Notes on the aesthetics of ruins.

The language of ruins — the presence of ruinscapes — is central to my current manuscripts. But so much of what compels my thinking will be left out of the poems, the essays, the novel . . .

So I leave these crumbs for myself, should I wish to retrace my journey in a space less chaotic than notebooks: the relationship between the icon and the monument, between love and eros, between seeing and beholding, between imagining and destroying.

In an essay, “Summer of the Statue Storm,” A E Stallings looked at Georgia’s famous Stone Mountain, a monument to the Confederacy, while reading ruin-guru Susan Stewart. In Stallings’ words, and quotations:

As Stewart concludes in her last chapter, “Resisting Ruin: The Decay of Monuments and the Promises of Language,” “Monuments are among the most controversial of built forms, and their controversy always lies in their inadequacy and in the inevitability of their failure.” A monument is a future ruin.

Reading Stallings brings back the goosebumps of reading Stewart and discovering connections between conventions, language, and social valorizations:

The fragment is cousin to the ruin, as the unfinished building reflects the collapsed one. “Companion to the ruin, the unfinished is not the sign of a damaged form but the sign of damaged intention.” The Tower of Babel is the ur-unfinished building—or the unfinished building of Ur, perhaps. Its most famous depiction is the much-reproduced painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (or paintings, to be precise, as two versions are in existence, slightly varied, like an early spot-the-difference game), itself based on a ruin: he pictures the mythological ziggurat after the breakdown in human communication as a lurching wedding-cake pile-up of layers of colonnades based on the Roman Coliseum.

Modernism thus is a kind of culmination of the ruins lesson, with its fetishizing of fragment, its palimpsests, its Babel of language and voices, its concern with the “age value” of ancient quotation, and its fascination with physical ruin.

“A quotation is also a way of engaging a ruin, or fragmenting the monument known as a text,” I think to myself, while reading Stallings’ beautiful essay.

“Perhaps saliency, itself, is a form of intertextual relationship,” I wonder, while recognizing words and phrases that I kept in my notebook when immersed in Stewart.

Surely Stewart must have mentioned damnatio memoriae? What other coincidence could cause it to pop up in both Stallings’ thinking and mine?

To quote Stallings:

Scholars have been busy telling us that iconoclasm is nothing new, reminding us of the Roman practice—cancel culture, if you will—of “damnatio memoriae,” or condemning the memory, when the Senate would try to erase every image and inscription relating to an individual, and even their families. Caligula and Nero are among Roman emperors treated thus; they have hardly been erased from history.

Also on my turntable as I finish quibbling with the poetry manuscript, the ruins of angelology, the hagiographies of motherhood, “In Labyrinths” by Martin Pops (also known as Marty Pops), “Resisting Left Melancholy” by Wendy Brown, and, of course, the echoes inside Paul de Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement”.

Music: “Into the Light” by J. Views ft. Wild Club

*

Is there something like a ruin in disappearing? Or does the ruin rely completely on a physical chipping-away in order?

I don’t know.

"I am indifferent about being missed," writes Hanif Abdurraqib, thus opening his essay, "The Art of Disappearance." Being rooted in his own contingency is perilous:

“To drill down on the definition of “being alive,” I have always come to a core definition that I can understand and make peace with: being someone who participates in the ever-shifting world. But I have no control over the world, and I don’t mean only the world in the sense of a blue rock twirling along endless dark. I also mean the smaller worlds.”

The smaller worlds include the immediate challenges of relationships, the persistence of his depression, the self's relation to self. Relationships expect things–they presume presence and bloom from anticipation. The more presence asks us to perform a certain openness, or emotional lability, the more it costs.

There are kinds of leaving, disappearing, and changing one's mind in a way that removes you faster from the presence and awareness of others. 

Sometimes, on the playground, I lied when the other mothers asked what my husband did for a living.

I pushed my son back-and-forth on the toddler swing and said: he is an engineer. Or a teacher.

Once I said my husband managed the gardens of the elderly and disabled, a sort of janitor for beautiful green spaces which felt like homes to their owners, but which their owners could no longer maintain.

My husband was out there, somewhere, in those moments when I was asked to imagine him.

But I was a single mother. There was no husband or partner. No ex or divorce.

It is easier to disappear in the expectations others have of you than to exist as a perturbation of the normal. Ruinscapes aren’t merely perturbations of the normal—-they are repudiations of time which articulate alternate temporalities. It is the precise nature of the ruining destruction which most intrigues me.

Tomaz Salamun's "The Field of Ptuj"

My Excuse

I want to the look at the place described in Tomaž Šalamun’s poem, “The Field of Ptuj,” before thinking through the poem, itself.

Since I’ve already read the poem, one might read this having-readness as a note of insincerity. But my sincerity is uninteresting—-and my reasoning is simple—- the place of the poem serves as background to the actual subject, which is the poet’s ancestor and family history.

But the way in which Ptuj, the place, is described on various websites carries the tone of heroism which Šalamun challenges.

“Ptuj”

Ptuj was located at a strategically important crossing of the Drava River, along a prehistoric trade route between the Baltic Sea and the Adriatic. The area is part of the traditional region of Styria and it was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire.

The area was settled by settled by Celts during the Iron Age. People first settled at the lively crossroads of merchant roads, where it was safe to cross the Drava River, already at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. Like many parts of Europe, recorded history began with Roman colonization.

In the middle of the 5th century the territory was plundered by the Huns, and later gradually occupied by the Slavs. At the end of the 8th century Ptuj became part of the Frankish Empire, and at the end of the 9th century the city came under the power of the Salzburg Archbishopric. The city saw a revival of its trade similar to the Roman era only in the 11th century, when lords of Ptuj took over the rule.

- Visit Ptuj website

“They were not only successful in the battlefield, but also proved themselves as erudite and critical supporters of art. They reinforced the town militarily, built a new castle on the remnants of the old, and long-distance trade was revived,”

- Marija Hernja Masten, Staro mesto ob Dravi.

The city’s most prominent buildings were erected already in the first half of the 13th century – the fort on the castle hill, the Dominican monastery, the Minorite monastery, and the Church of St. George. Ptuj officially got its city rights in the middle of the 13th century, including the right to build a city wall, which enclosed all city buildings, both monasteries, and the castle.

