Ben-Yitzhak Mesostic

holeinthewall

Musk

Self-naming and the third line of Notley’s “Poem”

St. Mark’s Place caught at night in hot summer,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now.
Tompkins Square Park would be midnight green but only hot.
I look through the screens from my 3rd floor apartment
As if I could see something.
Or as if the bricks and concrete were enough themselves
To be seen and found beautiful.
And who will know the desolation of St. Mark’s Place
With Alice Notley’s name forgotten and
This night never having been?

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Poets.org

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Not as distant as Guadalajara nor as threatening as Vesuvius. Not noisy like the former nor certain like the latter.

As urgent as? As focused as? 

The Ghazal-type signature pines, and I return a moment to Corman. Differences truly between Corman and Notley, but I can’t place these as surely as I can a distinction between two of my children forced to a morning goodbye.

On “jobs” in an Eigner poem

Headlights
                      in the  sky

                tail spot
                         on a cloud

                   there are
                           invisible beams

     somebodies'  jobs

                steady   wherever

*

Al Filreis shared this with his ModPo students. The caption read “Larry Eigner wrote this poem in late April 1972 in Swampscott, Mass.”

*

No need of the sources to partake of the wonder. As in the myth of Lamed Wufniks, maybe apprehension of a whole endangers its multiplicity. What if the poem is neither “we only have this much”? Where getting (or even getting to) any more (from “somebodies” “wherever”) dims everything.

Notes on Cid Corman’s “Fire”

Is it the
principle
or process

of desire?
To take some
thing at all

once from it
self until
it pervades

emptiness—
warms and glows
and goes out.

But what is
out that is
not into?

*

—

It seems like someone has been staring at a candle, looking at how much (and how much nothing) goes into that hunger. Including his/her thoughts, desires, thoughts of desire, and desire to think—all of which should be eliminated if there’s to be any hope at all of extinguishing the ego, suffering.

—

The stanza cut yields us both. The sentence assigns pervades to it (it pervades emptiness, which seems to be something both occupying and being occupied by emptiness) but the cut allows emptiness its own stanza, where it may warm and glow, maybe as something quite distinct from just an emptied out some/thing.

—

Another, burdened with saying what’s nothing in such space.

—

Notes on John Ashbery’s “Variant”

Sometimes a word will start it, like
Hands and feet, sun and gloves. The way
Is fraught with danger, you say, and I
Notice the word “fraught” as you are telling
Me about huge secret valleys some distance from
The mired fighting—“but always, lightly wooded
As they are, more deeply involved with the outcome
That will someday paste a black, bleeding label
In the sky, but until then
The echo, flowering freely in corridors, alleys,
And tame, surprised places far from anywhere,
Will be automatically locked out – vox
Clamans – do you see? End of tomorrow.
Don’t try to start the car or look deeper
Into the eternal wimpling of the sky: luster
On luster, transparency floated onto the topmost layer
Until the whole thing overflows like a silver
Wedding cake or Christmas tree, in a cascade of tears.”

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[ Sweatshirt Poesy ]

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—

Really missing the old platform. It’s really as simple as NOT imposing paragraph spacing (which we can do by ourselves, thank you very much). Was trying to replace these s and
s with
s too, but was unsuccessful.

—

Hello to you both. I’ve been thinking of "wimpling" and how it seemed to me an Oulipian V+7 variant of what would’ve been a trite "eternal weeping of the sky." Took a longer at the wimple and it took me to church, and then to something earlier, Magdalene before the empty cave where Jesus had been sneakily buried. A lot of poem now echoes the Bible for me, from the first line where the beginning is the word, and all the way to Christmas. Hands and feet, sun and gloves (and that enjambment at "wooded") carry shades of Golgotha with its armed Romans and the final rite.

—

Not sure why he’s not "laying down the law," but maybe he is, you know, precisely by not doing so, because you can’t lay the law that way any more.

—

Finding this true. And there are contrasts between lightness and weight (maybe also, light and darkness) if the lines are suspended from each other. On the one hand, the hands and feet, sun and gloves line, the "lightly wooded" line, luster on luster, cake, while on the other we have your bleeding line (smoke? ink?) and the mired fighting.

I hesitate to include cascade of tears and the flowering echo in either "camp" as they seem to me images where the values are blended.

—

It seems very light at the outset for me, first couple of lines, a word, hands and feet, it’s going, it’s going. Then yes, as had been mentioned above (many times, many ways), that syllable heavy (fraught) with history and meaning and cargo and consonants. Then it becomes a sort of dance between light stuff and heavy stuff.

The "it" in the first line seems light, not carrying any noun or what, not yet anyway. What could "it" be? We’re not sure yet, we’re just getting started. Is it the car? An argument? The marriage itself? The poem or poetry as a way of life? The cosmos? Interiority (as an echo flowering freely in corridors...)

Soon it’s clear (or not) that it might carry all of the above and more, it’s fraught, and every meaning we put into it is imperiled or itself a peril. So perhaps, don’t try to start it! Don’t carry it across (see metaphor’s etymology).

My favorite part here’s the sixth line, because that’s where I kind of lets it out, staccato, pitching back to you everything you said.

How did it come to this? Thus far, fraught has been said by you (original), but not directly quoted so this word came to us via I (first variant), who also returns the word to you, highlighted and quote-marked (second variant).

Even in a simple conversation, without paraphrasing anything, just an exchange of one word, we get a terrifying weight of possible meaning and misinterpretation. There’s possible accusation, a correction might be made in a while (excuse me, did I just hear you say fraught?), and then come the repercussions, cascading, cascading.

And the form, wow. So there’s that quoted "fraught" up there, the star up the tree, followed by an overflow of other things you said "but always, lightly wooded... cascade of tears."

I suddenly decides to return a chunk of what's been said by you, including not-starting. They are indeed mired in all this: looking deeper at (closely reading?) everything including not-looking-deeper.

—

Drawn to this image of the ruined cake, cascading as tears. Story of a failed marriage (or are those tears of joy), or someone’s watching home videos year after "home" has collapsed from the frame.

—

Notes on Lydia Davis’s “Suddenly Afraid”

     because she couldn’t write the name of what she was: a wa wam owm owamn womn

*

Biblically, it was the dual authority of God and Adam that caused “Woman” to come into being and name. In Genesis we have: “The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.’”

In Davis, was takes on significance. In plain view, childbearing and birth looks like woman “composing” another human being. This had to be inverted by patriarchal systems through language and myth-making, enforced by laws at politics. So in Corinthians we have: “For man did not come from woman, but woman from man.” God and Adam (and God’s “birthing” of Adam) came first, neither of them born of woman.

Our present speaker seems to be uttering herself, composing herself, a new alphabet, beginning from her own a and all of her language now to come fully informed (burdened? liberated?) by her being woman.

