)

"I'm delighted to see my friends for an hour," Auden wrote, "and then I want to be alone like Greta Garbo."  The persistent problem was truth – or not knowing how to judge one's actions given that hindsight would define the good, the just, the right. In the US – as in his mind, Auden lacked a foundation for ethics - the leap of faith felt too loose, religious, and unmoored.

Pacifism could not bring about world peace by seeking individual incorruptibility; in this, he agreed with Niebuhr. Lack of action in the face of catastrophe could not be ethical, and Isherwood's commitment to yoga and personal development seemed like an easy way out from the dark side of humanity. This tension inherent in magical thinking would bring American writing communities, especially those centered and appropriation of Eastern religious practices, to the point where counterculture went mainstream. Only the sacred had an excuse to bail out – but the secular sainthood competed with the sainthood of the monk for a world one had abandoned. 

In a letter to Britten, Auden poked at his comforts and defenses, urging him to risk coming out, or to risk standing for something, which is how Auden was construing this risk at the time. To quote the letter:

After spending time in the Midwest, and writing a libretto about the Midwest, Auden told Charles Miller "the land of the lonely" was the "true America," and he wished someone would write a novel about it.

“The Lonelies could be the title of a grand unwritten American novel,” Auden wrote, adding:

Auden blamed Benjamin Britten's musical impasse on his avoidance of openly-lived homosexuality. He introduced Britten to Arthur Rimbaud, inspiring the cycle of settings Britten would name, Les Illuminations. The cycle repeated the phrase: "I alone have the key to this savage parade." 

W.H. Auden; Sir William Menzies Coldstream; Benjamin Britten

Britten's essay, "An English Composer Sees America," was published as he and Auden worked on the operetta, Paul Bunyan. What Britten and Auden seemed to want from this musical was the depiction of American mythos, and the weakness at the heart of this mythos, namely,  that freedom created new moral challenges.

In an essay on Paul Bunyan, Auden articulated it: "what happens when men refuse to accept this necessity of choosing, and are terrified or careless about their freedom, we have now only too clear a proof."

The prologue of this American Opera included a trio of wild geese announcing the coming of Paul Bunyan - the religious exceptionalism was there, but the message was not well-received by critics staring at war in Europe. The disconnect continued.

Janet Flanner's essay, "Paris, Germany," first published in the New Yorker in 1940, attempted to convey the complexity of the exile community Just as the US press started to complain of an excess European presence in media — "an intellectual blitzkrieg"—-that dog-whistled to chauvinist xenophobia. 

In a letter to his sister, Britten said that he was "definitely disliked" for being British and "because I'm not American (everything is nationalistic)" and because he wasn't "educated in Paris."

*

On the day France fell to Germany in World War II, Auden gave the commencement address at Smith College. He said death and fear made it difficult to stop and think, to consider what was happening: "Nevertheless, that is our particular duty in this place at this hour. To try and understand what has come upon us and why."

*

Auden was practical rather than mystical. When he won the National Medal for Literature in 1967, he refused to accept it in Lyndon Johnson’s White House during the Vietnam War or “to make a Cal Lowell gesture by a public refusal,” so he arranged for the ceremony to be held at the Smithsonian, where he gave an acceptance speech about the corruption of language by politics and propaganda.

When Time magazine offered him $10,000 for a short essay on empires, Auden wrote “The Romans”, and maybe this is a good place to end my notebook dump, quoting Auden’s essay:

“I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to.”

*

Auden’s poem, “The Geography of the House,” was dedicated to Isherwood.

"I shouldn't have minded a vestigial tail," Louise Bogan said, after telling Auden about a man who sobbed when confessing his vestigial tail to a fellow cab-rider.

"No," Auden replied, "one can always stand what what other people have."

"Prologue" by Audre Lorde

I’d like to share this incredible poem by Audre Lorde without my usual commentary—though one could study her use of the “I” as punctuation, and the inconclusive sparsity of her periods alongside an impeccable enjambment strategy. One could study these things at the level of the line and the line’s momentum. But one could also read this poem just to remember why Audre Lorde remains one of the greatest poets the US has the honor of claiming.

Prologue

Audre Lorde

Haunted by poems beginning with I
seek out those whom I love who are deaf
to whatever does not destroy
or curse the old ways that did not serve us
while history falters and our poets are dying
choked into silence by icy distinction
death rattles blind curses
and I hear even my own voice becoming
a pale strident whisper
At night sleep locks me into an echoless coffin
sometimes at noon I dream
there is nothing to fear
now standing up in the light of my father sun
without shadow
I speak without concern for the accusations
that I am too much or too little woman
that I am too Black or too white
or too much myself
and through my lips comes the voices
of the ghosts of our ancestors
living and moving among us.