- Visit Ptuj website

Tourism began in the second half of the 19th century.

“Citizens of Ptuj invited travelers to come and see the remnants of the city’s glorious past, they praised its mild climate and good wines, and recommended bathing the rapid and clean Drava.”

- Marija Hernja Masten, Staro mesto ob Dravi

The city had a castle and vineyards! It was ripe for bourgeois recuperation visits, later known as vacations.

From the beginning of the 20th century until World War II, the city was famous for the bubbling social life that took place in its bars and cafés. The excellent choice of coffee, wine, and spirits attracted wealthy and more demanding guests to the city’s hotels and cafés.

Hotel Osterberger, now Hotel Mitra, was the most prestigious hotel in Ptuj. Cafés and hotels also hosted concerts and balls, which were an important symbol of the city’s soul and air of refinement.

- Visit Ptuj website

The Poem

Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun brought his neo-avant-garde brush to a piece of family history with "The Field of Ptuj," a poem first published in his 1980 collection, Masks.

Here is the poem as translated by the late and marvelous Charles Simic:

I am drawn to the poet’s subversion of monuments and stereotypes, a tactic Šalamun uses from the outset, in the gesture of his poetics of dedication. Šalamun dedicates the poem to its interlocutor: a great-grandfather who served as a General in the 19th century, and who would, in many poems, be treated heroically as the pinnacle of masculine accomplishment.

Alas:

You were tired at the very beginning.

The first line completes its declarative with a period. One imagines the poet looking at a portrait and scrutinizing the General’s facial expression as he moves into the next line:

When like a trained monkey you posed
with your saber.

Again, this sense in which Šalamun’s description suggests an iconic photograph: the General posed with his saber (and what a perfect word Simic chooses in his translation, sword comes more easily but saber retains antiquity).

He resembles a trained monkey. “At the ceremony”— the swerve of Šalamun’s line breaks— where he is officially “made a baron.” From a General to a baron after someone says the magic word and the ritual of transubstantiation is completed.

The poet’s mocking tone clings to the sharp images. And how cleverly he avoids the consequence of his gaze by distributing it among the plural pronoun:

We forgive you
for looking ridiculous.

After all, the interlocutor must have been thinking great thoughts, Šalamun tells us, invoking “duty” and “future generations”—two abstractions which satirize the depth of the General’s purview. Deploying a noble-sounding abstraction in order to ridicule a subject is a classic Šalamunian strategy—using the abstract against itself to render an aura of vapid pomposity.

The truth is that General got “bored” in Zadar. And his wife wanted him to return to Vienna.

Slowly, Šalamun begins dropping pins on a map, dots which relate to the title invoking this field of Ptuj. Borrowing the chivalric conventions of his ancestor’s time, the poet names names to gossipy effect:

Did you even notice when Mr. Toplak
carried off your daughter? Your investment
had gone to Ptuj.

Insinuating that the General’s war games meant little when he couldn’t even protect his own daughter from a weak suitor, Šalamun burrows into the language of masculine convention and social status to attack where it wounds the ancestor most.

And, if this is not enough, the poet adds onto the accusations, for it is the General’s disinheritance of his daughter which causes “Barberle” to “turn grey on the mountain road.” Here is the turn:

Dumbfounded she stared at her offspring.

One sentence occupying a single line.

There are three such single-line sentences in the poem: the first line, this turning line, and the final line. An invisible pattern is set by these lines which stand, complete in themselves. Like sign-posts on a road.

Here, Šalamun shifts into the juxtaposition, the secret tension, the division between the elite and the Slavic (one of his themes)—the mother whose children were “raised by barbaric Slavic maids” did not even understand her childrens’ “language.” It is the mother who failed to protect them from the linguistic Slavic taint. It is the mother who allowed their tongues to be polluted. And now she has lost a daughter to the Slavic suitor (see Toplak).

The gorgeous captioning of what follows, the frame which bespeaks rather than speaking, the ominous colon:

raised by barbaric Slavic maids. It’s written:
our mother lay down all white and kept
pressing the buzzer no one heard.

Šalamun swoops into a prophetic voice and stretches into the romantic, fairy-tale diction of “our mother lay down all white” only to leave the reader with a discombobulating buzzer sound, an sonic uncanniness that ruptures the flow and the seriousness of the folk-language.

O, and the perfect return to the image of the saber-bearing General, the Baron whose Baroness lies stupidly with a buzzer:

"That’s not the way you figured it, mon general.

Online, I find: “Archaeologists believe that some 30 thousand people lived in the greater area around Poetovio, which was one of the most important Roman army base camps, at the time.”

The Roman name of Ptuj was Poetovio. There is a poet inside it.

How does the italicization of mon general influence the ordering of the poem?

I'm thinking about how we begin a letter with the diminutive, the assertion of intimacy, the "my" inside "mon"...but Salamun ends the poem with this. Mon general—French, the bourgeois language of correspondence.

Asterisk

In poetry, one encounters the concern about an underdeveloped speaker. I’m not saying that it true of this poem, or in this case, but I see it pop up in craft essays and arguments about poetics.

(One could argue that Salamun’s speaker is quite underdeveloped; keeping his distance through plural pronouns and the razor-sharp focus on the subject of the portrait. The speaker isn’t changed by the poem—-he doesn’t mature, evolve, or discover anything small and precious about himself?)

“Development,” of course, is loaded by contemporary associations, and by the of the narrative arc, borrowed from fiction.

Concerns about 'underdeveloped speakers' are time-bound, which is to say, these concerns are only a problem for the poem which takes the narrow time of personal development as a metric.

Assuming our preference for redemptive narratives, it is still worth asking why we bring this expectation to the room of a poem? Why do we assume the speaker must be changed by it? Isn’t this concern one which ignores the relationship between the poem and the reader? What is the poem for?

Curb-Appeal: Notes on the author's headshot.

1.

The first time an editor asked me for “a headshot,” I had to google it. Accordingly, the term originated in the movie industry to describe a standard 8″ x 10″ professional photograph of an actor, taken with specific parameters, and submitted to a casting director or producer in the hopes of booking an audition based on the first impression of their looks. 

