Notes on John Ashbery’s “A Blessing in Disguise”

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,
But I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you
For a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs turned to the light
Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.
If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day
On the wings of the secret you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you”
You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.

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Possibly, the poem itself is speaking, the conceit being its possession of soul, life, an I. “You must come to me, all golden and pale” reminds me of Corman’s “It isnt for want”.

       I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
       Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

I get from this a way for a poem to mean things, this poem’s particular way, which is emotive, seeking immediacy (like Whitman). That line containing “knowing you may be drawn to me” could mean a couple of different “ways” depending on the which word takes emphasis. Again, these accents are their own defense... (or, in this case: disguise)

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Let me submit a candidate for a paraphrase of those lines. That our “slant” of light, our personal angle, brings to the poem something neither anticipated nor imagined by the poet (or the poem). What’s amazing here is the tone, it could be matter-of-fact (ex: you always have a way of thinking about these things). Could it also be celebratory? Maybe not as explicitly as Whitman’s. In the end, we’re projecting ourselves into all these lines. The poem doesn’t demean that I think (doesn’t say: you’re just telling me I am you), but it doesn’t go all out Whitman either (What I assume, you shall assume).

So this is just me (as “always”) projecting my desires and anxieties onto / alongside / prompted by the openness of this poem.

Upon rereading, that considered shift from expected to “suspected” jumps out.

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Exactly how it is for me too. The lines that take me there are “I pledge me to be truthful unto you / Whom I cannot ever stop remembering” and “Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me” though it’s still as puzzling as ever, yet something I accepted, as the “wings of the secret never to be known.” I mean sure, okay, as long as we’re flying there.

And we do.

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“Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day” Recalling Janus now as old Rome’s marker between wartime and peacetime.

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Colors. I was thinking that the poem could be referring to things other than poetry (prosaic things perhaps, following the Dickinson exploration), the other things that preoccupy us. Colors might mean visual enticements. Might also mean allegiances, as in flags.

It hums well with the play of light throughout the poem, and the room with all those weirdly oriented chairs. Makes me think of the stained-glass that adorn cathedrals.

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Props to versatility. He has very short ones too (found a handful), gems of wit and whimsy. That compare and contrast thread sounds like a good idea, but then I don’t think you’re capable of a bad idea. Ashbery’s curated by deft, able hands in these halls.

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Today’s rereading of the poem, along with your comments, yield me a sense of contentment. To feel the presence of something deeper and unsayable, but also to be at peace with the fact that you'll never ever know, never ever see.

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Perfect! And Gillig does mash-ups. Thanks!

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Your comment on Ashbery’s plural “you” takes me back to Whitman’s large, multitudes-I. 

“A Blessing in Disguise” seems a direct response to “Song of Myself”. The title of one can be written over the other, blessing-as-song / song-as-blessing (an understanding of the Whitmanian project: generous offering, promise of plenitude, illumination), self-as-disguise, disguise-as-self (a re-appreciation of “the persona” or masked-I that Whitman overtly wished to strike against, strike off, trying to eliminate the you/I distinction—resulting however, or perhaps it was Whitman’s design all along—in increasing I/I distinctions, creating a great many selves that “contradict myself”).

I found some references to grass (the image elected to serve for/as Whitman’s conceit). Following the light downward “inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees / That seem to shine at me toward you” I see “you” as the grass.

“The pastel girth of the day,” the sun's halo or its effect, which for the I seems to be illumination but for the you, age and decay, as in the beauty of leaves of grass wilting, "“all golden and pale”.

So perhaps our Ashbery has found a way (or ways, or guises, or poetics) toward Whitman as one who “most honors” him, one “who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”

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Hi. The lines were from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

       I am the teacher of athletes,
       He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own,
       He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

A really strong passage regarding influence. He’s making a contest out of it. Even if one of his athletes (Ginsberg, Ashbery, Pessoa, Pound) were to best Whitman, their feat would only serve to prove the worth of their teacher.

Ashbery asserts himself, registers “despair and isolation,” but also (I think) expresses his gratitude, singing and dancing his “I” to show how much he had learned.