Hear my heart’s voice as it darkens
pulling old rhythms out of the earth
that will receive this piece of me
and a piece of each one of you
when our part in history quickens again
and is over:

Hear
the old ways are going away
and coming back pretending change
masked as denunciation and lament
masked as a choice
between an eager mirror that blurs and distorts us
in easy definitions until our image
shatters along its fault
or the other half of that choice
speaking to out hidden fears with a promise
our eyes need not seek any truer shape—
a face at high noon particular and unadorned-
for we have learned to fear
the light from clear water might destroy us
with reflected emptiness or a face without tongue
with no love or with terrible penalties
for any difference
and even as I speak remembered pain is moving
shadows over my face, my own voice fades and
my brothers and sisters are leaving;

Yet when I was a child
whatever my mother thought would mean survival
made her try to beat me whiter every day
and even now the color of her bleached ambition
still forks throughout my words
but I survived
and didn’t I survive confirmed
to teach my children where her errors lay
etched across their faces between the kisses
that she pinned me with asleep
and my mother beating me
as white as snow melts in the sunlight
loving me into her bloods black bone—
the home of all her secret hopes and fears
and my dead father whose great hands
weakened in my judgment
whose image broke inside of me
beneath the weight of failure
helps me to know who I am not
weak or mistaken
my father loved me alive
to grow and hate him
and now his grave voice joins hers
within my words rising and falling
are my sisters and brothers listening?

The children remain
like blades of grass over the earth and
all the children are singing
louder that mourning
all their different voices
sound like a raucous question
they do not live in fear of empty mirrors
they have seen their faces defined in a hydrant’s puddle
before the rainbows of oil obscured them
The time of lamentation and curses is passing.

My mother survives
though more than chance or token.
Although she will read what I write
with embarrassment or anger
and a small understanding
my children do not need to relive my past
in strength nor in confusion
nor care that their holy fires
may destroy more than my failures.

Somewhere in the landscape past noon
I shall leave a dark print of the me that I am
and who I am not
etched in a shadow
of angry and remembered loving
and their ghosts will move
whispering through them
with me none the wiser for they will have buried me
either in shame
or in peace.
And the grasses will still be
singing.

A prologue is an event or action that leads to another event or situation.

Synonyms include: introduction; foreword; preface; preamble; prelude; preliminary; intro; exordium; proem; prolegomenon.

In music, theatre, and literature, a prologue is a separate introductory section of a literary or musical work.

More specifically, in fiction, a prologue is an opening to a story that establishes the context and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one, and other miscellaneous information.

The opposite of a prologue is an epilogue.

On the Image and Visual Part of Text; or 11 Ways of Looking at a Field in a Poem

1

Robert Pinsky described poetry as "a vocal imagining" which begins as an interiorized impulse but ultimately becomes social. I am interested in the relationship between the image and the impulse's particular vocalization.

Are there mountains around the field? If there are mountains, the voice on the field will have echoes attached to its feet.

2

Appearances demarcate events – images are opportunities in which to speak poetry. To paraphrase John Berger, one image interpenetrates another. Recognizing an appearance requires one to remember other similar appearances. There is an expectation of meaning attached to the action of looking at images. It is this search for meaning using our own cultural choices/experiences that differentiates, or creates irresolution, in the meaning of the image. I am interested in the vocal imagining which begins as an impulse and builds itself in relation to image, whether real or imagined.

Two ways of looking at a field in a poem:

“My life belongs to the world. I will do what I can. "

- James Dickey, "The Strength of Fields "

"And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,
the lovely diminutives. "

- Theodor Roethke, "A Field of Light "

The fields are present in the titles; the poets are interested in different things, strength and light. But both Dickey and Roethke are using the field, and its images, as a way to defeat forgetting. Both poems have a Kierkeegardian element of wanting to preserve something ineffable and valuable. To forestall forgetting by carving it into the field.

"Forgetting is the shears with which you cut away what you cannot use, doing it under the supreme discretion of memory….When we say that we consign something to oblivion, we suggest simultaneously that it is to be forgotten and yet also remembered."

- Soren Kierkegaard

3

"We are eager to be complicit in our own dazzlement: to pay money for a theme park ride, vote for a guy who's obviously lying to us, or stand there holding the basket as it's filled up with cosmetics,” Neal Stephenson wrote “The Interface Culture.” To be complicit in our dazzlement—this requires us to examine our relationship to the headshot, the image, the self as we hope to “be seen” in the world. Increasingly, the field of our personal data becomes a meadow to be mined for information.

If you open a jpeg as a text file, you'll find a random string of glyphs and encoded cosine functions that describe the location, luminance, and color of each pixel.

Most images are data. Rachel Ossip notes, "Today we exist as much in data and images as in flesh." How is this data-field self imagined vocally in a poem?

4

"A photograph is a secret about a secret," said Diane Arbus, "The more it tells you the less you know." 

This mixture of lucidity and obscurity is how the poem and the photograph reach the reader.

Do we read images rather than merely see them? Image literacy, the ability to think about what one sees in an image, involves similar interpretative practices to poetry. Even when being read or explained by the artist, the poem and photo remain voiceless in how they communicate what they communicate to each of us.