To book is to bill.

A booking (n.) is an engagement for a performance by an entertainer.

A book (n.) is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages bound together and protected by a cover.

A publication (n.) is a book or journal issued for public sale.

For writers, a headshot (n.) is the standard photo requested by publishers prior to a piece's publication in a journal or book.

As a visual component of marketing, the headshot serves as a possible point of sale.

2.

I change headshots more frequently than some mammals change their boxers—restlessly, constantly, driven by a mixture of intrigue, devout uncertainty, and dread. Like nail-biting, this compulsive shot-shifting is bad for my brand. It prevents consumers from relating to me as a recognizable product. 

What does it mean to recognize a produced self?

When someone refers to me as a blonde, I don't remember who they are referencing. In my mind, I'm still brunette. I am often unrecognizable to myself. Surely I’m not alone in this.

There are 117 photos in the folder marked HEADSHOTS on my laptop. Among these photos: seven camellias in varying shades of light, a glacier as captured by my dead mother, a small dish with ash from a manuscript, an assemblage of acorns, the back of my head on a metal slide, three MRI images of my brain with contrast, a green cardigan, a silhouette of me kicking seaweed, a passport photo, the Krakow nude, me in grass, me in meadows, me looking tired, happy, distracted, surrounded by notebooks . . . 

3.

Real estate agents emphasize curb appeal, or the attractiveness of a property for sale and its surroundings when viewed from the street. Landscaping, the front entrance, and the condition of the paint or siding are the biggest factors in curb appeal. It's the outside of the house that makes the buyer decide whether to enter. 

In "People Judge Your Book By Its Headshot," author Scott McCormick insists that “the goal of your author headshot is to cement your brand.” The headshot is aspirational: it aims towards a genre-specific creme brulee of professional glamour, aesthetic proximity, and iconography that leans on looking. Since publishers have deemphasized cover art, the headshot emerges as a selling point for buyers. 

People don’t judge a book by its cover, but by its headshot.

4.

P. took my first headshot in a ruinous Alabama cemetery on an outing with the kids. The image on the back cover of the debut fiction collection has its author glaring at something outside the frame, her face troubled by shadows (bad lighting), a torrid braid perched on her home-bleached hair, a gangly magnolia in the background. One wishes she knew better. One wishes, for example, that the author had experimented with display techniques to augment the visual experience for online marketing efforts. The dark circles under her eyes — ghastly.

As we train our puppy to cease pissing on house plants, P. begins a conversation which connects my headshot-horror to a fear of failure, particularly, the failure to be glamorous, the inability to appeal to others.

“Bullshit,” I tell him— bullshit being the gauntlet that leads me deeper into studying this object, this professional set-piece, the headshot.

5.

When my son turned five, he began reading billboards and signs aloud.

I remember his puzzled little forehead, the mind reaching for words: "Mommy, these smiles are trying to take something from me." This awareness of how smiles can be predatory was first offered to me by a child whose neurodivergence makes him, in many ways, a better cultural anthropologist than the articulate pedants of neurotypical hallways—o, hallways, maybe one recalls the predation of high school femmes asserting their smug grins in the silence that follows a whisper session. This has nothing to do with anything except the sound of a young voice singing We have affordable curves as I drove.

6.

Why do I smile when I enter a room?

"Is to see you to feel you or keep you at an unthreatening distance?" Mary Cappello wonders in her memoir, Awkward: A Detour.

In a room stocked with strangers, the smile asserts its own confidence. The smile may be a social badge of having arrived; power comes from the ability to offer the least determining smile in the headshot; the smile designates this particular relation. For me, that is the problem. The headshot promises a sort of relationship that can only develop into iconography.

Roland Barthes described the iconic gaze as the one which looks directly at the viewer— the one whose dead eyes insist on their aliveness. Eastern Orthodox icons witness the doings of a house; I grew up surrounded by their eyes and golden aureoles. Perhaps this supernatural element is what I wish to revoke of myself in recusing the representation of motionless and eternality.

If I’m not twitching with restlessness, the headshot is lying. It presents an unrecognizable self—-a self too polished, professional, surreal, or else too intimate, expository, torn from the sacred corners of my private cathedral. Is it the confessional that scares me? Cappello notices the subtexts of smiles when visiting Russia on fellowship, when a man tells her that she is putting herself at risk by grinning—better to look solemn and "normal." The normal varies across cultures, social classes, time, and language. What is normal today will be the ramparts of nostalgia tomorrow.

7.

"In Sicily, the sun doesn't shine," Cappello says, "it burnishes." The light of time and place changes the way we behold the body; the headshot denies this contingency; it universalizes the writer by holding us in one shape, one light, one moment, for all eternity. Is a headshot a portrait? I could write a book about this perhaps . . . an inventory of how we see one another in the altering 21st century lights.

8.

The policing of professionalism existed prior to the headshot. To take sides in the aesthetic headshot wars is to color the scene with ethical undertones while descending into visceral personalization of critique. God forbid one wakes up worthy of a hashtag on the social media marketplace. As they say in po-biz workshops for authors, brand is everything. The criteria of value is excellence. Honey: money talks.

Headshot discourse has evolved into a close-reading exercise wherein the author's image is decoded as a statement of artistic purpose, a development of brand, an aesthetic gesture, an opportunity to be solicited for features in journals or television.

“Look—” I tell P, “the headshot has a hook for a heart.”

Enter the at-home studio—-a variety of pen lamps with magnificent wattage, mood lighting so that authors on a book tour can take courses on how to look good on Zoom. What follows is a non-exhaustive inventory of things I've read or been told in the industry of headshot acquisition:

Investing in a professional headshot is a way of showing respect for the reader. Showing up with your hair a mess tells the reader that you don't value yourself or your work. The social media headshot should be more approachable than the book headshot in order to provide readers with a sense of intimacy: by following you on social media, they get access to a rawer version of you. When getting ready for your author photos, think of how you’d like to appear when meeting your reader in person for the first time. For the book photo, dress like other authors in your genre, which is to say, novelists ought to look more professional while poets can milk the constellations for whimsy and a slight bohemian aura. In order to keep your brand fresh, one must update your headshot every two-to-three years. If you invest in a grainy headshot, that image will follow you around for eternity.  At all times you should be asking yourself, “What kind of image am I trying to project to the world?” In the mall of desirable books, every image counts. 