—

And we so loved Lilith we named our eldest after her. When our gynecologist asked about the name, I told her about the legend. (She seemed a bit troubled by it). I suppose my wife and I wanted our daughter to have Lilith’s courage, to go even against your creator in a bid to preserve what’s in you and strong and and fair and worthy. Myths and legends don’t always give us character interior, but I suppose Lilith was naturally (or preternaturally!) self-defining. She didn’t need a bite of Knowledge to know what’s what.

Eve’s children would have to define themselves after a line of Adams, after a long history of seeing what men would do with the service of women. This isn’t so easy now, as maybe Davis also suggests, because as you well know even our terms of “definition” (grammar, agon, “make sense,” “be reasonable,” “know your place”) have been tainted, loaded in favor of male mastery.

Panic might be unavoidable. It could signal regression in the face of such a torrent of unknowns and what-nows. It could mean a fresh start.

—

Printing this to be framed. How “Suddenly Afraid” can carry both these senses of fear. More, besides.

—

Each word carries such weight. The first, because, suggests causality and rationality, claimed by male intellectuals as their province and dominion. Naming was (is?) Adam’s hobby. Om marks the spiritual “other” of rationality, a path to transcendence by and enclave of men repeatedly attempting to short out (and encompass) language by moving from its first vowel (from down the throat) to its last consonant (at the closing of the lips). Davis’s own owm captures this capturing and claims it, but not via the usual routes of history and tradition, but through a form that reminds me of what’s been called Dickinsonian stuttering.

—

Handwriting, typing with a typewriter (as in Eliot’s time), and with our present computers. It’s been said that each brings its own beat and breath to literature. Maybe these affect us in deeper ways, down to our “wiring,” the way we think and talk about things. For one thing, our screens are flexible as texts (and identities), easy to correct and redefine (and with connectivity, to jump forward to associations, change minds, retrace, recant, redo) as opposed to the finality of a struck typewriter key (bring down the hammer) and the commitment of ribbon centimeters to a measure of thought.

—

Maybe “man” was what the speaker was? And that sudden fear might have been a sort of gasp after liberation? Your post brings me back to the time when the word womyn was brought in as an alternative, a way to disown the claims of men on women.

—

The blankness that attends the piece seems supportive of any reading such as memory loss or dementia. We might also consider more active methods of diminishing the sense of self: drugs, meditative practice, etc.

—

Even law-breaking is “imposed,” yes! And perhaps the fear is epiphanic, recalling the angel’s “Be not afraid” message to Mary which moves the narrative right along to birth and the passion of Christ. But we may pause and consider the woman in transition, that fear before it was discouraged. We may dwell in “Mary was greatly troubled at his words...” In our poem, the woman is greatly troubled at her loss of words.

—

a wa wam owm owamn womn

Sounds like an incantation, a summoning or its opposite: a release. The unit owm stands out for me, owamn seemed to spring right from it, complete but deranged from our usual reference: woman. The last word (might not be the last, as it is unchecked by a period) is a contraction (based on our reference), maybe akin to can’t, won’t, and couldn’t.

Notes on John Ashbery’s “The Template”

was always there, its existence seldom
questioned or suspected. The poets of the future
would avoid it, as we had. An imaginary railing
disappeared into the forest. It was here that the old gang
used to gather and swap stories. It
was like the Amazon, but on a much smaller scale.

Afterwards, when some of us swept out into the world
and could make comparisons, the fuss seemed justified.
No two poets ever agreed on anything, and that amused us.
It seemed good, the clogged darkness that came every day.

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[ The Times Literary Supplement ]

*

—

These are often “greeted” with derision, most interestingly I think by those in search of something new, something else. Ashbery’s closing here strikes the same set of notes as Rumi’s line, at least for me, both seem to embrace what we customarily fear: darkness, pain.

—

In philosophy they ask, “What is the color of an orange in the dark?” In linguistics there was some curious play when Chomsky said “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” but in physics, Schrödinger had us thinking of a cat inside the box with some trap or radioactive bit, then asked us if the cat was alive or dead. When it was asked, it was suddenly us who were “in the dark” (definitely not in the same darkness that the cat was, and I’m now considering the Reinhardt variants as proposed). Was the cat dead or alive? The answers yes and no come, but neither and both also become thinkable, and so this cat plus darkness plus our multiplying answers (also, inadequacies) result in a state called superposition.

I think that’s what we’re embracing here, what’s clotting: the multiplication of possibility that only happens when we engage (as opposed to flee, or fight—as in your encouraging regard of fear) the darkness. And the magic of it is, we do something like it all the time, when we read and think, when we speak to each other: forming opinions about things we don’t fully comprehend, answering half-baked questions, finishing each other’s sentences.

—

His school seems to come alive in the amusement in the second stanza. Would love to see that explored. I remain partial to the clotting wound reading (nursing one at the moment, minor gardening mishap, and because of “The wound is the place where the Light enters you”), but your post remains a favorite spot on this thread. Light enters it.

—

Based on your edit, are we looking at catharsis here? I’ve been wondering about the source, where’s the conflict that got us to the wound and to the clotting? Did trying to fit into the template harm us? No two poets agreeing, that sounds like a whole forest of debaters, so much agon and agony: are each of the issued arguments in fact wounding? (If so, then there might as well be a hint of desperation, and this is maybe why I’m drawn to your use of lifeline).

—

Add to those, his pantoums.

Looking now at how he cut the first line at “its existence seldom” and it seems as if the these “templates and railings” flicker in and out of the world. As if they’re really only there when we question and suspect them, and maybe only as communities, conventions in the truest sense of the word.

“No two poets ever agreed” okay, but the amusement is shared. That’s the (new?) template begotten by the all the fuss over traditional forms and custom styles.

—

This portion of the thread takes me to the root of template, a temple, as it is an open, consecrated place, associated with what is solemn, calm, in search of order and a force.

—

That imaginary railing seems to come out of that tennis court without a net. That it leads to a forest, wow. It’s like the template preceded us, was ancient, or an ancient need. We’re in that discourse where the world is a jungle and the poem is something of a preserve or a garden, but if the form came before anything else, then it seems to me that poetry takes us to the wilds, is the closest thing we have to it, and that our everyday lives merely derive from this. Clot signals a wound, perhaps day is that wound. Or light, or reason, or civilization. It inverts Genesis where Yahweh also found that “it was good” but referred to what ensues after light.

—

Now that you mentioned it, that sort of railing lines up right between questions and stories. I remember that thought experiment about a tree falling in the forest without anyone hearing it.

—

What there might be some sort of template for is the “storytelling” in the clearing. Someone tells the story one way, say Petrarch. Then others follow suit, so it’s a Petrarchan series. Someone says it another way, keeping some of the oldspeak, putting in some novel spins and turns. Let’s call them Elizabethans. Soon others follow, after many nights of this, we have people like Dickinson and Williams and Stevens giving it a go, often refusing to tell it any way other than theirs, but they’re still taking a place among the others, in the wilds, dead of night.