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Thanks for the opportunity you opened. When the Buddha was quoted, I remembered Freud’s reflection on Oedipus where a young man’s passage into manhood was seen as an elaborate rite of killing his father. The father’s shadow threatens the growth of the boy, a sense I get from these lines:

       And right. The great spruces loom.
       I am yours to die with, to desire.

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Yes, that whole (grand!) Greek business of sons killing fathers, fathers eating sons. If only an opt-out were possible. Maybe JA was attempting something like that here.

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I don’t wish to reduce Ashbery to Whitman (as Whitman already seems ever eager to absorb everything into Whitman), but let me see how far I get reading with everyone here taking WW as my slant of light.

(Which is just my way of saying please don't get too annoyed.)

So perhaps “they” here refers to grass, all the colors they wear through the various seasons (JA: “golden and pale”) but also all the colors they absorb by way of earth and decay (WW: “among black folks as among white, Canuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff...”). Therefore, “they” might echo all those multitudes within Whitman large I.

JA's second line seems an assertion of itself (of the poem) “But I, in my soul, am alive too.” When WW says “I loafe and invite my soul,” he’s inviting the reader, but the reader who has at least partially accepted being of or with WW’s “I”. But while JA seems willing to loafe (even fly), he also wishes to retain his self, his soul.

This, in spite of WW’s (forgivable) claims upon him.

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Yes and yes to you. This is happy work for me too. Glad you brought up Crane and Rimbaud. These I shall now read (with amatory Martory) alongside our JA.

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       Let’s keep knotted kisses to ourselves for a long time
       Until another day erases
       The trace of each passing.

Hello, Martory! Glad to make your acquaintance.

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Yes, and more:

       the clear distances of the city the factories without smoke
       bathed as at their birth stammered
       a trial hello
       that only ended however
       in this word round as a doubloon
       placed on the edge of that day
       by a considerate friend
       the sun on your arms naked against my cheeks

Thanks!

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Yes, we found a lot here that could also go to the context/culture thread The many accents of his French connection, JA’s friendships, his translation work. I also found a link or two here from you and Jon for those who’d like to read more articles about him.

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A good new image to work with. Perhaps the learning to be done’s waiting outside?

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Snake in the garden? I like your point about his phrases too, stuff like

Yes, 
You see,
or suspected, perhaps
And right.

And I wonder how essential they are to his poems. These seem like the kind of phrases you’ll be asked to cut out in poetry workshops. But they contribute to a tentativeness, a sense of the open path, we can walk whichever way our feet might lead us.

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Delicious. And I hope that my last thought before the first night of this new year will be an imagination of these mighty, unperceived trees.

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Mention was made of isolation and despair. Those could be the trials we’re looking for. Or those could be consequences of those trials.

Backtracking to the Greeks, we have Prometheus presenting two packages to the gods. These were proposals, two prototypes, one of which would decide the type sacrifices man would thereafter be required to burn to earn divine favor (ie, blessings). Wiki has it:

Prometheus slew a large ox, and divided it into two piles. In one pile he put all the meat and most of the fat, skillfully covering it with the ox’s grotesque stomach, while in the other pile, he dressed up the bones artfully with shining fat. Prometheus then invited Zeus to choose; Zeus chose the pile of bones.

Blessing in disguise here could be the nourishing meat secured in the “grotesque stomach,” which could be a way of looking at the human lot. Or, at poetry as a thing to be unwrapped, laid bare, consumed.

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A take on the question of intent, though I don’t think it’ll be answering any of the questions above except for “What do you think?”

Attracted to poets who are concerned with opening their work, making sure it is intrinsically many things for many people and many things also for one very studious reader. Maybe because this poet is in touch with the fact that the making of a thing (poem, Nobel’s dynamite, rice cake, treatise) does not arise from only one cause but from many, that the process perhaps partakes from even her smallest desire, her secret anxiety.