The headshot is a glimpse of the person at their Sunday best; or as they want to be imagined; or as , or the self most amenable to markets – I'm not sure that we know which is which. As writers, I'm not sure we have time or financial incentive to consider it. I don't want to stop long enough to become a brand.

“Are you still obsessing about headshots?” P asks, as the deadlines and stacks encircle me.

There are so many Annes that I am, and so many Annes I resemble, without filling definitively —-

9.

In my search for the perfect headshot, I watch a microvideo lesson for authors on how to take your own headshots; learn about Hilary Mantel's pensive, caped headshot; discover that moody black and white headshots are hot; find that professional headshots are harrowing for the anxious or introverted; wander through hilarious twitter self-parodies of author headshots; get stalled in the indignance of authors whose publishers rejected their chosen headshots. 

A typology of headshots emerges: the realistic headshot (which constructs subject as unassuming, unsentimental and sincere); the bohemian headshot (which constructs the subject in opposition to bourgeois aura and interposes the author in counterpoint to the system that publishes him); the whimsical headshot (which constructs subject in relation to fragility of planet and natural world altered by climate change); the assertive headshot (which constructs subject as powerful, reclamatory, and serious); the sexy headshot (constructs subject as eager to be visible in a sexual way, or engage in self-objectifying lens); the regional headshot (constructs subject in relation to geographic terrain and placehood) — all of these constructions rely on an overdubbed mixtape of fantasy and nostalgia which is critical to the capitalist-realist aesthetic gaze. 

The fantastic subject of Walter Benjamin's 19th century flaneur has become the oversaturated subject, but the iconographical aspiration is the same. Part of this can be traced to the predominance of the visual in current marketing discourse: the proliferation of posters for book tours, the coordinated visual palettes and themes related to books themselves, the emergence of the book t-shirt grounded in aesthetic love for a book rather than articulation of theory. This is just business as usual in hypercompetitive markets where so much depends on being memorable. 

Benjamin gestured towards the market-friendly aesthetics when describing the broadening role of ad-space in 19th century newspapers, particularly with respect to the prestige of the reclame. A decrease in subscription rates, news items, serial novels, and advertisements altered the role of newspapers. 

Of newspaper ads in the mid-19th century, Benjamin complains that the ad took up more space and was better designed than the copy around it, so that even when the product was criticized in an editorial, the effect was negligible. Suddenly to be out of date was to be out of fashion —- a sin against the present time.

The news items caught on because they could be employed commercially. Reclames, independent notices masquerading as news items, referred to products that were advertised in the paper. Although they were denounced as irresponsible and deceptive, their use underscores the increasing connection between advertisements and paper sales. These short news items and different typefaces allowed the papers to have a different look every day, pre-disposing their daily purchase, and making them appropriate compliments for the newly defined cocktail hour— the ultimate in non-serious gossip that had become institutionalized in the cafés.

10.

Artists are not new to capitalist realist aesthetics: Marcel Duchamp's avant-gardism borrowed from mass consumption's planned obsolescence without disavowing the artist's protest at being reduced to a mass product. If Duchamp gave us the found sacrilege, Andy Warhol gave us the precursor to LOL with his  painstaking cultivation of public persona to accompany pop art. Set design, lighting, color theory, all came into play in the mythos of Warhol.

We spectate ourselves being spectated by others in order to perform the spectacle of the book launch. We lie to ourselves and locate these gazes in a subset of the numinous or authentic, rather than the commercial. We writers have been lying to ourselves since the pen first graced the page to placate our wild imaginations.

The brand is modernity's version of the icon—a holy image—the secular divination of market forces in action. The iconic headshot sanctifies the latest viral surge. Perhaps it is this fear of being sacralized, or remembered, as the brand, that worries the iconoclast in some of us. What's the point of getting rid of gods if only to insert one's self-image in the hole?

On this reading, a good headshot would be a lie—it would suggest that this self has fit in an image worth remembering, rather than reflecting the incoherent noise that I am.  Remember me, instead, as a consort that never managed to settle into a pose worthy of deification. Remember me as a flibbertigibbet who couldn't remain motionless long enough to warrant your time or purchase.

11.

If I query the headshot, it is to understand my own discomfort with it, or to locate it in relation to my discomfort for icons and monuments in landscapes saturated with the crimes of nationalism and theocracy. Because there is no such thing as a wrong headshot – though there may be some that sell better than others—-I prefer to strip away any ethical readings from the act of interpretation, just as I strip it from personal aesthetic preferences ranging from piercings to plastic surgery to hair color.

The color of one's hair is not a moral position – certainly less so when it pertains primarily to females. Hair color is an aesthetic choice which often reveals trends and social practices of the time and place. There is no universal aesthetic, no such thing as “natural” once you put the first cream on your face. The natural, itself, is an evolving aesthetic criteria.

In theory, the image is just a tool, but there is no space carved away from the judgment of consumers, some of whom are human – and there is nothing lonelier than the pulse of one's aspirational event in the putative icon. Perhaps an “intellectual history” of the headshot is impossible. . . The Algonquin Round Table residents spoke in full knowledge of the persona as they performed for each other at the table: their epigrams emerged ready for quotation, stoked for viral frisson. Maybe the nice NYC cafe wasn't a way of life so much as an enclosed space and a way of being seen as the Intelligentsia. The cafe was the site of that branding. 

The distance between gossip and insight is at the ear's discretion.

12.

Stanley Cavell calls it the illusion of the natural, or the candid — but is the headshot more candid than its textual apparatus, the resume? Which part of the resume is candid about interpersonal relations, or how many doughnuts one eats at the office party before wondering if others have had one? The resume, at best, is well-groomed—it sells itself. The headshot aspires to the same, give or take a wry grin.

13.

But there is a photo I love on the back cover of Brenda Hillman's poetry collection, Loose Sugar.

