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 ]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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      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.

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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.

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Intertexts for Ashbery’s “These Lacustrine Cities”

[ Poetry Foundation ]
[ PennSound ]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Notes on John Ashbery’s “Light Turnouts”

Dear ghost, what shelter
in the noonday crowd? I'm going to write
an hour, then read
what someone else has written.
You've no mansion for this to happen in.
But your adventures are like safe houses,
your knowing where to stop an adventure
of another order, like seizing the weather.
We too are embroiled in this scene of happening,
and when we speak the same phrase together:
"We used to have one of those,"
it matters like a shot in the dark.
One of us stays behind.
One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life—it's marvelous—
follows and falls behind.

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Could O'Hara be the ghost then? His confinement/haunt temporal (noonday, during lunchtime) rather than spatial (mansion)?

But your adventures are like safe houses,
your knowing where to stop an adventure
of another order, like seizing the weather.

The phrase "like safe houses" apply equally (though differently) to Ashbery's poems as well as to O'Hara's for me. The enjambed middle makes perfect sense, a demonstration of indeed stopping where it is most meaningful to stop. And there seems to be something in it about both writing and reading, living as well as relating.

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Ballet within its groove. It's why we keep coming back, I think.

Light Turnouts. Turnouts as results, outcomes possibly? (It's also lovely in that it still preserves the idea of the easier phrase.)

Perhaps a poem (or a poem written in a certain way) is a light turnout. Or more literally, that a ghost is a light turnout (only somesuch percentage remaining) compared to the life from where it was derived.

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One of us stays behind.
One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life—it's marvelous—
follows and falls behind.

Maybe the conceit here's how lightly he can take a subject matter as loss without demeaning it or resorting to farce. The last lines have that guess-who? and I think Ashbery preserves this moment/puzzle for us, no pronoun confusions as in other poems.

Who stays behind? Living poet or the addressee ghost? And where is "behind"? There is only this liminal space, this bridge and only vague ideas of what sits on either end of it.

Initial reading: Life (the living poet) follows the ghost, keeps calling it, pitching poems at it, never (as yet) becoming it, always something else except dead. In that sense, he's the one on the bridge, loitering, just walking around.

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what someone else has written.

Most fitting! Much darker, and somehow the tone means everything. It's like JA absorbed a debate between Shakespeare and O'Hara, and had been of course, charmingly light-handed and biased:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, (Dear ghost,)
To the last syllable of recorded time; (the same phrase together:)
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools (the noonday crowd?)
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! (advances on the bridge / as on a carpet. / an hour,)
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, (vs Life / marvelous / follows and falls behind.)
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, (vs knowing where to stop an adventure)
And then is heard no more. It is a tale (vs adventures are like safe houses,)
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing. (vs it matters like a shot in the dark.)

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Brings to mind a holy sonnet from Donne:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally 
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Which seems a sort of answer to WS's 146. And is (possibly) fruitful to contemplate in the case of "Lights Turnout" in that the poet here, tarrying as he does on the bridge (as on a carpet), attended by a ghost (real or conjured), seems to me a picture of immortality-in-the-moment, of being in touch with past (life), present (poetry, "the scene of happening"), and future (death) all at once.

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Could very well be that. And if so, it's Ashbery's feat to somehow turn it all out lightly without shedding its gravitas, reassigning the roles maybe to nostalgia, longing.

Thanks for the O'Hara and the Perloff. If it's all the same to you, I'd like to pair off parts of Ashbery's poem that most closely resonate Frank O'Hara's lines for me:

it’s also pretty hard to remember life’s marvelous (Life—it's marvelous—)
but there it is guttering choking then soaring (an adventure)
in the mirrored room of this consciousness (like safe houses, / what shelter)
it’s practically a blaze of pure sensibility (like seizing the weather.)
and however exaggerated at least something’s going on (this scene of happening,)
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected ("We used to have one of those,")
will not sulk or fall into blackness and peat (a shot in the dark. / follows and falls behind.)

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Agreeing that we play around with the idea of ghost a bit more. The JA spirit seems to allow that sort of thing. Dante has been mentioned above. Ginsberg summons Whitman. Macbeth was faced with the ghost of his old friend, Banquo.

The Greeks had a lot of ghostly activity, some heroes straight down Hades to converse or commune with ghosts (katabasis). Aeneas went to see his father; Orpheus to retrieve Eurydice. Odysseus also sought a ghost for advice, spilling blood at the mouth of a passage to attract Tiresias. This nekyia is closer (I think) to "Lights Turnout" in that there is a crowd (the crowd of other ghosts that Odysseus attracts, some of them he knew from Troy, but whom he did not address as he did Tiresias).