This is what I love about Dickinson and Stein, Niedecker and Perelman. If, at the outset, the intent is for a poem to mean in many directions, then we’re cool. A poet might very well react to a reader’s surprising (brain-beyond-the-groove) reading with lines like Ashbery’s:

       You hold me up to the light in a way
       I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps

Most of the writers I know are prosaic in the sense that the work must mean one thing (often referred to as “the main idea”), must get us to the point in the shortest, most memorable route possible, and yes, it’s an indispensable way of composing. It runs industries, assembles the broiler, constitutes nations, etc. But it would be impoverishment were that the only way to do poetry.

For writers like that, one-track and fabulously so, I try to honor them by getting their intent and nodding my head repeatedly. But for others like Ashbery, I can really just walk around. That’s his gift. I could try to get his intent without that having to be the point, like a game of chess in the context of a wide-open afternoon, so winning is not the thing, the sunset is.

Even when Ashbery tries to explain a poem of his, he words it carefully so that it sounds as if he’s just one reader of the poem (just so happens he’s also the writer). He just got to the poem before everybody else, but we can all have a look-see. And it’s poems like his “These Lacustrine Cities” and “A Blessing in Disguise” (charged with the writer's intent, but welcoming of the reader’s intent and—paraphrasing you in the webcast—moment and temperament) that make possible such northern lightly, quantum physical, mystically humming threads as these.

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Thirst for Immediate Results

Last year, July, we launched a small book called Waylaying Innocence at the UP Rural High School. The title was derived from a poem in it by Emmanuel Dumlao, a co-teacher in the Department of Humanities at the University of Philippines Los Baños. The second stanza of his “Art of Waylaying Innocence” reads:

                              He stayed silent as a spider; and with seamless
                              gliding of limbs and fingers, he entrapped
                              his prey like a moth entangled in a cobweb.

This stanza, yanked from the context of the other four, speaks to me not only of victim and predator, but also of subject and artist.

I provide half the poems in this book, and I wish to write briefly about one in particular, among those of the poems dearest to me, maybe because it came out in a gush, most likely because it contained more lives and transmissions than I can follow. I have attempted to, though, against the curious prudence of authors keeping mum on their work. While the resulting essay might prove spare, the effort has been both delightful and excruciating—no surprise, for I assumed both the spider’s hairs and moth’s, these paragraphs the “seamless/ gliding of limbs and fingers”.

“Before they're allowed to graduate” is a 27-line poem cut irregularly into 8 stanzas. With only a few exceptions, you'll find five words per line. All the lines, including the title were gleaned from elsewhere: news, biology textbooks, pop ballads, “Araby,” and social media. Consider the lead:

                              the first day of school
                              the outline of a skeleton
                              was looking into your eyes

                              I'm waiting, this is true

Here’s the background. My HUM 1 class studied Bob Perelman’s “Chronic Meanings” among the introductory materials. I picked this poem up from ModPo, or Modern and Contemporary American Poetry—a massively open online course, and in my opinion, the most lively and student-enabling MOOC to ever exist, one taught by Al Filreis, Kelly Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The poem “Chronic Meanings” consists of a hundred lines divided neatly into 25 quatrains. Each line contains only five words, all of them unfinished sentences. Curiously, Perelman placed a period after every line, stressing for me the feeling of being silenced.

I asked my students, around 160 of them, to collect fivers of their own. After briefly discussing some techniques of cut-ups and found poems, I asked the class (divided by then into groups of six or so) to make a poem by arranging select pieces (three lines per member) according to some ordering scheme or other.

I began checking their submissions that very afternoon, while seated in the waiting area of my daughter's school, the mothers and grandmothers around me, abuzz with small talk and gossip. It started as something quite involuntary: I began ticking off some of their lines. Later that night, I would return to these lines, re-compose them, and produce a cut-up from their cut-ups. “Before they're allowed to graduate” was the result, and its penultimate stanza read thus:

                              interest in the universe alive
                              when did the rain become
                              the thirst for immediate results

I posted the poem on our private feed, and some of my students immediately engaged it. Within that same semester, the Sunday Times would publish our poem. Much to our delight. High spirits which would survive the holidays, floating us well past Valentine’s (with the help of some eccentric readings, a novel by Sionil Jose, and a couple of movies), landing us only in time for March, when we learned of the suicide of Kristel Tejada, student of UP Manila, someone unable to pay her tuition loans, forced to quit school.