In this grainy, black and white taken by Louisa Michaels, the author sits before a white wall in a white tank, her lower arms hidden from view, her shoulders complicated by loose hair, her head tilted with an unassuming, close-lipped smile. The lines on Hillman's face are visible; the sunspots on her chest are an open field; there is a glare on the skin under her eyes. By industry standards, this headshot would be a flop. 

After subjecting this photo to the usual close reading, I realize what I value is how little it reveals. How it could not, for example, sell a shampoo or a lip gloss. How it hovers for an instant in the air — a face, a simple snapshot of an author who has just finished writing, and who hopes to return to the page —- and who has paused, for a moment, to look at the world without fashioning herself into it. A sin against the times, the poem’s part-crime.

Notebook: Poems I've kept since high school.

High school. Everything started there— the copying of poems on the cover of binders, the prefacing each day’s journal entry with a verse written by a ghost, the slow seduction of language and the careful attention the poet brings to words.

There was a way of being there and not being there, entirely. Poetry was like playing hookey mentally, opting out of the classroom scenes.

Metaphorical hookey aside, the first time I skipped school, it was raining. And the rain resembled the peasant dress my great-grandmother wore in the portrait which hung on the dark wooden walls of our hallway, except that the peasant dress was intended to symbolize the rain I imagined would arrive when, suddenly and dramatically, I left school after trigonometry, knowing that my boyfriend would likely look for me – knowing he would look and worry, given that we had argued in the cafeteria earlier. But the privilege of seeing him look and worry – the very reason for which I left – was made impossible by my leaving.

As for the rain, it arrived an hour later, by which point I had already been conquered by things I was sitting on, namely, the swing shaped like a metal dragon which resided in the park a mile down the road from the school; I had already been swinging and wondering if he was still looking for me, wondering also if he had realized that there had been an argument which occurred earlier in the cafeteria, an argument which represented the struggle between my hopes for community and my commitment to him, as an individual, with extensive emotional needs, and the sort of vibratory lexicon required to communicate these needs to me, and make my head spin and spin and spin with him. Or, rather, make my head spin a bit with the words I had come to associate with the idea of him — nervy, metamorphic, sensitive, sandy, necrophobic, misunderstanding.

Perhaps nothing came of it. Perhaps poetry is the nothing that comes of things we hold close?

In honor of a new year, and poetry, here is a handful, a small dusting of poems which I first copied then, onto various surfaces — including the doors of my closet, my head, my hands. One shares such things because someone else shared them first. Something abides in these poems—-something outlasts its self. May they bring you closer to whatever you’re imagining or writing.

*Disclaimer: These poems were collected prior to the internet and the world wide web, back in the day when teens went to libraries and sat with books copying poems from them in Alabama towns where the bookstores only held Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The linked translations are not necessarily my favorite, or the best. But they were easier to find. And I erred towards ease ….

“For the Anniversary of My Death” by W. S. Merwin
“This world is not conclusion” by Emily Dickinson
“A Confession” by Czeslaw Milsoz
“December 11th” by Anne Sexton
“Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand
“Elegy” to Marina Tsvetaeva by Rainer Maria Rilke
“The Abyss” by Charles Baudelaire
“Mock Orange” by Louise Gluck
“Untitled” by Cesar Pavese
“Love Songs” by A. R. Ammons
“Marriage” by Gregory Corso
“O Lull Me, Lull Me” by Theodore Roethke
“No Childhood” by Adam Zagajewski
“Recreation” by Audre Lorde
“Third and Last” by Anna Akhmatova
“A Litany for Survival” by Audre Lorde
“Elegy, owed” by Bob Hicok
“Soonest Mended” by John Ashbery
“Vita Nova” by Louise Gluck
“I Knew a Woman” by Theodore Roethke
“Encounter” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Two Poems for T.” by Cesar Pavese
“The First Elegy” & “The Eighth Elegy” from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies
“Fame is the one that does not stay—” by Emily Dickinson
“Plaster Cast Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke
“Be Drunk” by Charles Baudelaire
“Knee Song” by Anne Sexton
“My Faithful Mother Tongue” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Meditations in an Emergency” by Frank O’Hara
“Posthumous Remorse” by Charles Baudelaire
“My Heart” by Frank O’Hara
“Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium” by James Wright
“Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” by Stéphane Mallarmé
“With Mercy for the Greedy” by Anne Sexton
“Autre Eventail” by Stéphane Mallarmé
“You Who Wronged” by Czeslaw Milosz
“Sensibility! O La!” by Theodore Roethke
“Purists with Object” by John Ashbery
“Late Echo” by John Ashbery
“Etiology” by Linda Gregg
“Last blues, to be read someday” by Cesar Pavese
“Night Song” by Lisel Mueller
“Tortures” by Wislawa Szymborska
“The Aeolian Harp” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“The Room of My Life” by Anne Sexton
“Constancy to an Ideal Object” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“And then we cowards…” by Cesar Pavese
“People at Night” by Rainer Maria Rilke
Copious amounts of Leonard Cohen, including “Owning Everything” & “The Only Poem” & “These Heroics” & “I am dying…” etc.
Poets in Romanian (Stanescu, Ana Blandiana, Enescu, so many others)—this would be a longer list

Apostrophe

Lost lists and silences.

1.

I’ve been thinking about lists— particularly the lists one is asked to assemble after the death of a loved one. The legal system frequently requests an “inventory” of the items which belonged to the loved one, a list of things which can be contested by beneficiaries and inheritants.

Lists have their silences. I did not include my mothers’ shoes in the inventory of her estate. But my mother loved shoes; she preserved her 30-year-old boots from Romania carefully in her closet. The boots were useless in Alabama, where sorority girls sport Uggs with shorts all over campuses that never see snow. Why did my mother keep those boots near the black heels she wore to work?

2.

Is silence listed or unlisted? I don’t know.

In contemporary memoir, in the industry of unpacking wounds, silence often appears as the enemy, the erasure one writes against. Silence is violence, and the text serves as indictment. But silence is also protective, a way of preserving the sacred, a way of acknowledging the unsayable. Marguerite Duras hints at this in her “Letter to Centro Racchi,” where she bows out of an invitation to speak at conference, due to fear of being asked a question which would ruin a silence central to her life. 