—

I would love to see how that that plays out. Will it be like milieu but on a cellular (bodies, antibodies, templates, anti-templates), evolutionary level?

I’ve been thinking about your sense of railing. That invisible railing as a structure seems like an internalized restraint, akin to the missing tennis court net. Railing as complaint or set of charges seem to me unrestrained, an spilling out of anger into outrage. Kept in only by the domain of speech, but almost always a mere breath away from physical violence.

—

      There it was, word for word, 
      was always there, its existence seldom

      Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged, 
      would avoid it, as we had. An imaginary railing

      Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds, 
      used to gather and swap stories

      Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: 
      was like the Amazon, but on a smaller scale

      Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, 
      and could make comparisons, the fuss seemed justified

      The exact rock where his inexactnesses 
      seemed good, the clotted darkness that came every day.

—

Yes it is! And thank you for bringing this mountain here, it fits. Actually, it supplants, it overwhelms, it might yield if we ask nicely, but I do think that these two (as with all of us here) might be brought to speak to each other. Though Ashbery in this case would seem the more sociable guy, but I’m sure they would soon be lost in each other’s landscapes.

—

Notes on John Ashbery’s “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name”

You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing,
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers,
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull-sounding ones. She approached me
About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was
Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.
Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head
Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.

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[ Poetry Foundation ]
[ PennSound ]

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My experience thus far has been curtains pulled up every other line.

—

I'm taking *murmuration with me too now, thanks! I heard starlings could gather over a town to the point of being pests so murmuration seems like a town possessed by gossip. I once thought MacLeish was being clever, maybe even sly with "A poem should not mean / But be." When you factor in that negation such as that which our friend saw then it might as well go "A poem should not mean / But be mean."

—

That seems to be a self-referential song with lots to say about rhymes and meaning, and as for this poem, "Ut Pictura Poesis" is not a very ordinary girl or name. Meanwhile, it's fun to put "Closer to her than to me" and "hearts that never played in tune" on the same page as "His head / Locked into mine."

—

It's great to see you here (and I found her too). "Dangerous Moonlight" had a title that was taken from a song (or a film with a song?), so I suppose it's something he could have done for this poem as well. Putting Horace and Bread together, that kind of thing's just wow for me, though I suppose high brows would like to keep JA "literary". But that's just it, he's expanding what "literary" or "poetic" could be. Latin's the classic source, a dead language in the sense that no one's born into it, but it's renewed here, even if only to say that it can't be said that way anymore. That's what I think about the Latin, though I'm certain there's more to be said about this particular sampling, esp it's place in the title, the place where you'd easily (conveniently?) find a female name (as in the poems of Jonson and Poe and even in Williams, in a lot of songs, perhaps excepting "A Boy Named Sue").

"As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must / Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed, / Dull-sounding ones. She approached me" comes across to us as pointers for a new (or renewable, renewing) poetic diction, but JA might as well be talking about sources. This poem could be a lyric equivalent of his keeping Zeus and Popeye together in one rambunctious sestina.

—

Dolphins are associated with Dionysos (Apollo's aesthetic opposite, if we trust Nietzsche). I looked up delphinium images (will probably never see one "face-to-face") and saw that they were very skyrocket-like.

"Personified," maybe, an embodiment... muse?

—

Or that poetry should bypass usual logic for a logic all its own? Of your take on hinges, I'm most drawn to "two media of expression". In this poem, there's an opening to more media ("or other centers of communication, so that understanding") as if JA anticipates that the reader's off to other "lovers" after the poem, maybe trying to "catch" (in painting: "capture") the reader in the act of leaving a poem behind.

—

I'd look for hinges under the seesaw, and by implication, between the locked heads (of reader and poet? of poet and artist? poet and poet?). There might be one in the sled too, but I'm not sure. Or between boy and sled? Kane and Rosebud? If hinges are how one thought connects to the next in this poem or in Ashbery in general, then I'm all for that picture (and many other pictures besides).

Or "hinges" could very well be one of those low-key words that we'd been asked to look for. Now I'm looking for hinges everywhere, even along the spines of those testaments.

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8 poems

bone—meal

careers—following

Count One

Count Two

Count Three

Count Four

men—person

properties—air

Intertexts for Ashbery’s “These Lacustrine Cities”

[ Poetry Foundation ]
[ PennSound ]

*

That Escher up (or below or across) there reminds me of Borges's structure in "The Immortal," doors and stairs of timeless design and symmetry but often leading nowhere. Doors and stairs don't have to be practical features if you're building from the point-of-view of immortality. The builders sleep outside* that magnificent useless structure. As "The Immortal" seems to be Homer, this also presents an "idea" of literature as vision and enterprise.

*

Thought of pairing Auden's lines with those from Ashbery. An exercise that not everyone might find agreeable:

Lakes × These Lacustrine Cities

Lake-folk require no fiend to keep them on their toes;
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,   

They leave aggression to ill-bred romantics
Who duel with their shadows over blasted heaths:
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.

A month in a lacustrine atmosphere
Would find the fluvial rivals waltzing not exchanging
The rhyming insults of their great-great-uncles.
Much of your time has been occupied by creative games

No wonder Christendom did not get really started
Till, scarred by torture, white from caves and jails,
Her pensive chiefs converged on the Ascanian Lake
We had thought, for instance, of sending you to the middle of the desert,
To a violent sea, or of having the closeness of the others be air   

And by that stork-infested shore invented
To you, pressing you back into a startled dream

The life of Godhead, making catholic the figure
Of three small fishes in a triangle.
You have built a mountain of something,Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,   

Sounded out each of Auden's lines and looked for the closest resonance from those of Ashbery. I think Auden is more given to narrative, to a clear exposition of cause and effect. 

This is a unique topic for poetry (though not for anthropology): the features and beliefs of people as they develop communities alongside (or atop, astride) lakes. I think "Lacustrine" is a formal response to Auden's "Lakes". Auden looks at lake-folk with their chiefs and rhyming great-great-uncles. He won't rhyme as they used to, he's leaving that, he'll sing in another way though of course cognizant of the source, inseparable from it. Ashbery's uncle is Auden, and he's responding with "cities," with the sound of cities, with pieces of effects and causes that might seem to stray, even fight, wondering how they could be sitting side-by-side, this apartment and that studio, but still somehow cohere in one pulsing view.

If in Auden's view God is "invented," in Ashbery what we have is a "startled dream" and you'd have to get pressed back into it if you're going to make your own mountain of something.

*

These two together reminds me of "Ozymandias":

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

Dali then, and his wonderful sand. No hope, maybe, but some regeneration is achieved in the constructs of the poet. The idea is derived from shambles. But I've yet to know of a civilization that was one idea. I imagine a main idea, a mythology, and then digressions and transgressions come from and go against and (sometimes) come back into it, reshaping it and the society it's supposed to have brought into being.