Field is pause   field is plot   field is red chigger bump where

the larvae feed   corn wig curled in your ear. Field cares not

a fig for your resistance   though kindly   gently   lay your

head down   girl   lay it down.  

- Erin Belieu, "Field"

Erin Belieu allows the field to define itself, and the juxtaposition of meadow language with her expansive use of the field makes the field, itself, feel relevant. The field speaks. And yet, I could not stop seeing a particular image as I read, namely, Andrew Wyeth’s painting, Christina’s World (1948). This association may be related to the popularity and prevalence of this painting, or it might be the way the injunction to lay down her head made me think of the resistance to laying down in Wyeth’s subject?

This resistance mentioned by Belieu kept dragging Christina back into the frame as I read. Wyeth titled it after his model, Anna Christina Olson (1893 to 1968) who lived in Cushing, Maine on the farm pictured.

She had a degenerative muscular disorder that took away her ability to walk by the late 1920s. Eschewing a wheelchair, she crawled around the house and grounds. Wyeth, who had summered in Maine for many years, met the spinster Olson and her bachelor brother, Alvaro, in 1939. The three were introduced by Wyeth's future wife, Betsy James (b. c. 1922), another long-term summer resident. It's hard to say what fired the young artist's imagination more: the Olson siblings or their residence. Christina appears in several of the artist's paintings. [Source]

5

Two separate lines from Paula Meehan's poem, "Death of a Field":

The memory of the field is lost with the loss of its herbs

The magpies sound like flying castanets

Loss in its ecological sense—the articulation of things which disappear if the particular meadow disappears.

In ecology, endemism is "the ecological state of a species being unique to a defined geographic location, such as an island, nation, country or other defined zone, or habitat type".  For example, Bermuda cedars were prominent in Bermuda before the 17th century. Settlers arrived. By the end of the century, the cedars were nearly extinct, wiped out by the shipbuilding industry and foreign parasites. The Bermuda cedar is endemic to Bermuda. 

Kudzu originated in Japan, though it has grown characteristic of the southern US landscape. Indigenous species that are found elsewhere are not considered endemic to a place —- they can survive in alternate locations. Kudzu is indigenous to Japan though not endemic.

Americans benefit from "sweepstakes colonization,” living in a geographical location that has been largely spared the ravage of climate change. We have done nothing to deserve winning this lottery. We have neither tended nor protected this site of good fortune "rendered even more advantageous, as opposed to the "losing" species, which immediately fails to reproduce..." etc.

6

Joshua Marie Wilkinson said that we are drawn to what the photo or poem wants when we look at it. We are trying to learn how to want, and to desire – and how this occurs "is the poem’s secret to keep, and the photograph’s secret to flaunt.”

Here is the end of Rick Barot’s poem, "The Field”:

In the dark, alone, I went out to see the turn toward morning.
Then I saw them. What the imagination would do with two people
sleeping in a field is keep them where they are,
unknowable, untouched. The imagination also wants them
to stir, to wake them back into their stories.
The day will be hot. The smell of yesterday’s heat
is still in the air, like the sweat of a body. What would bring me
to a field in the night and have me sleep there?
Whose hand would I be holding, out of desire or fear?
My pants’ hems are heavy with dew. I know how far away
I am from everyone. Am I a child again, am I old?
Or am I only who I am now, astounded at the transport of the body
from one end of time to another.

- Rick Barot, "The Field"

What should the eye want of the mysterious couple's image? Barot tells us the imagination has a script to "wake them back into their stories." His brings his own story, his childhood fears, into this space with the couple. There are shadows between them, and those shadows are what the poet recognizes. These are the voices he brings to the page.

This poem exemplifies the first-person roving camera. I’m thinking of how Caryl Pagel urged writers to allow “the poem to be an exercise in haunting instead of starring, an act of investigation instead of performance”; and how, in such poems, the first person I doesn’t serve as as a signifier of self, but as a roving camera or seeing instrument. Desire lurks in the heart of this roving motion, and something here is the poem’s secret to keep.

7

"All photographs are ambiguous," John Berger warns, "All photographs have been taken out of a continuity."

Dom Bury’s “The Opened Field” gives us a word in the title which frames how we read it: this field is opened, something happened to open it, and part of the poem’s journey will exist in relation to this word.

Three boys stand in a frozen field —
each child stripped and hosed, the next task
not to read the wind but learn the names

we have for snow, each name
we have given to the world. To then unlearn
ourselves, the self, this is — the hardest task.
To have nothing left. No thing but heat to give.

- Dom Bury, "The Opened Field"

"Ruins are a way of seeing," Robert Harbison wrote. It feels as if one is looking at the ruins of field rather than its destruction—at the ruins of the children in relation to the field. The frozen position of statues.

8

Leslie Scalapino called the assembling and arranging of photographs "a kind of contemplation." Louise Gluck’s formidable You is deeply contemplative and meditative. She often uses flowers as icons to focus concentration, and addresses them as one would address a divinity or a beloved.