The conversation between Ashbery and his particular Tiresias sounds casual but also intimate. It seems a case can be made for this poem as a nekyia, perhaps the poem itself is making a case for poetry as a way of breaking bread with the dead, communing with the fact of dying.

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Take one down, pass it around
99 stanzas of beer

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Digression via Taraxippus (or, what happens when you stable ghosts)...

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And dying is such an insult. After all   

(wow)

You're right, Waldman seems more ghostly than Frank here, less substantial, less alive. I like that Frank keeps singing (almost typed "keeps bursting into song" which was how it was in my head while reading this), and it sounds to me like a reversal of the Orpheus-Eurydice roles, the dead pushing the living back out into life.

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This is wonderful. Sounds like "Howl," and has that incantatory effect. My favorite lines were around 2 minutes in:

as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors
pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways

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I think enjambment should also be on the priority list when discussing sound, particularly because Ashbery might have been calling attention to it at the beginning of the second stanza. Here are the enjambed (or at least the awkwardly stopped) lines:

Dear ghost, what shelter 
in the noonday crowd? I'm going to write
an hour, then read

your knowing where to stop an adventure

One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life—it's marvelous—

There's something missing between the first and the second lines, could be "is there for you," "can we find," "should we consider establishing for business purposes," etc. But the elision is rhetorical so it sounds like a sentence though it's a fragment. The ghost is syntactical: the verb absented.

We could also look for "for" after "write" but this elision opens up the possibility that the hour is not merely the duration but also the topic (which could lead to this poem being itself that hour of writing / that hour written).

This hour stays with "read" on the same line, curiously enjambed, but leading to "what someone else had written." Could it be that whatever he writes is attributable to someone else, a loved one, literally, literally also a ghost writer (which could be weird if the ghost writer writes in behalf of someone writing to a ghost, which could be the ghost writer himself), or a literary influence, an imaginary friend or friend-like somebody (Lautreamont), a muse or djinn, a kindred spirit.

Stopping on "bridge" prevents passage, allows us to dwell there indeed "as on a carpet." And while stopping at "Life" would have been enjambment, putting in "—it's marvelous—" complicates it, makes an end-stop out of it (stopping it by judging it, by appreciating it) but the appositive is our way in prose to produce a sort of enjambment in usual speech, to disrupt the flow without cutting it.

Placing greater attention now to "—it's marvelous—" as it is the poet's addition, perhaps the product of his interaction with the ghost. Not only life, it's his annotation to life that matters (his use of life to justify one more hour of it).

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Loved your alepoem. And this stanza, where I kind of like "adventures" being its usual nounly self, but also somehow venturing into verb territory.

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Not exactly a ghost: phantom of the opera? These lines in particular bring him to mind:

You've no mansion for this to happen in. 

it matters like a shot in the dark.
One of us stays behind.

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Barthelme says in an interview: "One of the beautiful things about words is that you can put words together which in isolation mean nothing, or mean only what the dictionary says they mean, and you put them together and you get extraordinary effects. Ashbery does this all the time."

We saw this while working on the title of the poem. And now you see this type of "extraordinary effect" on the idiom "a shot in the dark." Because it happens in the context of speaking with a ghost, of already having gone through the motions, the phrase gets charged with the terror you speak of. It doesn't lose the usual meaning which is an attempt to get something you have no prior information about. But now it's begun to sound like this something you have no prior information about is also out to get you.

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That is the reason we're having such fun. Rereading "Light Turnouts" now, Susan. And keeping your annotations handy while considering the possibility of "Dear Ghost" as Ashbery addressing his mother...

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Will  have to read up on this Baudelaire-Lautreamont connection. And after that, walking over to Susan's Walser. Many fine hours of "what someone else has written" ahead of me.

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Notes on Gertrude Stein’s “Roastbeef,” Stanzas 22-37

Claiming nothing, not claiming anything, not a claim in everything, collecting claiming, all this makes a harmony, it even makes a succession.

Sincerely gracious one morning, sincerely graciously trembling, sincere in gracious eloping, all this makes a furnace and a blanket. All this shows quantity.

Like an eye, not so much more, not any searching, no compliments.

Please be the beef, please beef, pleasure is not wailing. Please beef, please be carved clear, please be a case of consideration.