*

Recalling Hobbes's Leviathan, the idea we need a state because we'd be at each other's throats without something like a government to keep us in line.

*

Or, if a city, then a mountain of garbage? The poet is figured to be attuned to his culture and history, to chunks of it anyway (perhaps synced differently from others because of intense attention). And I'm thinking that yes, the last stanza in particular points in the direction of that poet building from the rubble. And of course, this solitary one:

But the past is already here, and you are nursing some private project.

*

I'm taking Guest's lines for myself, putting them right beside "Lacustrine":

The siege made cloth a transfer

learned from invaders who craved it;

spindle thieves. 

She sang high notes and pebbles went into her 

work where it changed into marks; in that room

*

Burning, until all that hate was transformed into useless love.

I'm grateful to have been returned to this poem, to find that I read some of it very differently. The "useless love" here, for example, seems to me something of high value. It's a way of re-figuring "unconditional love," where even one of the most basic conditions—usefulness of the love, of lover and beloved—has been discarded.

*

Yes to your implication. Hate your friends, said Nietzsche. Healthy stuff. But here's another angle: love that doesn't bear children. I've been trying to play this reading out with the rest of the poem, but it unlocks something and turns the whole thing into a series of sexual positions. It's like there's a hidden slideshow, and it ends in tears.

If I'm to be a responsible academic and connect it with the rest of the readings, I'd say that habitations could be "forced" toward the path of citihood, the teepees crushed underhoof. Loathing, pillage, rape.

Celibacy's another angle. I think it was Leonard Shlain who said the middle ages was something of a eugenics disaster for Europe, attracting the best and the brightest to don habits and cassocks, most of these thinkers institutionally kept from the possibility of progeny.

*

Then you are left with an idea of yourself
And the feeling of ascending emptiness of the afternoon
Which must be charged to the embarrassment of others
Who fly by you like beacons.

And "charged" makes another appearance, in something of a similar airy movement, but "charged" with (perhaps) a different sense. Sounds monetary, "charge this call to." The "I" here seems to be at rest, or in some state of stillness, while it's others that do movement, that transmit "like beacons". Others, and that distinct feeling in the second line, which perhaps would eventually lead to transcendence... but transcending toward... what? Something other than civilization?

*

That's worth re-posting and seconding. Indeed a gift, and I'm glad the rules say she must keep on giving! Paraphrasing her remark, these lacustrine observations elevate my own. For instance, she turned us to the plurality in the title and how the poem somehow specifies, zeroing in on a certain You. I don't have anything to add to that, except that yes, it's really got me to thinking more about the scope of this poem, something I hadn't thought of even thinking about before. Here's a thought regarding that from Calvino's Invisible Cities, published some six years after Rivers:

And Polo answers, "Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name."

*

It's this precisely. And my experience with Ashbery is that no matter how many times I read a poem of his (and what eloquent, keen, sometimes playful notions we bring from/to it), the poem remains an unpossessed place. And... odd, but I find this so reassuring.

*

My mother used to starch handkerchiefs and shirt collars for my father. It makes for crisp fabric. It marks formality, serious business. There's something even more serious, it's from the urban dictionary, really makes that connection with desire, but it might not have been applicable back in 1963 or 66. There are others that relate to being intoxicated, knocked out, or drugged. I'm not sure about these though.

*

Stepping back (but I think I'd still be along these trajectories) to test a couple of things:

Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.

There's something oddly familiar about how this line was done, and if you saw the airport control tower in the second stanza, maybe you'll consider "starching a petal" as something akin to gilding the lily. In fact, if we go full Shakespeare (a nod to you), Salisbury will also reward us with the "rainbow":

Therefore, to be possess'd with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

So John's dipping back into King John, those last three lines getting us "tapering, branches / Burning," and... let's just do the whole thing:

Controlled the sky, and with artifice dipped back
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,

Into the past for swans and tapering branches, / Burning
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light

until all that hate was transformed into useless love.
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

The cities are "doubling" the "pomp" of the lake, adding beauty to beauty only wastes it ("embalm" and "entomb" was, I think, inspired). This is the classic problem of art, of literature. Perhaps Ashbery is touching upon the limits of mimesis as the measure of the poem. Don't go sending it to the middle of the desert to record things for you. The poem now its own "private project" which is something "no climate can outsmart" because, maybe, it is its own climate, its own body of water.

Starch is the byproduct of plants. Pure starch is a product of people refining what they found in nature. "Gilding the lily" is extended by "starching a petal" because you return to the plant something that's been extracted from it, now in tampered (or refined) form, perhaps enhancing the plant, maybe clogging up its pores and stiffening it.

If desire starching a petal is in any way like gilding the lily, then maybe this is a development "useless love". Love's not only useless, it's become a method of negating use, of killing (by giving back more of the same in adulterated form), and thus could be judged "horrible" if not loathsome or hateful.

Itself, the city is a crime of passion.

*

Two thoughts about this. First is Wilde's, 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Which will end in—

Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Perhaps you kill to preserve (the love, the beloved)... but is there any other way? If your answer is poetry, then maybe that poetry isn't potent enough.

The second comes from Noah. Those are tears of disappointment, the melancholy wrath of the Godhead (these lakes but remnants of that magnificent flood). It's an eternal agreement signed with rainbow flourish. This stops now, dear, I won't drown you again.

Ashen Bird Candidates for “Poem at the New Year”

[ Poem Hunter ]
[ Locus Solus ]

*

Read rationing in waiting "in line for things," but couldn't quite place it.

*

If the "great ashen bird" is Ashbery as phoenix—as you and the others have noted—than it also marks the passage of time (cycle phases spanning five, ten, or more centuries). The word "spiky" is curious too, and seems to me a mainstay of corporate meetings, seen in charts and progress reports: a way of telling time in terms of ups and downs, successes and failures. The use of "adjective" here suggests another filing system, the dictionary, which co-habits the time-keeping of the calendars and clocks as well as that of the map in the fourth stanza (time-space).

*

So familiar with this feeling. 

A sort of "time" that was suspended in the early nineteenth century was the French Republican Calendar. It was part of a whole drive toward decimalization. As always, reality would thwart "perfect" systems (showing that systems have yet to be perfect or that perhaps systematization itself is an abnormal, curious trait). The Leap Year tells us that the earth-sun relationship refuses to give us a whole number—365 is off, and so is 365.25, currently our most elegant solution.

The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off-center.

I've also been staring at this use of the word "polarized," often a political word, but here it seems to carry also the idea of time zones (north and south poles), of long-distance (relationships?). And yes, since the earth is not a perfect sphere, it can't have a single center.

*

May I add to your list? I expected "composed" but was given "packaged". And while these may sound like verbal slips, off-kilter, perhaps indicative of a failing system, some of us might also appreciate them as inventive, layered, "the best way to put it." For example, your "O I was so bright about you" could mean so many things even only on the semantic level: I had intelligent ways of figuring you out; I was glowing around you (handsome, pretty); I felt intelligent in your presence, haloed, etc.