What are you saying? That you want
eternal life? Are your thoughts really
as compelling as all that? Certainly
you don’t look at us, don’t listen to us,

- Louise Gluck, "Field Flowers"

I’m also thinking of how Dolores Dorantes' untranslated dictionary images in COPY (Wave Books) resemble small scenes in a film without subtitles – one wants to read the gesture in order to recover them from the narrative. But there are iconic in the sense that they encourage meditation rather than analysis—- to think upon a thing rather than to think through it. Poetry allows us to treat images as meditative icons, and to complicate this through invocative address.

9

In "Two Versions of the Imaginary," Maurice Blanchot describes the image as that which is present in its absence, or something which appears as a disappearance.

Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freed
for good—not for the freedom of it, or anything like
beauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, I'm
thinking more how there's a kind of violence to re-entering
unexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but got
torn away from so long ago it's more than half forgotten

- Carl Phillips, "Pale Colors in a Tall Field"

I think of these of two versions of the imaginary in Carl Phillips’ poem, with its lush, long lines and careful enjambments, and the echolocutive effect of these enjambments which echo back and forth across the field and the mind recovering memory in moments, fragments, snatches. To re-stage the moment which touched us is tremendous.

10

Here is the entirety of a poem which looks at a field, or makes use of the images evoked by a field.

"The Bright Field" by R. S. Thomas

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

The relationship between normalizing and making something seem inevitable is the strategy of religious fundamentalists who refuse action on climate change. They believe the end of the world is God's will. To contest God's will is to be unfaithful, or disloyal. Life is not hurrying . . . It is the turning.

11

“Poetry is always the cat concert under the window of the room in which the official version of reality is being written," poet Charles Simic wrote in "The Flute Player in the Pit.” In the same essay, Simic links the desire of the image to that of the poem: “The secret wish of poetry is to stop time….. Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we recognize ourselves.”

“Scientifically Speaking” by David Tomas Martinez

There have
been exciting

discoveries
in the field

of me.
Many

of which
I have

made
myself.

In this poem from Hustle (Sarabande Books, 2014), David Tomas Martinez uses words associated with science (discoveries, field of) and applies them to himself. There have been exciting discoveries in the field of me. I love this line for its simplicity, and for the surprise of the final clause— “of me”—which carves the self as a field worthy of attention.

Martinez makes use of a narrowed margin which foregrounds understatement, and results in a sort of mysterious humility—the speaker doesn’t inventory his findings or list his scientific observations. Instead, he overturns the concept of discovering as used in headlines about the latest scientific etc.

To quote Simic again: Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we recognize ourselves. Recognizing often has the thrill of discovery, and Martinez’ discover of “the field of me” has the shape of a permission to other poets to recognize ourselves in the relationship between the poetic field (i.e. it’s projections, it’s use of space, it’s lineation) and ourselves.

Homophones.

Homonyms are words which share a name, or “have the same name” (etymologically), whether by spelling or sound, despite the vest difference between those two variance. Usually, homonyms refer to words which are spelled the same . . . Like the arid desert heart of the one who deserts you at Piggly-Wiggly.

Homophones are words which sound the same but are spelled differently, and mean different things . . . Like except and accept. Social life feels very accepting until it begins excepting you out of it. The film reel makes it difficult to discern what is real. To write the wrong is not to right it. I'll find you in the aisle with an ad for a tropical isle beside it.

The altar is where flesh alters itself into bread. The band got banned by local officials. A bear who is bare comes bearing acorns. The bread we eat, the habits bred by shared meals. To sell one's blood includes tiny red cells. The cord on the floor, the chord in the air. To elicit a smile, or to provoke desire with an illicit photo. The fairy has wings. The ferry has an engine and floats on water. Someone ferried us here. We marry and hope to be merry. He may mince words when looking for mints.

The oar helps move the boat, or something, in the sentence where the ore is buried beneath the earth. Each soil has its ores.

To sew is to connect with a thread. So, he said. Sow the plants seed that food may come of it.

One may pray for mercy. Another may prey on the merciful.

His hands on my waist, the waste of clean water.

One particular beast’s tail is another's tale to tell. Yet another’s tell to read and recognize in the game.

We is massive. But the wee is tiny. And oui, elsewhere, is yes.

Anyway, it’s fun to keep a running list of homophones in your poetry notebook. They make great hinge words and have the capacity to turbo-charge a volta.

[Motivating myself to work on this project by collaging and making an image public— this is my tactic. This is how I nudge myself towards the things I set aside in draft…]

Here’s what Charles Simic wrote in his essay, “The True Adventures of a Franz Kafka’s Cage”:

While the bickering of two housewives over whose son broke the window of a funeral parlor was putting the judge to sleep, a policeman brought into the court room a birdcage accused of propositioning a street sparrow to have a go at one of its swings.

A literary cage is, I think, a lovely conceit.

On journals and notebooks as genre, briefly.