Search a neglect. A sale, any greatness is a stall and there is no memory, there is no clear collection.

A satin sight, what is a trick, no trick is mountainous and the color, all the rush is in the blood.

Bargaining for a little, bargain for a touch, a liberty, an estrangement, a characteristic turkey.

Please spice, please no name, place a whole weight, sink into a standard rising, raise a circle, choose a right around, make the resonance accounted and gather green any collar.

To bury a slender chicken, to raise an old feather, to surround a garland and to bake a pole splinter, to suggest a repose and to settle simply, to surrender one another, to succeed saving simpler, to satisfy a singularity and not to be blinder, to sugar nothing darker and to read redder, to have the color better, to sort out dinner, to remain together, to surprise no sinner, to curve nothing sweeter, to continue thinner, to increase in resting recreation to design string not dimmer.

Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.

The sooner there is jerking, the sooner freshness is tender, the sooner the round it is not round the sooner it is withdrawn in cutting, the sooner the measure means service, the sooner there is chinking, the sooner there is sadder than salad, the sooner there is none do her, the sooner there is no choice, the sooner there is a gloom freer, the same sooner and more sooner, this is no error in hurry and in pressure and in opposition to consideration.

A recital, what is a recital, it is an organ and use does not strengthen valor, it soothes medicine.

A transfer, a large transfer, a little transfer, some transfer, clouds and tracks do transfer, a transfer is not neglected.

Pride, when is there perfect pretence, there is no more than yesterday and ordinary.

A sentence of a vagueness that is violence is authority and a mission and stumbling and also certainly also a prison. Calmness, calm is beside the plate and in way in. There is no turn in terror. There is no volume in sound.

There is coagulation in cold and there is none in prudence. Something is preserved and the evening is long and the colder spring has sudden shadows in a sun. All the stain is tender and lilacs really lilacs are disturbed. Why is the perfect reestablishment practiced and prized, why is it composed. The result the pure result is juice and size and baking and exhibition and nonchalance and sacrifice and volume and a section in division and the surrounding recognition and horticulture and no murmur. This is a result. There is no superposition and circumstance, there is hardness and a reason and the rest and remainder. There is no delight and no mathematics.

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The sound of collard greens at 29, "gather green any collar": might this be gathering people of any stripe? Or, both the blue- and the white-collared workers. As if everyone is invited to the same table for the same meal.

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And thanks for organizing us!

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Search a neglect. A sale, any greatness is a stall and there is no memory, there is no clear collection.

"Search a neglect" sounds like fault-finding, and that process spills over to the market place. Where one finds food, I suppose. And greatness... where one finds ideas? From the quotidian and the "neglected" details of everyday life, maybe.

"Collection" has been repeated, and here, working as it does with "memory" and "clear" seems to suggest the word "recollection". But this is the first instance, where memory is being made.

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Thanks for this link, and wow, congrats on that New Year's Day publication.

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"Claims" are also verbal, poetic acts. That sense could be at play here too, how this production of sound and play not merely a process of cooking but also consumption. Maybe in the sense that the performance at the dining table (conversation, eating) forecasts the events of the bed.

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Bargaining for a little, bargain for a touch, a liberty, an estrangement, a characteristic turkey.

The "characteristic turkey" (just the sound of that!) follows "an estrangement" which seem to me also a formal estrangement, the cadence and feel (and type) of the first four suddenly thrown off by her pièce de résistance.

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I don't think the reference to genitalia is at all out of place, and I'm glad you brought it up. And it's "characteristic": so maybe the male presence was perceived as an inevitable, tolerable intrusion or something of a threat in the space between Stein and her lover.

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So maybe it's beef vs turkey (at some point), about which of the plates will take the table, and that it could also be a question of identity if not politics (and maybe economics, as it "bargains for a touch").

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Looking also at a, b, c, d, definitions, as I feel that the words "sinking" and "rise" put so close to "standard" tends toward that image of a flag maybe in the context of a conquest, a contest, a demarcation of territory.

Please be the beef, please beef, pleasure is not wailing. 

Hm. Hysterics does not a poem make? Is this a call for substance? But if we're looking at the processing of food, wailing would happen maybe as animal becomes beef. Or if the cook or butcher is injured in some way? Could it also occur while consuming, eating? Or afterwards?

—

I only had a vague idea of what kosher is, much less how it's done. This connection is indeed fertile: the idea of "pleasing" the beef is there, of somehow easing the living animal into the state of death, preparing it (and ritual participants too, I think) for food and what it means, what it means to take something like this on the table, into the self.