*

yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal.

My first go at the title's "At" is that, well, it's the best way to sound it. Before or along with any level of meaning, the way it gets through the ear is most important. But addressing those "raised and lower levels," perhaps it's a poem that's thrown at the new year. Or, it recognizes time now (more than ever) as a place (as said). Perhaps it's just  coincident with the new year, one not meaning the other, just two pieces of a collage overlapping.

*

It's 29 lines. 30, if you consider the title a line. I was keen on this yesterday when I was thinking of French decimalization. It was two words short of 300 though, so there goes that tangent.

The first two stanzas seem to belong to a narrative (with many layers and branches, of course, but still, really, just one at least to me). Someone asked for the suspension of time in the first stanza. Something like this happens in the second stanza. So after these "packages," things are lost and that signals the third stanza: a list of world-self / self-world questions, and images of time (rush hour, fluttering pigeons) yield to the stillness of the frozen swamp, perhaps reentering the narrative of time having stopped while the consciousness keeps on.

Movement resumes after that double-size third stanza. But what is this "it" that slips past? Is it the same it that never became a gesture? Is "it" the great ashen bird?

*

Every reading is an act of translation. And yes, I always choose texts that I look up to, one way or another. Translating seems to me the closest form of reading. At each turn (as you demonstrated) we embrace the limits of any reading.

*

This would be an interesting basis for a highly self-aware poetics. Ashbery is not translating him into English. Ashbery is translating him into Ashbery. Which is perhaps as fine a way as any to manage these situations.

*

I'm going with "unavoidable". A pessimistic way of translating this comment is: it's all the translator of poetry can do.

Seeing it as a job means that the translator has come to absorb other concerns as part of the self: marketability, "the literary," posterity, previous translations, advocacy, etc. It's possible to see the translator as a "scrivener," getting stuff handed to her, handing stuff back. But what if translation begins with someone catching sight of something and seeing something of herself glinting in it? Maybe then translation would be a pursuit of that passing image, hoping to see more of it.

You need to zero in (that is the job), but the thing is elusive and you are left to your own devices.

And when/if you do "capture" it, it's already something else. For one thing, the smell of your pursuit is all over it. Finally, everything I said has been a muddled translation of Borges's clarity: "Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers."

*

I’ve been thinking of the little girl in your personal note, and so—as they did—I went to the Washington link. I’d like to give something back (which I don’t think is off-topic but is perhaps a bit off-Ashbery, though maybe not, considering what the owl crushes at the end):

Tomas Tranströmer and Robert Bly Translate Each Other’s Works
by Sandy McIntosh

Tranströmer writes: “You changed my line to: ‘The plow lifts from the furrow like an owl slowly airborne,’ but what I meant was: ‘The plow lifts the furrow like an owl crushing rocks.’ Well, I like yours better in English, so please use it that way.” Bly writes, “My English word ‘headlong’ means ‘rushing at something heedlessly.’ But I like that you’ve translated it as ‘He grows a head of enormous length.’ I send you several new pages of verse that go in the direction you’ve pointed out.”

Meanwhile, where there are no negotiations:

Kruschev thunders in 1956: “We will bury you!” after the Soviets explode an H-Bomb, and the Cold War is ratcheted up. But the correct translation should have been, “We will outlast you.”

In 1945 Truman demands that the Japanese surrender. Japan issues a statement that it will consider the demand, but it’s mistranslated: “We’re ignoring you with contempt.” Ten days later, thousands die at Hiroshima.

Early in the first millennium, Saint Jerome translates the story of Moses returning from the mountain with horns on his head, having been hung with them by the Lord. But “horns” could be translated as “a great light on his face.” Yet, for more than one thousand years, Jews are believed to descend from Satan. Millions are killed.

Can poetry matter?

*

"Un-file-able" too, maybe. Gesture seems to me a touch that did not land, so a gesture that did not happen feels like utter negation.

*

Thinking about this poem on the meta level, my two candidates are "this glum haven," "filing system," and yes, that "gesture". Perhaps this poem refers to itself as a glum haven, as a field of both flight (wish, angel) and limitation (sobs), one yielding and yielding to the other.

The phrase "filing system" occurs in a short catalog of questions (cataloging is a staple Whitmanian device, and making poems out of lists of questions became a project for one of his many self-appointed heirs—Neruda). Normally the New Year's list is a set of resolutions. Questions are seldom resolute (they "flutter," in a sense), and questions listed in this way (haphazard or seemingly so) doesn't quite come out as a full-fledged interrogation.

"It never became a gesture." Perhaps pointing to the futility of the new year, or of new year's celebrations, or of the poem itself. Or maybe the arresting of the gesture is the accomplishment of this particular gesture.

*

Still on the meta, both poetry and narrative partake of an off-centered time. "Now" therefore becomes one of the weirdest words. Whose "now"? The poet's? The poet's character? The reader's? And what if the poet returns to the poem in the future?

my song bird, once. Now, cattails immolated
in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for.

*

Care for a few more birds? JA's ashen bird appears to me as flying somewhat like Shakespeare's:

Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;

Definitely a songbird, but while there's a contrast in Shakespeare, the "sullen" quality seems to have pervaded JA's tableau (c/o pipe smoke) including the bird. What was once a hymn becomes "lettered" on the windows, orality becoming print becoming advertisement.

An earlier line from this same sonnet was lifted, rephrased a bit, and used by Eliot in his "time"-heavy "Ash-Wednesday":

Shakespeare: Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
T.S. Eliot: Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope

Whether these desires are related to the wish(es) in Ashbery's poem, you'll be happy to know (or have we not crowded heaven's gate enough?) that Eliot opens this poem with an aged eagle then recruits, towards the end, a crying quail and a whirling plover.

*

Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight,
you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs,

Could the first line be taking us (also) to the Rhine? Wagner's "Twilight of the Gods" sets some key scenes there for Siegfried and Brunnhilde. (That's a "later" twilight though, and a bit later than that: Nietzche's "Twilight of the Idols".) Still, the whole thing ends in two immolation scenes: the pyre of Siegfried and the burning of Valhalla which would signal Ragnarok. Which might mean that the gray ashen bird is a raven of Wotan's. Either Thought or Memory streaming from that last stanza.

Men in Ashbery’s “Into the Dusk-Charged Air”

[ PennSound ]
[ poet.org ]

*

None for me, no. But I’ll take this one over a game of dice: “The Rubicon is merely a brook.” Might it not take offense that it was named for its mud (“red”) and not its water? It has gained the function of a border and a heavy sort of ward by virtue of edicts and customs. It becomes a measure of such stuff  which might not necessarily concern it: loyalty, audacity, sacrifice, transgression. Won’t mean any less mud, perhaps no increase in fish.

*

 we must / Find a way to freeze it hard. 