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                              air, musty for having been long
                              time in your own health
                              arms to look like wings

This is the graphic accompaniment of “Before they're allowed to graduate” in the said book, Waylaying Innocence. It was created by UPLB students Jesa Perl and Paulin Reyes. Each of the 20 poems in the book was paired with such prints.

Tomorrow, we will launch Waylaying Innocence: Poetry/Pictures Exhibit at the Sining Makiling Gallery. It will run until the 28th. All the prints are up for sale and—thanks to the Office of Initiatives for the Culture and the Arts-UPLB (OICA-UPLB)—100% of the sales will go to the Given Grace Academic Excellence Foundation, Inc.

The Foundation describes itself as “a cause oriented organization which aims to provide financial assistance to aspiring and deserving students to complete their education.”

Or, Berrigan and the Whale

3 Pages
by Ted Berrigan
for Jack Collom

DE— Let me just say that my heart skipped a beat when Berrigan's list mentioned the Hunt for the Whale. I read Melville in my youth when no teacher required it of me, and it was one of my greatest reading experiences. In fact, when the line struck me, the whole poem was suddenly flooded by the novel's immense waters. Even the title reminded me of Ahab's own 3 "pages," Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, petty officers and middlemen on this the grandest and most foolish of ventures.

AN— the first part of the novel is encyclopedic, a sort of melville's a dummies guide to whales, whaling, and the color white (that last part is my fave). formally, they're essays. if i remember right, there should be a good handful of lists in the pequod: what to do with blubber, what to do with whale parts (look up cassock!) and others, a lot of how-tos here and there. starbuck was the most practical of them, the least metaphysical, and he must be partial to these lists. of course ahab would dash them all and have it his way! he has his own list. and his methods of staking the ship to his own TO-DO, his theatrics, his mythic references, that sinister, inert doubloon!

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AN— schopenhauer sounds right in this case. perhaps not only in our reading of the poem but also in berrigan's writing of it.

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[A post was deleted]

DE— Ahab's mission, and this list of ten things to do. They're a whole universe apart in terms of grandeur and scope and yes time (and diction, as I think you're pointing out too). Though they're both America, that much is true. And maybe I'm forgetting (and you've reminded me) that the creation of this poem is itself the hunt for the whale.

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AN— it could be a key to this, i agree. one among many, i'm sure bec of the nature of the poem, but still, a welcome entrance!

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DE— The last lines after NO HELP WANTED doesn't seem like things you do every day. There's the heart attack, the medal of honor, the house in the country: these are things to aspire to, such that every day builds up to them. I guess in the back of the psyche there's something that gnaws, a less obvious, less acceptable desire, something more Quixotic (forgive the mixed references though I'm fairly certain Melville the sailor was likewise referencing Cervantes the sailor), therefore more grand than any desire. Still, there's that other thing. Ahab was all about revenge. Could this be the hidden motive (motif) of the poem? Berrigan's revenge on US conservatism (prosaic, sorry!), it's pretensions, how if it has any greatness in it, you'll find it solely in the shortcomings? For some deep yearning here is unanswered (WCW on the poem: for lack of which people die miserably every day). Which brings us back to the port of poem as whale as poem.

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AN— and maybe beyond the revenge of the poem is the vindictive life. like Berrigan was saying something like: I won't get with your program folks! my poker, my lunch poems these fly in the face of your congressional medal of honor!

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DE— Forgive the re-post here; I'd like the Mates in my ship as well. I tried to read Berrigan by using the 3 MATES of Ahab (as you suggested). There's something there, though not so clear-cut, but perhaps the others can make more of it.