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Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.

Stanza 31 plays with several things at once. There's the silver lining and the rolling of thunder among others. Melting... could that be rain? Such a painterly way of putting it.

It's all of a single line (lining?), perhaps a lesson on evocation, that you need only see (lining), hear (roll), and feel (melting) certain select details to account for the whole sky. It begins and returns to taste: the cloudiness of the gravy or soup maybe, the roll on the side, the butter.

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Lunch time here so I can imagine some sort of lining with pastries and cakes. Maybe the side dishes "line" the entree, or the dishes are lined-up, or it's yes silver, a literal lining along the edges of the plate.

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Dirty silverware? On to 33...

A recital, what is a recital, it is an organ and use does not strengthen valor, it soothes medicine.

I imagine someone playing music at meal time, Christmas or New Year. That curious ending sounds to me like "preaching to the choir," or how artists (or those with an artistic temperament or tendency) are the only ones to ever "get" other artists.

—

I've been reading some Barthelme, and his view of Stein (alongside Joyce) sounded perfect: that she is party to making an object out of literature, that is not about something but a thing-in-itself "like a rock or a refrigerator." The recital and organ do not merely accompany each other, they are same, solid, able to produce music. And this music, her music, it does not serve catharsis is the old Greek sense, but by reviving the language itself, by soothing the "medicine."

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The word "increase" here and the context of your discussion makes me think that they're trying for a relationship were both individuals are freed rather than restricted, the "string" thus being redesigned for their intents. As for 34...

A transfer, a large transfer, a little transfer, some transfer, clouds and tracks do transfer, a transfer is not neglected.

In terms of food, clouds seem to me steam, also the dimming of the clear liquid as it becomes broth. Heat transfer has ever defined the process of cooking, a central consideration when living off the land. Tracks are more difficult in this level. But if I'm following the Karren's reading of the pioneer-in-Stein, then there's the possibility of seeing a dynamic process (collecting firewood, butchering, going to the market) making possible a couple of hours of cooking, standing in more or less the same spot and just cooking. All those errands are in that pot. And later, in the stomach.

Unburdening? An emotional, physical connection? These are here.

Conversation too. And the poem itself as a transfer, even the misreadings, all of that is communicated, assimilated (even if only a little), proven indelible.

—

That would be a great connection to make, and I'd love to think that... whether it's there or not. I'm trying to remember Macbeth, him trying to squeeze some clarity from the witches. I'm seeing Stein's 'cloudiness' as important, vital, even if the brew (and the words) of the witches were necessarily 'cloudy'. Macbeth would project his longings into the words, seeing what he wanted to see and establishing a set of plans upon that vision. If Stein is making spells for us here, it seems the acceptable reader-position is that of the Thane of Glamis.

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Notes on Richard Howard's "Infirmities"

No use having an executor, Horace Traubel,
                literary or the other kind
        unless I can show you what to execute.
Losing every damn thing all over again, Horace.
                I need you: this floor's become a flood—
        dive in! See if you can't come up with something
letters—tied in green ribbon—from an "Abraham Stoker."
                Wrote me from Dublin, years ago . . .
        Now he's coming to see me, or to let me
have a look at him. Either way, I must lay hands on
                those letters . . . I know they're here somewhere.
        Mary Davis is no help at all. Once a week
she comes to clean house, that's what she calls it, forages
                through my mail as if it was haystacks—
        only thing she could find down there's a needle!
No, in that pile, Horace . . . Letters from the Seventies:
                I recall the first one as if
        for my birthday—fifty . . . long past now. Some things
you don't forget. Keep looking, Horace: a young man's hand,
                twenty, he said . . . Middle-aged by now
         (I thought so at forty, know better today.)
That's it! the green ribbon—green never fades. I chose it
                for Ireland. Just read out the top one,
        then you'll understand why I kept the others.

        Put this letter in the fire, if you like,
        but so you do, you'll miss the pleasure of

        this next sentence, which ought to be that you

        have defeated an unworthy impulse:
        You are a true man, Walt, as I would be
        myself, & therefore I would be to you
        as an apprentice is to his master.
        You have shaken off the shackles, therefore
        your wings are free. I wear the shackles still
        on my shoulders, tight—hence I have no wings.
        I write to you today because you are

        different from other men. If you were

        the same as they, I would not dare to write.
        As it is, I must either call you Walt
        or not name you at all—I have chosen
        the better course. I thank you for the love
        & sympathy you've given in common
        with my kind . . . I have read your poems, Walt,

        aloud to myself with my door locked

        late at night, & read them on the seashore
        where I could look around me & see no more
        sign of human life than ships out at sea,
        & there I often found myself waking
        from a dream with the book lying open
        beside me . . .