In his 1918 journal, Andre Gide wrote:

It is from the point of view of art that what I write should be judged, a point of view never taken, or almost never taken by the critics… Moreover, it is the only point of view which is not exclusive of any other.

The journal continuously revisits itself and its conclusions in light of new reading or knowledge. The production of self, in this form, is tentative: it is willing to be rearranged or remade.

Tentativity occupies time and space differently from rigidity. The marble statue is rigid — it asserts itself against tentativity. The notebook is fluid.

As Roland Barthes remarks in his first published essay, “Andre Gide and His Journal”: "The stream is more durable than marble…”

The ellipsis is Barthes’ own. The ellipsis, itself, is common to journals, a marker of where a thought trails off to be picked up later.

And there is something poetic about this notebook’s ellipses — some way in which the uncertainty of self’s relation to time crosses both forms.

I’m thinking of Frank Bidart’s “Self-Portrait, 1969",” which uses ellipses in order to move back and forth between the self in the world and the self in the mind’s eye.

“He’s still young,” still overdetermined by what the word young allows or evokes.

Bidart plays with the eye a bit: this poem is composed of two stanzas, but the extreme indentation of “Once, instead,” makes it seem like three stanzas exist. The use of the field, the long blank before the qualifying condition, drags its finger along the rim of a sink, and all that white porcelain.

When I begin this poem
to see myself
as a piece of history . . .

Frank Bidart wrote this somewhere, in a poem, according to my notebook, which lacks the poem’s title and imagines each line as the first line of a triptych.

There is a way in which the journal or notebook genre enables the placing of words behind each other rather than after each other — it is disorienting to be the speaker inside a chronology. No conclusions can be drawn about the subject who is the speaker.

”I was writing this poem about someone else,” Samuel Cheney says in “This Was Before The Wedding.”

I was someone else before the wedding. Who am I now?

“I lost my father before I was twelve years old,” Gide writes.

From Andre Gide’s Strait is the Gate, translated by Dorothy Bussy.

The day when Gide’s mother “changed the black ribbon in her morning cap for a mauve one” . . .

Should I watch With Andre Gide? Isn’t this question mark actually wanting to be an ellipsis . . .

On a different note, Roland Barthes published an essay titled “Deliberation” about journals and notebooks. In it, he explains why he didn't keep a journal; and why the notebook, as a text, to him seems to fail, or to be implicated in the aesthetics of failure. But some of his favorite writings were notebooks, particularly those of Andre Gide. Imagine the ellipsis.

Hashtag with poetry prompts from Kim Addonizio.

So much cruelty is framed as truth-telling on social media. #hottakefromhell I’m studying myself in the frame of social media posts, learning about this woman named Alina whose performance of perfection is stippled with protests to the contrary. #hownottoparent I’m a frame within a frame of competitive marketing in a publishing industry increasingly reliant on authors to hustle their books or mothers to worship their children or grandparents to repost cringe-worthy memes. #therealme doesn’t believe in competing for human relatives and attention but I have so many friends who #tribe, and I'm beguiled by new apps that commodify the market of self-improvement metrics which give us a sense of control by marking tiny achievements. Socialized early by school grades and tests, do we ever outgrow that training to display how well we’re doing? #performativewellbeing correlates with inflatable ego, which others evaluate on the basis of the size of the inflatable jumper one can afford for a child’s birthday party. #whocares #hashtageachheart #signifysomething #googleityrself

#poetryexercisesfromKimAddonizio

1. Find a line by someone else and look for different nouns or adjectives beginning with the same letter as the line. Play with substitutions.

2. Write a poem for the end of something with "lost" in the title. See "Lost Poem" by Ted Berrigan.

3. Name a specific time or place in your title and then write a poem about it.

4. Write ten openings that begin in media res.

5. Write a poem to the future modeled on Brecht's "To Those Born Later" or Ruth Stone's "Look to the Future."

6. "Jot down a list of things you see around you and fall recklessly in love with all of them."

7. Make a list of 50 favorite words and write a poem with them. Then experiment with framing by adding in words from a cookbook or a how-to text.

8. Write a lyrical list poem like A. Van Jordan's "afterglow" which uses slashes to build pauses through a string of associations.

9. Anaphora is the repetition of an opening word or phrase. Write one that borrows "but" or "the bluest".

10. Write a poem that repeats the last word or phrase of a line in the beginning of the next line.

11. Article, adjective, noun: article, adjective, noun, verb, adverb.

12. Write an opening sentence. Now change period to comma and add "as if" or"because" or etc or although.

On or around April 12, 1978 of Roland Barthes' mourning diary.

A monument wants to be souvenired.

“The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia,” Susan Stewart writes in On Longing.

Love wants to be remembered. Barthes believes this. He feels a duty to remember his mother, and to immortalize her in the project he never finished, the book she was supposed to star in, Vita Nova.

My mother said this explicity: “To me, the way you know someone is loved is that family remembers them when they die.”