Here it goes. Melville's Pequod is a ship of symbols (although it can be read as a driven narrative even without any eye for allegory, we thus have movies of it here and there) and as such is a very symmetrical construct. The 3 MATES can be read as the stages of the human brain: 1st mate STARBUCK is the voice of reason, the schooled one, a pragmatist at heart. 2nd mate STUBB is much less refined, but in moments of clarity he embodies a folk sort of wisdom. Nevertheless, he's more Gung-Ho and is thus more open to the seductions of Ahab. But 3rd mate Flask has practically sold his soul to Ahab even without him asking for it, and since it's clear we're moving down the brain here, Flask is more bile and vengeance; he really takes the whales personally.

Beer? Jack off? Curse? Probably Flask. hunker down, quite merrily, life goes by: We could probably get a whiff of Stubb's pipe here (though he seems to be smoking with Flask in the earlier parts too). Which means that the last, where happiness is not happiness but something negotiated with weather (sails?), that could be Starbuck there, the only dissenting voice when the ship went mad with Ahab's bloodlust. He's the one with his eye still on Mary, his wife, their "house in the country," their nameless son.

But all of their tempers and powers taken singly or together: NOT ENOUGH

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DE— Others in the forum say that it's part of the incompleteness, the "NOT ENOUGH"

Poem says that it's a list of 10, but it doesn't always add up (though it depends on who's counting), almost always amounting to but nine items. In the anthology, it physically takes 2 pages, though it says three. So 3 pages follows that logic. (An aside, Calvino's "Six Memos" contains only five, suggesting we write the last one, perhaps that's the case here too? Add your page. Or add your thing-to-do?)

The others cut the poem into three, following the sectioning suggested by those phrases with purely capitalized letters. What do you think? Perhaps there's an important 3-page document somewhere in American history we should know about?

Anyway, I'm glad to have to think on it/ of it. Hope this helps.

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DE— Hi! It's an idea I got from your 3 ages thread. I hope I didn't misquote you. But yes, put like that I see that it somehow not only "clusters" but "furthers" all the cutting that's already been done in/by the poem.

AN— a very good idea. the more you read it that way, the more the 3 "sets" or "pages" distinguish themselves from each other

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DE— True and tragic, how the persona "can't even find that wholeness in the lifestyle of other Americans." He lists everything that everyone else is about but comes out empty-handed. Even with fame and security thrown in at the last breath.

AN— perhaps because fame and security was offered in the list? maybe that made it worse somehow?

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DE— It's hard (for me) to put the whiteness of the whale out of the picture when inside North Am Lit, but because Berrigan does it in cuts he could evade full reference (as an epigram wouldn't, or a direct quote) and that sometimes makes for more richness, a more textured reading. Perhaps the "paging" I did with the mates was a stretch as well. But it was such fun doing it.

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AN— the openness of a cropped line is interesting. that's probably why I loved not only following Tzara's instructions but reading the works of people who did. and now that Berrigan gives us a project like this, it's wonderful to welcome all associations in the tapestry of meaning

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DE— Ishmael as the sailor behind (or grafted into) Berrigan's persona, that's promising. What a bummer to miss this, so: thanks! Ishmael's more laissez faire, a down and out man, going where the wind would take him. Melville must have been trying his damnedest to draw a blank of a character, someone who'd soak in the whole Pequod, all its men and methods then live to tell the tale. Ishmael is a survivor (the survivor) of the mad quest, and his presence could change the motif from revenge to just pure survival, openness, going at it one day at a time.

AN— she is on to something. Pip also is mad(dened) enough to deserve a second look as an intertext of this poem

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AN— hegemonic parameters of quality? are you saying they are the gold standard of poets of the time? and that they are oppressive somehow as influence goes? if i hear from you, thanks

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DE— I do love Berrigan too. He and Corman and Armantout, they're great "finds" for me, and only made possible by "This".

AN— perelman too now, and bernstein and hejinian

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DE— I saw this a bit late, here's the summary of some hypotheses offered earlier:

1) NOT ENOUGH. 3 Pages makes you look for a page that isn't there (the poem takes up only two in a book), the texts and contexts from which these lines have been cut. It highlights the insufficiency of the list, perhaps also of listing, maybe of poetry.