There’s a “we” though. And it's so audacious in its intent that when you return to the title, it sounds imperative. Is the poem itself the way of freezing it hard? And perhaps even more basic than that: our act of naming rivers, of making them human, holding “slumbering,” “remembering” rivers in our mind and seeing them “choked”.

*

Naming creates opportunities for rivers. Which aspects of it might be perceived (color, tranquility or violence, produce, deity association, political, historical, or even literary significance), which to downplay or ignore. All of these rivers named and unnamed meet in the sky, that one overhead “sea”.

*

But right after that (and catching the light) there’s something of a release:

Near the Escaut the noise of factories echoes
And the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.
The Po too flows, and the many-colored
Thames. Into the Atlantic Ocean
Pours the Garonne. Few ships navigate
On the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen
On the Elbe. For centuries
The Afton has flowed.

And at the end, I think, there was a (feeble?) attempt to “capture” stillness through minuscule “acts” of light:

The Ardèche glistens feebly through the freezing rain.  

*

If the Rio Negro
Could abandon its song, and the Magdalena
The jungle flowers, the Tagus
Would still flow serenely, and the Ohio
Abrade its slate banks. The tan Euphrates would
Sidle silently across the world. The Yukon
Was choked with ice, but the Susquehanna still pushed
Bravely along. The Dee caught the day’s last flares
Like the Pilcomayo’s carrion rose.
The Peace offered eternal fragrance
Perhaps, but the Mackenzie churned livid mud
Like tan chalk-marks. Near where
The Brahmaputra slapped swollen dikes
Was an opening through which the Limmat
Could have trickled. 

That conditional seems to me a way of returning to the first few lines of the poem where unconnected rivers are held within one sentence, by the thread of a metaphor sometimes. The disconnectedness seem to be stressed in these lines, one river’s effect doesn’t much care for another’s cause. But that possibility of connection between the Brahmaputra and the Limmat is wow, a killer. And maybe these three lines, this moment of wish and speculation—is exactly what provided an opening.

*

A young man strode the Churchill’s
Banks, thinking of night. The Vistula seized
The shadows. The Theiss, stark mad, bubbled
In the windy evening. And the Ob shuffled
Crazily along. 

Seeing these passages as if but one movement of unrest, perhaps a conspiracy or a long breath before a tryst, a big thing just about to happen. And all these players are reacting in their own peculiar way, all of them theatrical.

*

See the rhetorical (big) stick now adrift in the Potomac. The whole of it, and those passions and intents: swept away.

26th line of Eileen Myles’s “Triangles of Power”

Hung up on the “natural elements” that could number either two (cold night and digestion) or the more triangular three (cold, night, and digestion). I hear some amor fati in this gratitude. This poem seems an embrace of  the “low-glowing” appetites, the more immanent and base ones, even if (or because!) these get us running around in circles (from one January to another, and from each January “looking forward and back.")

*

Any trinity might be the holy family. Maybe we can read the poet's “fast-walk” as analogous to Mary’s frantic search for a place at Bethlehem for the impending delivery (where another “trinity” comes to mind: food, clothes, shelter). The transcendent great star in the nativity scene is replaced here by “low-glowing” hunger. That last part, where the author changed, that seems to me evocative of both the annunciation and the delivery of the prophesied baby.

*

Another triangle involved here could be Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The goings-on depicted in the poem are “low-glowing,” hungers to be found near or at the base of that pyramid. Poetry (along with other creative, “noble,” and “enlightened” achievements) belong to the apex: self-actualization.

*

And the pyramid on “The Great Seal” of your regular US$. In relation to this, the ampersands seem to be a good visual choice on the part of Mayer. Knots and all.

*

In the poet’s case, the delivery of the utterance. In mangers the world over.

On Bernadette Mayer’s “FIRST SHOW HOTLINE”

Out the somber window that shows
Hibernation trees, the water pump, the road
Nothing falling from the gray sky yet
The room I’m in’s too clean, the fire’s failed
I’m doing the French fries on the top of the stove
The mail’s failed to come, the turkey had no liver
But it may work to write this poem unless
It gets stuck like a car by the creek
The creeks are over the top, be wary 

Of them, of getting mail from a bank
And a flyer from the Family Dollar store
In which everything is more than a dollar
Except sardines, I don’t even have a bank
Account but I saw a rainbow in the woods once
          When the sun got low enough to shine
          Under the earth’s cloud cap, I thought
          That’s not a bad deal on dish detergent

*

[ LITERARY HUB ]
[ EXQUISITE CORPSE ]

*

Glad we’re warming up. And with such fine angles too. “First” has me stumped. “Show” kind of drives home the point that this is not a life (or a process) typically produced by TV and consumed by viewers. Szymborska once remarked that the poet-at-work is “hopelessly unphotogenic” as opposed to the lives and processes of others artists (painters dancers, thespians)—those were much more cinematic. With a poet, all we have before us is a person slumped over a screen or some odd pieces of paper. “Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later,” Szymborska continues, “and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens... Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?”

*

Would like to ride this tangent and add “soap opera” as a possible association of the titular “Show” and the last line’s “dish detergent”. This is a domestic scene, but one connected to the outside, represented and appropriated by the forces out there that try to shape our “in here”. I see poetry here as resistance. And I’m still unsure if Mayer embraces the frustrations or if she is hostile to them, sees them as unnecessary distractions, asks us to “be wary” of them as well. A cautionary note that could clue us in on what that “Hotline” is all about.

*

Well if attending to poetry isn’t poetic, I don’t know what is. I can feel your anger all the way to my place, but this also sounds like you’re about to read “Show” metapoetically.

*

Two views of these contractions. First is how it’s reflective of a poetics that refuses to sound all noble and wise (and maybe that amounts to its own wisdom). Next is how it tries to save breath, save time, save space in the household and consequently in the language itself—maybe the interior of the poet.

It’s really curious, and I think it’s fruitful how you pointed this out to us. Visually, it works so that all the punctuation marks are in-line while the ends are free from markings. Everything is perhaps swept “in”—which is a weird form of cleanliness.

*

From this juncture, the thought of how the operating room is sometimes referred to as a theater.

*

Here’s a link to an appearance in Exquisite Corpse on January 2015. However, this one has for us a certain “FIRST SNOW HOTLINE” by Bernadette Mayer. Either LitHub committed a typo error or it’s a newer (?) version. Then again, maybe it’s not a typo, as there are other differences. Family Dollar was “family dollar” in this one (as in the last line of “SARDINES”: “& shipped to the family dollar store for Bernadette”). In fact, aside from personal “I” and the “F” in French fries, there are no other capital letters (not even the words at the beginning of lines). This one uses an ampersand rather than “and” in line 11. The stanzas are also cut differently, “the creek” and “the creeks” going their separate ways, be wary placed more closely to “them”.