This is not an fuzzy statement — it’s not unclear, blurry, or vague. It is a clear expression of her wish to be kept alive in our minds. There are many ways to do this, but none of them are related to our own personal needs for “closure”, which is the nice American way to describe erasure in therapy-speak.

On April 12, 1978, as Barthes wrote these words, my mother was in labor with me. She sat on the curb outside a Bucharest hospital and smoked her last cigarette before entering. I was born in the early morning hours of April 13th.

"Nests are a tragedy waiting to happen.” Ellen Dore Watson says this in her poem "He Watches Them."

The poem’s title includes two pronouns — like blank holes in a mask, all we know is the watching will happen.

The tawny owl hunts at night because its prey comes out. The hunter is guided by the actions of what it predates. It waits for the wood mouse who feeds on nuts and beetles. The barred owl moved into the tree close to our bedroom window after mom died. Sometimes I stayed up listening to it.

In an essay, “Wanting Wrong,” Anna Enright describes an “anxiety about consent” that runs through a book by Miranda Popkey, and focuses on how this anxiety might actually be centered in concerns about the “agony of others.” Enright calls it “the flower dilemma: you cannot ask a man to give you flowers, because to do so undoes the sense of a gift.”

You cannot ask a man to tie you up without complicating his intentionality if he agrees to your wish.

My mother thought being loved would keep her alive, but I know better. Hate is the thing which does not die— humans remember their own wounds better than they remember any fellow human being.

I want you to hate me.

And remember me.

I am here for whatever monument you wish to erect.

At night, the cloud looks down on the tree and whispers, “Look, I have memorized your crown. When they cut you down, I will remain as a moving monument. Others who knew you will recognize your silhouette in me…”

On July 9, 1978 of Roland Barthes' mourning diary.

There were several directions in which to define the definitive.

That which has happened cannot happen again, Barthes seems to suggest. And yet — the nature of grief is that it keeps happening.

Grief keeps its own time, I said to my father.

“But we define time,” he replied, “we are the ones who create it.”

We create and are created in turn by our definitions of time, hope, humanity, feasibility, wisdom —

Alan Lightman says, “An object may participate in three perpendicular futures. Each future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.”

The fact that Lightman says this in a book titled Einstein’s Dreams does not mean he said it less.

Barthes used tiny sheets of paper to collect and preserve the dailiness of his grief.

“You should not perform grief,” a yoga instructor said.

What does it mean to perform the unspeakable?

I did a headstand and everyone clapped. They performed their appreciation.

What did Witold Gombrowicz perform when writing about the performance of others in the memoir excerpted below?

Alone, in the loge, I, a modern person, deprived of superstitions, I, an antisalon man, I out of whose head the whip of defeat had knocked the sulks and airs, thought that a world in which a man adores himself with music is more convincing than a world in which man adores the music itself.

I had the feeling that I was among Proust's characters, who went to the concert not to listen but to grace it with their presence, where the ladies stuck Wagner into their hair as they would a diamond pin.

It is ridiculous to perform one’s self.

One must use words in order to create alternatives to the paucity of existing language.

“Words are events,” said Ursula Le Guin.” They do things, change things. They transform at both speaker and her; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."

The energy of death.

The amplification of the void in strategies of avoidance.

A void dance.

Charles Simic's "Reading Philosophy at Night"

Whoever reads philosophy reads himself as much as he reads the philosopher. I am in dialogue with certain decisive events in my life as much as I am with the ideas on the page. Meaning is the matter of my existence. My effort to understand is a perpetual cycling around a few obsessive images.

I found these lines in my notebook, copied from Charles Simic’s essay, “Reading Philosophy at Night” — which I’ve shared below. This essay still resonates with me, and I think it allows the poet space to engage a broader ontological palette, which is to say, all the things we have read, thought, heard, believed… All of it.

“All my experiences make a kind of untaught ontology, which precedes all my readings,” Simic adds. “What I’m trying to conceptualize with the help of the philosopher is that which I’ve already intuited. That’s one way of looking at it.”

These ways of looking at it are the work of poetry.

Fernando Pessoa's sacred and profane existences: part 1.

Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms were deeply tangled with the idea of posthumousness.

In The Book of Disquiet, he describes how characters from novels, particularly Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Wardle, are more real to him than living humans.

The heteronyms existed on the stage of Pessoa's life as characters, but also as friends, as costumes he could slip into and flaneur across the page. 

[The self is a friend to some of us; ideas become our favorite company.]

In a letter dated 8 February 1918, Pessoa wrote:

There is only one event in the past which has both the definiteness and the importance required for rectification by direction; this is my father's death, which took place on 13 July 1893. My mother's second marriage (which took place on 30 December 1895) is another date which I can give with preciseness and it is important for me, not in itself, but in one of its results – the circumstance that, my stepfather becoming Portuguese Consul in Durban (Natal), I was educated there, this English education being a factor of supreme importance in my life, and, whatever my fate be, indubitably shaping it.