2) 3 SECTIONS. Some believe that lines such as "BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN" cut the poem physically into three.

3) That the title refers to 3 PAGES known only to Berrigan (and other such "hidden" readings).

AN— or there are (at least) 3 ways of looking at everything here. maybe read/ lunch/ poems are three pages more than enough!

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DE— Thanks!

TAKING FIVES: Fragmentary record of attempts to own "Chronic Meanings"

Read or listen to Bob Perelman's "Chronic Meanings," a poem of 25 quatrains. You might also wish to read here or here for some notes regarding the process.


GE— I'll take "Structure announces structure and takes" off Perelman's poem because of it's metapoetic value (not only for this particular poem, or of his own poetics, but perhaps for all poetry read and written). This line also shows me a body invaded by disease, the immune system overrun, deceived to feed on itself. And that amazing word "takes" that that keeps, that saves, takes away, takes us nowhere, takes us so many places (as this poem does, and life) only to arrive at the period. Would you share your choice?

AN— "Then, having become superfluous, time." Yes indeed. Time, and therefore words. I wonder if he cut this off from somewhere? Nevertheless its perfect (to me) the way it is, placed where it is, after that cutting description of AIDS (and poetry, language) as "Symbiosis of home and prison."

for Lee Hickman

AN— "Rock or ages, a modern." Seems to refer to this poem, the addressee, as well as the "modern" disease, and the "modern" ways of detecting it (and maybe as well: the modern inability to cure it) that makes writing a pre-elegy possible

GE— that's so many ways of reading that rock! all of wc fits, i think. thanks, anon. "symbiosis" still has a sense of "life" in there, in fact at least two lives. it's like the poem itself as an act of preservation

AN— "The sky if anything grew." A longing for the comforts of the myths? Eternal life as well as judgment?

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AN— "dumb/ as old medallions to the thumb" all that's left. if i had a line, that "stopped me cold" it's "Economics was not my strong." I mean, what?! Economics, now, really? And then I thought of the metapoetry, economy of the line so forth. The condensery. But also the budgeting of time that goes into the meditation of mortality. And how it's hard to find strength in that. In the counting of breaths.

GE— i think (and maybe im just over thinking it) that the toaster can be a metaphor for what's going to happen to him: here we have a man living his life, doing his job, and trying to maintain his sanity in this world and then pop, (or is it Ding) here's the news that he'll die of aids. i find the directness of it to be honest and so perfect.

AN— that "ding" or "pop" sounds like the period at the end of the line!

GE— had not thought of that, anon, but it makes sense. silent, almost absent pop, but one that's omnipresent nonetheless

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AN— The 1st line you chose reminded me of Neruda's line in Preguntas which goes: "Is there anything sadder in the world than a train standing in the rain?"

AN— thought too about neruda's train. here it's even more absent, maybe sadder. Milton promises an after-life (very prosaic way of going at it, sorry) but that could be a sort of cruelty, esp with such a turmoil/grand war that the afterlife is painted to be

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AN— in your US sitcoms, "i had better" has a special connotation. esp among girls. don't know if that's activated here. but yes such regret is present there, such sense of loss "no object to which urgency can be applied" doubles the loss somehow (the very act of this poem too)

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AN— this line resonates for me with "The phone is for someone."

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AN— can't even "do"... not even the word for do or whatever else is available, graspable

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AN— out of our hands. and the rest of the sentences as well are out our hands whether writer or reader or addressee.

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AN— "The lesson we can each." has the same feel for me as your first choice, "A story familiar as a." It's yes, that the lesson (or story) doesn't get told in its entirety, if there is an entirety. Or if there's a lesson, that's all the lesson there is in the world: "The lesson we can each" "A story as familiar as a." is all stories, because they all end (as in Atwood's "Happy Endings" story).

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AN— this particular Atwood story is very short. I remember reading it in two anthologies, one of which is Sudden Fiction International. Here's the link to "Happy Endings"

GE— thanks for piquing my interest (once more) with that line!will have to listen in again on perelman.