Duras fears being asked why her characters are always Jewish, a question she cannot answer; the possibility of speakers or audience members theorizing on an answer to what feels unanswerable, the chance " that someone might tell me why" is "intolerable" to her. She speculates that silence is what binds her and her characters to Jewishness—"We keep silent together and that makes the book."

Waking up at 16 to a world that included disaster, Duras says:

"What happened to me in between, the war, the children, love, everything fades. The Jews remain. Which I cannot speak about."

3.

"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.....for it runs in my head we shall all die young.."

[ John Keats to Charles Brown, 30 Nov. 1820]

4.

In court, this refusal to defend oneself is often interpreted as an admission of guilt. To refuse to satisfy the answers of others is to deny the world's claim on justice, or to complicate its relation to reality. More than anything, silence challenges our ways of knowing the world. And a kept silence, an impermeable, living silence, cuts off our access to the sacred, or that which is set apart.

5.

Excerpt from Ryan Bradley’s “The Lost List” (as found in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee)

I love Ryan Bradley’s essay, “The Lost List,” which touches on the inventory of absences compiled by the mind. It prompts notebooks.

Reading Bradley, I thought of Judith Schalansky’s marvelous book, An Inventory of Losses (translated by Jackie Smith). In it, Schalansky invokes what archivists know, namely: "chronology—the allocation of sequential numbers for each new addition--is in its banal logic the most unoriginal of all organizational principles, being only a simulation of order," as "the world is a sprawling archive of itself."

The world is a sprawling archive of itself. Everything depends on what is selected as worth remembering. Or what it determined to be forgettable. What we consecrate with legend.

6.

Joan of Arc's trial is notable for its silences —- she is, after all, being tried for heresy against a god administered by rulers, or the power of those on the podium.

And she responds with refusals: "I won't answer that.... Even fire won't change my mind..... The voice has forbidden me”—-the voice being God; fire being the way she would die, condemned for relapsing into heresy, exposed to a public recitation of her countless sins, and the response: silence. Like suicide.

The film still as quotation.

3:37

Tobias shares a photo of a girl with blonde hair surrounded by a golden nipple of light, a dusky illumination – this gilded creature keeps appearing in his Instagram photos, and then disappearing when he clicks on the photo. He has no idea who she is.

The days of muskrat Twitter have dawned and even this angelic pixel-host seems seems connected to the present uncanniness—- an uncanny knit further from the eerie than the commercial.

Mystery has changed. Even mystery feels slant, invisibly calculated, algorithmically-inclined, in the spaces of social media, those mediums which mythologizes us to ourselves.

3:39

A DM from a bitcoin miner followed by a DM from a writer expressing concern about our role in the systems of dominance. My dog Radu barks at a squirrel.

4:01

X confesses: “I like myself better on screen. Being away from Twitter reminds me of how despicable I find myself in real life. The real me screams at her kids and fails daily. I am an actual failure.”

The way social media defines time, or infects our relationship to temporality, feels so loose, so wrong, so—to use a twitter expression — unhinged.

I console myself with the fact that my work originate there – in that hustle of headshots and fake luminosity.

4:08

Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, as translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty, arrives. I get sucked into it quickly…

5:18

“The Internet has rung in the revenge of the archive and sounded the death knell of the show, which used to set the beat for the triumphal march of the present,” Renouard writes.

The show-and-tell of tweetland— the instability of our attachments to it. One would have to be mindless not to consider the effects. Purisms aside, Renoaurd’s critique is right. And yet, I hope Twitter doesn’t die before I do, since I scheduled tweets for the year 2031, which I can’t imagine actually seeing.

We all have our dubious experiments; each manuscript invests in the variant dubiousness. On restless writing days, I inventory conditionals and fondle the dream of my posthumous bird voice carrying on without me.

One conditional: If Twitter dies, the ghost I wanted to be will die with it.

9:32

Revising an essay on Celan alongside a book about files, truth, and surveillance. Staring at photographs cut from family films. Thinking how quotation resembles the film still—the scavenged screenshot.

Addressing the shadow gives it weight.

One cannot read Paul Celan without absorbing this somehow. He says it directly:

the words
I address to you, shadow,
to give you weight.”

I speak to you in order to give you substance, to point to the thing attached.

As I remove these lines from the palm, I set them apart. Like S. Cavell, my interest drives me to write what arrests me. In turn, I arrest the image in a manner that turns it into a still from a film. I rip it from the context of its motion, of its life. Because I have isolated this photo—these lines, this particular shadow—I read it differently, there is no longer movement, the frame is reduced to the intensity of these lines.

The critic uses the imperative when they elect to quote or phrase a section of a poem. I want you to look.

9:43

The shade is the name for the ancient ghost. The lampshade changes the light. The order of life versus the disorder of death. Fourteen DM’s from friends trying to figure out whether they should migrate to another platform. Twitter slows fills with Muskrat experts and Muskrat reportage to reflect the new contagion. “Hyperbole is everything,” my teen daughter announces in her book report.

9:49

Order. Disorder. Simply put: I want twitter to die after me. I don’t want to witness the death of a book published posthumously. It seems rather wretched for logic to ask such things of the mind.

12:51

Renouard mentions “the aura of things glimpsed once and then lost forever” with respect to a book manuscript he lost. This missing book is the one which haunts him (I think of Mihail Sebastian’s The Accident).

The sad lovers crawl into my mind near midnight with their furious foreheads, their rage-curved shoulders, the books I have seen and lost. Projected books that come back like the ice pic of a migraine. As Renouard misses the written book, I miss the unwrittens—-the stories half-lived, half-remembered, the poem’s sharp clip, the shadow—-not a plot I’d wish to inhabit again but something I treasure like a lost tooth or a lock of hair cut from a corpse whose skin hasn’t betrayed its pastness yet.

Notebooks: the end of November.

Background: Tony Morrison, George Steiner, Danilo Kis, Elias Canetti, Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Roland Barthes— all eventually wrote towards the aesthetic and ethical value of openendness.