After losing his father and infant brother at a young age, with the sounds of his most recent birthday party in the background, Pessoa found life changed quickly: his mother fell in love with another man, who worked from Durban. In the final year of living in Lisbon, when Pessoa was six years old, he wondered in his diary, of this time:

"Is anything sacred? is anything permanent?"

This is a question that plagues writers and theologians. Is anything sacred across time. Is the notion of sacredness sustainable in application to eternity.

. . . Pessoa would move to Durban with his mother and family the following year. Stability is built into our idea of sacredness.

The young Pessoa. Source.

*

How Pessoa was described by a fellow classmate in his early teens:

I cannot tell you exactly how long I knew him, but the period during which I received most of my impressions of him was the whole of the year 1904 when we were at school together. How old he was at this time I don’t know, but judge him to have 15 or 16. [...]

He was pale and thin and appeared physically to be very imperfectly developed. He had a narrow and contracted chest and was inclined to stoop. He had a peculiar walk and some defect in his eyesight gave to his eyes also a peculiar appearance, the lids seemed to drop over the eyes. [...]

He was regarded as a brilliant clever boy as, in spite of the fact that he had not spoken English in his early years, he had learned it so rapidly and so well that he had a splendid style in that language. Although younger than his schoolfellows of the same class he appeared to have no difficulty in keeping up with and surpassing them in work. For one of his age, he thought much and deeply and in a letter to me once complained of "spiritual and material encumbrances of most especial adverseness". [...]

He took no part in athletic sports of any kind and I think his spare time was spent on reading. We generally considered that he worked far too much and that he would ruin his health by so doing.

Pessoa's sister, Henriqueta Rosa Dias said, of Pessoa as a child: "Reality was constantly being transformed, and we were the protagonists of his reverie."  

Pessoa typescript from 1930.

*

Charles Robert Anon.

At eighteen, Pessoa stepped into Charles Robert Anon to excommunicate all churches in a notebook piece titled "Excommunication":

His favorite book was Charles Dicken's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, of which he said:

"The women of Dickens were cardboard and sawdust to pack his men to us on the voyage from spaces of dream. The joy and zest of life does not include women . . ."

[This, in contradistinction to fellow heteronymer, Antoine Volodine, who gives women a central role in the posthumous frays and fictions.]

Pessoa acknowledged in a 1935 publication that he had created a fictional world around him since childhood - to make friends. To make friends by making them. [More on this on p. 116 of Pessoa biography.]

The heteronym enlarges this world with possibilities by making real the hope of another one.

I would call it Pessoa’s promiscuous posthumous mode. I’m interested in writer’s relationship to his heteronyms, per loyalty, allegiance, identification, etc. as compared to writer’s relationship with his characters.

*

Alberto Caeiro.

Source: Poetry Magazine, 1955.

Everything was subject to fiction – and characters gained biographies, became letter-writers, created a stage for themselves. Each heteronym was nurtured as its own creation. Pessoa  practiced their signatures, carefully distinguishing them from his own. A signature was a man's word, a gentleman's honor in correspondence. It was a high-status pledge to deliver in that relationship. Pessoa invested signatures with a sort of magical power,  even as he subverted their conventional bonds.

In the past, literary alter egos had been adopted by adults (usually males) once they had already established writing careers. The purpose was to separate particular texts from their public personas and reputations, as seen in Kierkegaard, Yeats, Machado, Valery and others. But Pessoa created his collaborators when he was young, almost as a sort of initiation into writing, a reason for writing itself, rather than to balance a work against reputational considerations.

In "Aesthetics of Artificiality," Pessoa articulates his relationship to artifice as a mode of being: "I live aesthetically as someone else...” An excerpt (with my line breaks for reading purposes):

Life hinders the expression of life.

If I actually lived a great love, I would never be able to describe it.

Not even I know if this I that I’m disclosing to you, in these meandering pages, actually exists or is but a fictitious, aesthetic concept I’ve made of myself.

Yes, that’s right. I live aesthetically as someone else. I’ve sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that’s foreign to my being.

Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognize myself.

Who am I behind this unreality?

I don’t know. I must be someone.

And if I avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it’s so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personality.

I want to be exactly like what I wanted to be and am not.

If I were to give in to life, I’d be destroyed.

I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body.

That’s why I’ve sculpted myself in quiet isolation and have placed myself in a hothouse, cut off from fresh air and direct light –where the absurd flower of my artificiality can blossom in secluded beauty.

Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people, a false life which I could live and suffer and enjoy.

Misfortune would sometimes strike me there, and there I would also experience great joys.

And nothing about me would be real. But everything would have a sublime logic; it would all pulse to a rhythm of sensual falseness, taking place in a city built out of my soul and extending all the way to the platform next to an idle train, far away in the distance within me…

And it would all be vivid and inevitable, as in the outer life, but with an aesthetics of the Dying Sun.

In order to have the friends and camaraderie he wanted, Pessoa had to invent them, and it.