FIRST SNOW HOTLINE

out the somber window that shows
hibernating trees, the water pump, the road
nothing falling from the gray sky yet
the room I’m in’s too clean, the fire’s failed
I’m doing the French fries on top of the stove
the mail’s failed to come, the turkey had no liver
but it may work to write this poem unless
it gets stuck like a car by the creek

the creeks are over the top, be wary
of them, of getting mail from a bank
& a flyer from the family dollar store
in which everything is more than a dollar
except sardines, I don’t even have a bank
account but I saw a rainbow in the woods once
          when the sun got low enough to shine
          under the earth’s cloud caps, I thought
          that’s not a bad deal on dish detergent

*

Following you, I also prefer “SHOW” over “SNOW” because I think the second significantly stunts the line “Nothing falling from the gray sky yet”. I felt cutting the stanza after “be wary” had more power (was more “wary,” formally speaking) and increased the threat of “them” over the household and the poet within. The lines are around ten syllables each, plus/minus a syllable or two so maybe it does suggest the sonnet. Or a sonnet that has yet (or refuses) to fall into place.

This thread reminds me of the WCW exercise: which poem does the better job? (Which is a rather uninspired and inaccurate way to recall our trademark second essay.) It’s not like correct ideas will wash away all your sins.

Notes on Lima’s “Bright Blue Self-Portrait”

I thank the spiders’ webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes with
Rapid movements and authorize our handcuffs to make no distinction
Between night and day or love and hate.
No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed to

Work. These pillars actually belong to you since I have not counted them
Or know any more than you do where they are or in what country they
Still exist. We can put all our concerns into a loaf of bread and French
Kisses, go to movies and watch the splashing milk on the screen imitate

The forest in the moonlight. Why all the fuss about the patrons becoming
Feathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? There
Are no lights in the theater just soft snow from the balcony that is the
Little red schoolhouse where all this began.

Actually it was because of you I did not attend as often as I should have.
I was too embarrassed to face you across the clay modeling tables since I
Always felt like the clay in your hands was a cartoon version of my teen
Years, dear slippery-fish ladies of the sleepy west.

Don’t forget, my early life will be yours, too,
With its self-descriptions of poetic justice,
The tiny creatures we write about can describe themselves in the moss
We leave behind.

*

[ Poetry Foundation ]

*

—
—

D— Curious that the pillars are marked “these” and thus would have been close at hand, within view and maybe touch, but then the tail of the sentence denies knowledge of location. Maybe “these” because it’s in the mind, or on the table in a conversation. Or is it because they are still there somehow, his supports or foundations, but he also has no access or continued awareness of them?

—

D— Inability to cope would indeed explain the discontinuities. Maybe some of these pieces belong together though. Could the theater (or schoolhouse) be housing the pillars? But if so, why would “these” be uncountable? The darkness? And since it’s the theater, might that (slightly) account for the shifting country/ies?

—

D— And your word “faded”... could it be a set of photographs? That would multiply a single set of pillars. In which case, what is he handing over? The pillars, the pictures, or the memories (which could also be unreliable)?

—

D— Another take on the pillars. One of the theories about the origin of the $ sign is that it was derived from the Pillars of Hercules. That might account for “counted” and for the insane mobility of these pillars.

—
—
—
—

D— Also, the possibility that Lima might be addressing his child-self. But these lines—

Don’t forget, my early life will be yours, too,
With its self-descriptions of poetic justice,

These may point us to him in the act addressing his future self. Another thread-inspired possibility: he might be addressing his ideal self.

—
—
—
—
—
—

D— I thought this self-portrait had some parallels with Rilke’s (I pasted Lowell’s translation below). Blue is here too, inside the eyes, as if a portrait within a portrait. Perhaps Lima is figuring himself as that scared blue child? The “opening animal” here is a beast of burden, but in Lima we have the spider, and tiny creatures toward the end. In both there is a sense of being controlled by external (but internalized) forces (in Rilke, the figure of the mule, the idea of servitude, of speech kept in; in Lima the handcuffs and “No one will know the sum of our arduous daily separations from bed to / Work.”)

Self-Portrait 

The bone-build of the eyebrows has a mule’s
or Pole’s noble and narrow steadfastness.
A scared blue child is peering through the eyes.
and there’s a kind of weakness, not a fool’s,
yet womanish––the gaze of one who serves.
The mouth is just a mouth . . . untidy curves,
quite unpersuasive, yet it says its yes,
when forced to act.  The forehead cannot frown
and likes the shade of dumbly looking down. 

A still life, nature morte––hardly a whole!
It has done nothing worked through or alive,
in spite of pain, in spite of comforting . . .
Out of this distant and disordered thing
something in earnest labors to unroll.

—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—

D— There’s a theater, so maybe the “I thank” is like an acceptance speech (gone awry, berserk, or... interesting). Now if the “I thank” came from the schoolhouse, then maybe this a valedictory.

—

D—  I thank the spiders’ webs and the circus dancers who stain our eyes with

And “stain” here would have been an easy substitute for “strain” and it did cause quite a strain whenever I come to read it, wondering if it’s a typo. Could there be others? If so, I’m thinking of “fathers” here:

Feathers, discharging their ideas of nobility on the evening news? There

—
—

D— Maybe there’s a hint of clay tablets in “clay modeling tables”? And if we’re entertaining Moses, other ancient expressions of law and order, then, those really are for modelling.

—

D— The West usually locate their exotica in the East. Edward Said built his discourse on Orientalism on that ground. The East is also known to have been characterized as “sleepy” say, “Sleeping Giant” as opposed to what might be a Western self-image of we have less resources, bitter weather, but we are untiring and industrious. There seems to be a reversal of these things here. The sirens, Odysseus, are at home, not far off in some uncharted land that have yet to taste your brand of clever.

Or, overreading in the morning. Have a nice day everyone.

—
—
—
—

D— Food is Lima’s specialty, so that’s perfect context for his majors and minors in the fourth stanza of “Felonies and Arias of the Heart”. Remembering Corman now, and marking this movement toward “you” that begins at the third stanza.

I very much like the last stanza, would like to hug it, make a pillow out of his pieces of paper, the candor of a poet saying yes, you know, I’m doing this to make an impression on you, I’m throwing in some flashy history too, dear reader, forever desirous of your love and attention, signed.

—

Notes on Gertrude Stein’s “Veal”

Very well very well, washing is old, washing is washing.

Cold soup, cold soup clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into.

*

[ bartleby ]

*

K—

D— washing is old,

Veal is the meat of the young, more expensive and tender. Washing could be that key and ancient practice of cleaning your meat before cooking. Something that could be taken for granted very easily. It could be a psychic or spiritual (even ritual) cleansing, as this is a sacrifice of calf or lamb for the sake of taste. Not necessity.

K—

D— I remember a discussion on kosher in one of the Stein threads. Veal must be something of a controversy in that regard.