Discursiveness, theory, worry – the mind alone with a book in a room at night.

Point of origin: There must be a starting point which isn't loss.

Cosmology: Heidegger said "questions are paths toward an answer"; each path will be unique to the mind who sets off asking it. Schools turn paths into highways by sending us to chase the same question and to compare our responses.

Being able to ask questions is more important than being able to answer them. And the belief the answering questions is a measure of intellect diminishes the range of thought, both formally and institutionally.

We cannot dismantle the house in which we live by coming up with new answers. Dismantling requires undoing, reformulating…

The right answer – the one directed by the textbook – testifies to its own idolatry, or to the belief that one answer can stand for eternity.

Technical considerations: Good criticism reveals the supple shoulders and strength of an idea, its gait, its range, the terrain it travels in a landscape of inter-textual topography.

How steep is the slope of the gradient away from convention in comparison to other ways of knowing?

What is the degree of this gradient, its effects?

The ways language fails those who put their faith in it.

The aesthetics of idolatry uncovered by the author, whether personal or cultural. The particular lineaments of loss — not to start in that space, but to acknowledge its potential dominance.

Subjects: Amatonormative relationships.

Class as construed by the cognoscenti. Power.

The nature of belief and its relationship to the vatic voice.

Memory as elsewhere or otherwise.

Longing as a failure of markets.

The apocalyptic heart of modernity. 

To seek the metaphysics of how language changes, and how unstable the world conveyed in a word, whether we read it from experience, cultural limitation, or time.

The insight and the apercu, the personal portrait set against the pain of the text.

The posthumous voice on trial for what it failed to anticipate, and dialogue with her grief continues to challenge semantics.

Barthes quotes from Gide's 1927 journal: “They want to make me into a dreadfully anxious being. My only anxiety is to find my thoughts misinterpreted.”

Abstractions: You don't know what you don't know until you've built a house which must be undone by it.

The hunger for purity rationalizes violence.

Therapy doesn't provide solutions to social problems – it merely offers attention to those who can afford it.

Social problems are not resolved by privatized solutions.

Asides: We mistake citations for rigorousness, just as we mistake the use of complicated lexicons for intelligence.

Neoliberalism offers to each the opportunity to each be the hegemon of our own hallway.

Storyline: Someone wants to rule the world so they run for local office. 

Poem: The sapling stripped by winter. 

The rawness of the leafless thing.

The incongruency of raw evoking meat when I mean is a bone.

Distractions: Piranesi, piano tuners, baroque variations. 

Samuel Beckett saying to A. M.: “It gets harder and harder to write a line that’s honest. It’s very painful, very difficult.”

Contentions: Modernism relies on the sense of observable time as a form of authority.

Schools tell us a statement is true or false but life reveals the truth or falsity depending on its moment of utterance and its situation.

Tempo: The velocity of engagement and the language which enacts this. 

Cigarettes in the bathroom: Memory is elsewhere or otherwise.

The moment of utterance.

Counterfactuals. Sincerity and good faith: both require a commitment to error.

Mysteries: The way ideas are used to explain a perception, and what it triggers in the reader. What sort of re-cognition is involved.

How a poem has its own landscape and selects its own characters.

The specifics, the details, the blitz.

The visibility of voice. ….Is the poet whispering to someone else in the room? Why not?

“Resonance” rather than “reference”, Daniela Cascella calls it in Chimeras, this decentering of academic citation and direct quotation.

Non sequiturs: The discourse of great seriousness may not be serious.

Language doesn't become a god just because we put our faith in it.

Moral choices require the existence of other people; ethics exists outside of the closet of our personal feelings, in the space which is social, in the cafeteria.

How a book creates a sense of reality.

How a poet encounters temporality.

You don't know what you don't know.

And yet, one hopes to somehow build a house which is undone by it. 

Black widows, embodied cognition, and memoir in confessional culture.

"The observer stands outside the landscape, for were this not the case it would not be possible for nature to become a landscape at all." 

-Gyorgy Lukacs

“Ideology may appear clear to its proponents as long as it remains abstract, but when it is put into practice it takes the shape of a crime.”

-Mahmoud Darwish

1.

Black widow webs resemble messy tangles tucked into corners and crannies of things, under logs, sometimes littered with leaves; splashed by the surrounding spiders' white urine that attract scavengers with its strong scent. Often on the face-down side of old car wheels.

Sometimes she eats her lover. He plays her web like a lyre.

She may eat him before even copulating, or she may decide to not eat him after sex and then he dies alone.

When torn with a stick, the widow's web sounds like paper crackling in fire.

2.

The black widow spider benefits from what Ed Yong calls “embodied cognition”, so the web, itself, is part of the spider’s body:

Earlier, I described this as a postural squint. That’s close, but the analogy isn’t quite right, since squinting helps us focus on particular parts of space. Here, the spider is focusing on different parts of information space. It’s as if a human could focus on red colors by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog (or downward spider).

The ability to sense vibrations that move through solid surfaces, as distinct from sounds that travel through air, is “an often overlooked aspect of animal communication…..”

She may even eat him before copulating…..

3.

Which brings me to memoir, confession, webs, network-weaving, corporate malfeasance, the vacuity of authenticity in the never-ending hustle to keep our work separate from our personal lives. Or, at the very least, to be able to maintain control of our information space.

Eda Gunaydin’s “Tell-All” approaches the challenges of memoir in a confessional culture:

A friend who is a memoirist and I talk about the compulsion to disclose. Like her, I want to make disclosures – build intimacies to overcome the sense that this is so fucking mundane, that we, freshly emotionally regulated full-time job holding perfect subjects of neoliberalism, are now trapped in a prison of pretending like we don’t want to talk incessantly about one of three things: trauma, sex, anti-capitalism, that we are ever thinking about anything but these things. The way that any sleepover builds this heterotopic space which devolves and opens up necessarily into a conversation about fucking. The way that every game of Never Have I Ever is about fucking. The way that we all want to say to each other what the worst thing we’ve ever done is, and be forgiven.