One suspects many writers find themselves returning to the page in order to have conversations, or feel kinned to others. The person one becomes when writing is kindred. 

Pessoa, writing as Bernando Soares in The Book of Disquiet (with my line breaks):

To know nothing about yourself is to live.

To know yourself badly is to think.

To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word.

But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.

Pessoa loved the visionary scope of John Keats, how he wrote from what he imagined rather than what he saw. 

His last known writing, dated November 29, 1935: "I know not what tomorrow will bring".

Pessoa died next day, on November 30.

*

Alberto Caeiro once more, as translated by Eduard Roditi, and published in Poetry Magazine in 1955.

On May 1, 1978 of Roland Barthes' mourning diary.

“Now it is my knowledge…”

The domestication of death. The knowledge which was foreign and has become personal — though still foreign, still inarticulable.

A friend told me: “Welcome to the club of motherless daughters, where words fail us daily.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "I never mistook pleasure as the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work… and, as work, I offer it to the public, feeling it's faultiness more deeply than any of my readers."

How can be held responsible for this knowledge, for what grief asks of the self?

A few years before, in April—

It rained for three days and then stopped.

The yard was smothered in pine cones, tree legs, bark, and spring leaves.

The granddaughters wanted to help with Bunica’s yard. They went through a phase where helping was important to them.

She laughed from driveway as they swept the sidewalk with brooms fashioned from fallen tree limbs.

The granddaughters sang a song as they swept:

I’ve been working on the railroad
all the live long day
I’ve been working on the rail
road
just to pass the time away

Repetition; vertigo; mother’s role in making myths for children

Autopoiesis, or self-production, tries to explain why the identities of living systems remain constant despite incessant change. I am interested in how humans continue to produce a self after loss.

The image-idea of ourselves in art discourse.

The mythography of the self as narrated to others — and the memorial form this mythography assumes after someone’s death.

A myth applies to a culture, but families are their own countries, their own terrains of sustaining myths.

I keep saying the same thing to my kids, and yet this thing is simply the softer version of the true thing I wish to say to them. Will this true thing every be said? Can they discern it from the softer version?

Why am I so afraid of leaving them with the wrong words?

Robert Calasso:

"The mythographer lives in a permanent state of chronological vertigo, which he pretends to want to resolve. …The mythical gesture is a wave, which, as it breaks, assumes a shape, the way dice form a number when we toss them."

There is mythography in Julio Cortazar’s play, The Kings, the first piece Cortazar published under his own name.

Begin with the statement: “I find everybody takes what they have and invents a history from it.”

And then a mirror.

Minos: “There’s something behind it. As there is in every mirror. There’s always someone who knows and waits. “ 

There is always someone who knows and waits. I just needed to say that aloud to my self in this laybrinth.

Minos: “Mothers don’t count. Everything Is determined by the burning seed that chooses them, and uses them. You’re the daughter of a king: Ariadne, the feared one; Ariadne, the golden dove. He is not ours. He is a construct. Do you know whom he is the brother of? His own cage, his own stone prison: the labyrinth.” 

Ariadne: “To hear something spoken out loud is not the same as to know its meaning in your heart. To know something without words, and have it stay in our hearts, protects us from our image of it like a piece of armor.”

Minos: “You persist in seeing a resemblance between us, where there is only a shared destiny.”

Apheresis: a medical treatment with roots in a Greek word that means to take away.

"I am not my own idea as I'm falling," Dan Beachy-Quick says of the sailor who tumbles from the ship's mast into the water below.

When falling, I am the thing someone else has seen. Or this is the way I have found to think about what falling means.

Falling from a mast is like falling off a cliff: one is finished. We are speaking of finitude.

“Even the song of the lark is pitched without rumor…”, Jack Heflin writes in his poem, “Amnesia.”

Can't and Won't with Lydia Davis.

Reading Lydia Davis always drops ideas for form and constraint straight into my Sunday brain. I’ve included a few below because each of them can be used as a model for writing, or for generating something in the same vein. All are excerpted from Lydia Davis’ Can’t and Won’t: Stories.

And here’s a link to “How I Read as Quickly as Possible Through My Back Issues of the TLS,” another story from this collection that makes a great have-at-it.

REVERSIBLE STORY: Use Davis’ reversible story as a model for your own doubling-over.

CAN’T AND WON’T: Write a brief paragraph about a contraction, or a set of contractions, where contracting led to consequences in an event. Even if the event was a misunderstanding. Even better.

THE LANGUAGE OF THINGS IN THE HOUSE: I’ve included the first page of this piece, and then excerpted some of the beautiful passages on languages which Davis intersperses between sounds. The juxtaposition, and the flagging with italics, is worthy studying. How do italics change the texture of the language in this particular piece?

Make an inventory of the language of things in your house. Sit down or go for a listening walk through each room. Then go back and write a few paragraphs on the story of origins for select sounds. Use italics. Experiment with diction and mythography (as opposed to Davis’ semantic focus).