K—

D—Yes, technically veal is kosher so long as it’s from official animals and cut in the proper method. Hence the controversy. Some rabbis would like us to look at the principles, and from that there’s a lot going into the conditions in which the animals are kept and raised, how it’s translated from farm to table:

The idea of linking kosher food with other ethical issues is not new. In the 1970s, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein of New York urged Jews not to eat veal. In the late 1980s, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leader of the Jewish Renewal movement, wrote that Jews should examine all the resources they consume, not just food, to determine if they were “kosher” in the broadest sense of the word.

There’s more, but I don’t know, maybe this is a very small minority:

Clearly Rabbi Levy was implying that some, I emphasize some and not all, Reform Jews might wish to refrain from eating the foods that are cited as forbidden in our Torah portion. He also seemed to suggest that some Reform Jews might wish to express their social consciousness by not eating veal that comes from calves that were raised in a cruel manner or crops that are cultivated and harvested with the use of pesticides, which are dangerous to farm workers. Rabbi Levy was seeking to explore a range of possibilities for Reform observance, some hearkening back to ancient tradition and some quite modern in spirit.

Still, it’s worth noting that scriptural ethics is at odds with other moral systems and this leads to an internal crisis:

If these unethical violations seem too anomalous an occurrence to judge the entirety of kashrut on, though, consider the fact that within the system itself there abound examples of unethical practices. For example, veal is a common  kosher dish served on Jewish dinner tables across the country, but its production is anything but humane. According to the American Humane Society, hundreds of thousands of calves raised for veal are confined in cages so compact that they cannot move their bodies for their entire sixteen-week lives. While this is the case for both kosher and non-kosher veal production, if there is no distinction between the ways in which kosher and non-kosher factory farms raise veal, what other factors distinguish kosher veal from non-kosher veal? In what sense is it more moral to eat kosher veal?

Very well very well, washing is old, washing is washing.

It’s been justified from the very beginning. And this old white-washing, it’s still at it.

Cold soup, cold soup clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into.

Could that coldness be a judgment? That these producers (and consumers?) of veal are cold-blooded. They follow a divine code and yet there’s this "clear" outrageous practice that the code condones. And the existence of such "little" issues puts into question the universality and goodness of the rules.

For me, it’s not about moral qualms on the part of Stein. Just because someone drinks coke doesn’t mean this guy’s not mindful of how the multinational corporation runs down local economies and ruins teeth the world over. I think that Stein’s sensing hypocrisy and would like to enter that into what veal is supposed to mean. As in celery, she tries to restore the history of the food as part of the food, as something we consume without knowing we consume it, that we are continuing and absorbing ages-old ideas (slavery, elitism, all manners of prejudice) just by cooking and eating something.

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D— Very well very well, washing is old, washing is washing.

I’d look into the youngest of the crew, Pip. He jumps out of the boat twice, washed, so to speak. “Very well very well” seems to lead to a revision (or greater specification) of plans once new factors are identified. It might also lead to compromise. A whale is loosed to save Pip, and no one’s too happy about it.

Cold soup, cold soup clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into.

No one, that is, except maybe for Captain Ahab. The next time Pip jumps in the water he is stranded there or a long time, in that “awful lonesomeness” (cold soup, cold soup). Captain Ahab looks at Pip as if he is some compass into fate, or to the real (clear) nature of things. I vaguely remember a chapter where Ahab takes Pip aside and confers with him beyond earshot of other sailors but within view. I think he took Pip out on a small boat? Anyway, if so, this is where that principal question was entered.

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D— There are tales and practices where important structures like bridges and large bells would be cursed, would prove dangerous if the builders neglect to pour baby or virgin blood.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is littered with the remains of the young and the innocent. Abel, the son of Abraham (almost, and it was a close call), the firstborn children behind the unmarked Egyptian doors, and Herod’s infanticide. It’s usually done to curtail power (as in those offered to the Minotaur in Greek mythology), keep it on one side or the other, the adults refusing to pass it on to successors or soon-to-be-upstarts. Now if Jesus is God’s lamb, then it might be Pilate doing the washing:

Very well very well, washing is old, washing is washing.

It’s that “very well very well” that puzzles me, though your “well” as noun is fascinating. Tears welling up? It does sound as if the word “veal” was butterflied and unfolded.

clear and particular and a principal a principal question to put into.

In Moby-Dick, what comes closest to all this is Pip. Ahab’s that principal (they belong in the cabin, thanks, K—, I misplaced them earlier) and his quest and question in the heart of the hunt as well as the book. I remember encountering “principal” in Stein’s office once before. It seems to come into this too... and some schoolgirl or schoolboy is about to get it.

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Notes on Gertrude Stein’s “Celery”

Celery tastes tastes where in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains.

A green acre is so selfish and so pure and so enlivened.

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D— Celery tastes tastes where in curled lashes and little bits and mostly in remains.

Those lashes could be curling as in the act of whipping. Perhaps this acre is not as pure as it feels in the mouth. So “lashes” are soft “on the eyes,” but those s-sounds from kind of seethe, for example: ending as they do in those fertile “remains”.

A green acre is so selfish and so pure and so enlivened.

What a redundancy of life in this one, and selfish of course stands out. This green comes at the cost of those remains, conceivably buried in the soil beneath.

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D— Something sounds quite technical now that you’ve highlighted it. If legal, perhaps pointing to an institutionalized injustice? As for “tastes tastes,” one of them could be a verb, and if grammatical, it should be the first. The celery is the one doing the tasting, eating of those lost, nameless bits, those buried remains. If these nameless had “tastes,” these would not now be distinct from the vegetable’s taste. And now the agency, the spirit, the subjectivity belongs to the celery.

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D— Odysseus also found herbs. And following Heracles and his (pre)Spartan boys, I came upon a wreath of celery. So pure! So enlivened! And maybe something that might account for the remains:

While she showed to the heroes the way to the nearest well, she left the child behind lying in a meadow, which during her absence was killed by a dragon. When the Seven on their return saw the accident, they slew the dragon and instituted funeral games to be held every third year. 

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D— Never thought of linking them that way, T—, one leading to the other. I’ve always somehow seen these subpoems as independent, linked in terms of theme and image. But yes, if they are courses in a meal...

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D— And lashes... Pip was to be led (then tied) by Ahab with “man-rope”

Notes on Gertrude Stein’s “Way Lay Vegetable”

Leaves in grass and mow potatoes, have a skin, hurry you up flutter.

Suppose it is ex a cake suppose it is new mercy and leave charlotte and nervous bed rows. Suppose it is meal. Suppose it is sam.

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D— “Way Lay” might point to an ambush. Are those veggies out to get us? Or we, them? “Nervous bed rows” makes me think of how we call paralyzed people vegetables, how falling down from normal human functions also means descent along Jacob’s ladder.

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D— But Stein, she did go on. It’s remarkable. Like how some poets go on and on about spirit and noble ideals, but before anything else, why don’t we touch upon the basics? Food, which is our fundamental interaction with nature and with each other. Language as well, how we language food, our relationships.

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