Her observations on “communicative capitalism” will not sound strange to poets marketing their books, struggling with the blur between persona and human, and the ways in which confessions, themselves, have been a shock-market. With disgust, a part of me is forced to acknowledge that Trump knows this his market; his victim-centered memoir of his time in the White House will net millions.

For the Right is milking the teat of white male victimhood in earnest. It is doing this by constructing its own reading lists and special canons. And this confessional often involves some intense bootstraps, as Andrew Marzoni observes:

The frontier archetypes of Republican discourse – the antiestablishment maverick, the lone-wolf vigilante, the rebel, the patriot and the self-made man – draw most explicitly from the bootstraps myth of the rugged individual at the heart of American exceptionalism, which conservative authors exploit wholesale….

The pro-life thriller Gideon’s Torch (1995) by Charles Colson, formerly Special Counsel to Richard Nixon, is representative of this literature in that its depiction of ‘Christian white men in a persecuted light demanded,’ as Mason writes, ‘a deft appropriation of oppressed peoples’ actual histories and a revisionism that ranged from outright Holocaust denial to comparisons that likened antiabortionists to abolitionists.’

The current trend of far-Right literature presumes itself academic (i.e. operates to dominate the conventional elite) while lacking its own innovations. As Marzoni notes, it is characterized by “its Romantic environmentalism, neoclassical worship of the male physique, and its fixations on technological determinism and irony recall literature of the early 20th century….The narrative function, too, has remained the same: to stoke feelings of bitterness and solitude into a politics of reaction that is intellectually justified only after the fact.”

4.

Carol Mason’s “Right-Wing Literature in the United States since the 1960s” is a must-read for anyone tracking reactionary literature. To the degree that living in the South involves constant Civil War Reenactments, which I take as theatrical, nostalgia-inflected confessionals rooting the hearts and mounds of countless men in confessionals, Mason points to the sort of “rough agrarian” xenophobia that still exists in Alabama on both sides of the political spectrum, often eager to shame or reject those who don’t “sound” southern enough:

Less documented than the proliferation of right-wing serials in print, or the love of a conservative tradition of great nonfiction books, is how the reading of fiction and poetry compels right-wing movements. Five literary journals helped shape not only what to read but also how and why literature played a role in conceiving a conservative society. These literary reviews were heavily influenced by the Agrarians, a group of scholars trained at Vanderbilt University who promoted a radical conservatism. Beginning in 1930, with their manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand, the Agrarians responded to the rise of modernism as a challenge to Victorian values and to the modernization that rendered the Southern economy more industrial, forever changing society with it. Throughout the mid-20th century, writers such as Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Richard Weaver, and Paul Viereck presided over or engaged with the following five literary journals that were important to conservative thought.

All of this remains complicated, and if one pulls a strand of the web, the entire edifice quivers.

5.

Kate Manne has written extensively about media that constructs "himpathy", as in Fargo: we don't see the violence because we identify with the male, and worry about his future.

Misogyny is a problem women face "not because they're women in a man's mind, but because they're women in a man's world." Misogyny enforces patriarchal norms while sexism rationalizes them. 

“There's no control group in a patriarchal culture….”

6.

Simone, Sartre, the relationship of loyalty which resembles forgiveness on the part of female intellectuals. We want to imagine more from Hannah Arendt. We want their intimacies and loyalties to align with our own descriptions. We want, I think, an extreme option that caters to Western feminism, or to the abrupt ending. The divorce. 

I have always mistaken loyalty for what might be freedom, or the commitment of engaging the ideas which failed us, but the ideologue's promises of liberalism and liberation are not separable from the anointment of their eyes. To be chosen as a partner in thinking - for some women, this is greater than marriage or birthing children.

Sexual freedom is not separate from intellectual freedom, or the ability to reflect on the desires and fascinations of one's life. When torn with a stick, freedom sounds like a letter being dropped in a shredder.

Who for his hunger?

In 1977, Roland Barthes gave a lecture to an academic French audience wherein he claimed that his study of semiology grew from disgust for "this mixture of bad faith and good conscience which characterizes the general morality." The mixture of bad faith and good conscience is critical both to the paranoid reading and to the virtue signaling which has evolved in order to get ahead of the anticipated bad faith.

Is it interesting that we expect to be misread?

Is is problematic that our longing for authenticity has developed into an expository seriousness?

*

The poet sits and stares at the sunrise with due disgust—she is not a morning person, not an “angel of the morning,” not one who finds release in donning lyrca and running around the block or counting her steps.

*

There is a short poem by Victoria Chang which fascinates me.

To The Margin

I will never love
anyone the way I love
my memories and their cliffs.

Notice how things accumulate in a sort of negative theophany…. I will never love.

*

I will never stop seeing a god in our hungers for recognition.

*

Trauma is persuasive precisely because it ends a conversation – there is nothing to discuss after someone has laid human pain on the table and labeled it thus. Perhaps it is better to describe trauma as manipulative rather than persuasive; it speaks by silencing. By making speech impossible.

*

The underside of the market for self-improvement is the growing aisle of trauma products. Not every behavior or thought can be credited to the burgeoning industry of trauma. In the US, the market for trauma includes sub-aisles like gun culture.

I will never stop seeing a gun in the eyes of every human who bump-stocks their American Jesus.

*

Our hunger becomes text.

Our fears take shape in figurative language.

"What we know that we will soon no longer have before us, this is what becomes an image," wrote Walter Benjamin. The rotten scent of ungathered plums dangling in the air. The vines whose flowers open at night and emit a fragrance to attract nocturnal pollinators. Not all poems do their work in the daylight —-

*

The language of the promise presses up against Paul Celan's poetics, or borrows from the apophatic nature of communication by depriving it of testability. The modern promise is scientific, and therefore testable, or subject to verifiability. Testing the promise is part of the nature of a promise, as Stanley Cavell said.

*

What is the name for a prophet who never prophecies, or who gets all their predictions wrong? Are they still a prophet, or does their being and identity depend on having kept their prophecy? How does the prophet profit from speculation?

In the same 1977 inaugural lecture to College de France, Roland Barthes said: "I cannot function outside language, treating it as a target, and within language, treating it as a weapon."

And yet, he does. He does both. Who, shall I say, is calling?

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.