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AN— Truly! The power and creativity of a poet's intention. I liked your take on these two lines, thanks.

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GE— The cutting of each line too, maybe. Something that couldn't be helped.

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AN— nothing left in, nothing left out, nothing left.

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AN— the way you put it gets me to thinking now about the way back is totally indivisible in "In a Restless World Like This Is"

AN— "There are a number of." But a number of what, right? Options, debts, friends, ideas, projects, toys in the attic, words? Whatever it is, they're not yours anymore, they're out of your sight, the world recedes.

AN— There you have it, co-Anon. "Words" definitely. And in the following line. Only one. Only one word, one life, on you?

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AN— what pain to see these aspirations dashed, cut short

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AN— "Characters in the withering capital." Sounds like the beginning of a Russian novel,a winter serial. But it's also about characters, Hickman, Perelman, us. Also about words, AIDS in particular. With its small letters hidden from view, superfluous little terrors. Unnecessary

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GE— and maybe not enough of now either. thanks for weighing in!

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AN— we end at I. the noun, the self hanging there...

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AN— and now our own time ebbs

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Timing

"I’m going to set my timer. It's not rhyming words at the end of a line. It's not form. It's not structure. It's not loneliness. It's not location. It's not the sky. It's not love. It's not the color. It's not the feeling. It's not the meter. It's not the place. It's not the intention. It's not the desire. It's not the weather. It's not the hope. It's not the subject matter. It's not the death. It's not the birth. It's not the trees. It's not the words. It's not the things between the words. It's not the meter.

(timer beeping)

It's the timing."

—Charles Bernstein's 60-second lecture on "What Makes a Poem?"

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GE— Timing is the comedian's property, his element. Timing is everything, else the punchline is wasted, the joke, the whole life of the hours of preparation flows out of your hands. Perhaps for the "new" poet as well, this is the case? Timing might mean you sing when relevant the relevant song.

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AN— Mean Time, don't be so thrifty, so cruel

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AN— haha, well you did make it in time anyway

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AN— Time asks: Is there more to be sad? We answer: In tune.

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AN— the motions. the hesitations where we reveal ourselves best as nothing.

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AN— Dance operations.

GE— the tiny motions of the every day mind, tiny notions of the every day hand. / we dance best when we don't know it, the earth spins beneath so we seem to be moving. / seem: to whom? and why?

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AN— yes, those syllables are drumming =)

GE— the hay came to pay its respects to a dead horse. / the dog said the horse died of hunger. / the hay cried itself into a forest, choking the dog.

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AN— precipitate, also. then rain. sink to the occasion.

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GE— Bow before audience so you don't have to look it in the face when you're laughing.

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AN— except the outside shattered like so seem so inside, somehow

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AN— Readiness yes. Enough patience to hold your tongue. Come the moment: speak!

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DE— Touch the moment and moment flies away. Do not touch the moment and your hand flies away.

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AN— useful directions (also) for rowing a boat, sitting up or down a tree. Would make for an interesting shower.

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AN— reColding | deColding

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AN— no breath to waste!

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GE— Remember Orpheus. Who, in song, had perfect timing, had the Furies crying, drenching their wretched hair with tears. But come the last moment of patience, when he was moments away from freeing his Eurydice, his doubts overtook him, he turned (a moment too soon!) and lost his meaning forever.

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AN— your eurydice reminds me of kafka (coming from Dickinson's alternative house of "Prose," hope you won't mind): "There are two cardinal sins from which all the others derive: impatience and laziness. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise, it is because of laziness that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return."

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AN— patience was not asking for one more day yesterday

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AN— a haste of lime

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AN— let's stalk in staccato, yes!

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DE— In Time, a classic revenge is being taken upon France.

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AN— laissez le bon temps rouler, louisiana! france has left the building

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DE— Superfluous time. Withered characters of the capital. There is only one——what?——moment to lose.

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DE— Diamond is only so much coal that had to endure and wait and hide until it has forgotten what black ever meant. I can see glitters in the soot...

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DE— The hour the clock skipped and never remembered

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