". . . on the grass . . ." Stop, Horace. I remember what comes next,
                and I need to hear it, too. But first
        what you need: this Stoker fellow's here! Coming
today to Mickle Street. Now when he rings, you let him
                in, Horace, then leave us two alone.
        Stoker thought he was writing to me, of course,
but it was really to himself. I answered—warmly,
                I always do, to the personal.
        I wrote with my whole heart. Now read me some more.

        . . . If I lie out on the grass,
        those days come back to me with undying
        freshness. I look among the stalks or blades
        & wonder where the energy comes from—
        that fond hum of Nature, never ceasing,
        for ears that can hear. I guess at what is
        below the brown uneven earth that seems
        so level at a distance, so rugged
        in reality. At such moments comes
        the wisdom of those half-forgotten thoughts,
        the rudiments of all philosophy . . .

That boy was my reader, no doubt about it. We need
                our readers, every one. Now we'll see
        what this man's done with that boy. Today's letter—
oh, I can manage to find a letter that comes today,
                Horace: today is easy to find;
        it's yesterday I tend to lose . . . Stoker writes
different from the way he used to. Guess we all do that.
                Sorry to have lost what was in his
        early messages. Lord, what I've lost in mine!
He sounds polite enough now, of course, but determined
                to settle the business of the day.
        Explains he's come over here with Sir Henry
Irving, Irving the actor—they knight them over there—
                manages the Lyceum theater
        for him in London, brings the whole troupe
here on tour. Says "Sir Henry" has contracted to play
                New York, Philadelphia, Washington . . .
        I played Washington, in a manner of speaking,
before Washington played me—played me out! . . . Stoker has
                his reasons for coming today, he says
        he needs me—needs me again is what he says.
Maybe so. You let him in, Horace, send him up here
                to me, and if he don't come back down
        in half an hour, you collect him. Half an hour's
all I can stand of any man's "needing"—even mine!
                Now read some more young Stoker, till
        the old one gets here.

        I know about the grass because for years
        I could not walk, though no one ever put
        defining names to the disease I had.
        Certainly till I was about seven
        I never knew what it was to stand upright.
        But I was naturally thoughtful, &
        the leisure of long illness gave the chance
        for fruitful thoughts later on: healthy ones.
        All my early recollections are of
        being carried about in people's arms
        & of being set somewhere or other—
        on a bed or sofa, if in the house,
        or if the weather was fine, on a rug
        outdoors, or even right out on the grass . . .

        . . . There's the bell! Stop right there—
"on the grass", of course. I know the sound of my own bell:
                One thing I still recognize. All right,
        let that be your signal, Horace. Go downstairs,
let him in, send him up. We may have something to say
                to one another . . .
                                            Welcome, Stoker—
        welcome, Abraham! Let's greet one another
as old friends, as indeed we are . . .

        Sir, I cherish your friendship, but the name
        a friend must know me by is changed: it's Bram,
        Bram Stoker I call myself, sign myself
        now that I endeavor to write . . . fiction.

                                            I overlook the change
                of name—dislike it, actually.
        Stoker was born Abraham, and he should be
Abraham still—has the breath of humanity in it,
                and Lincoln too, Can't "Abraham" write
        fiction as well?

        Surely you'll sanction the change, Sir: you too
        must have known a like need for a new name.
        Were you not called "Walter" before the Leaves?

                You show an old man his place . . .
Glad to be there. The years might have blurred that need. The man
                Stoker repeats, no—fulfills the boy!
        You took a shine to me over in Ireland,
when you were at Trinity. I value your good will:
                maybe you've remained of the same mind,
        in substance, as at first . . . You see, I prepared
myself for your visit by reading those old letters
                of yours. Appears from what you wrote me,
        if I understood you rightly, that we share
infirmities. Most men do, of course. Sometimes I think
                it's all they share. All they can share. But
        our weaknesses, yours and mind, set in
at opposite ends of life: old age has withered me,
                nowadays they put me out to grass
        on a blanket, just as you lay there in your
own childhood. The grass is the same—for you in your first,
                for me in my second, most likely.
        Still and all, I get up, get dressed, get outside
most days. Live here lonesome enough, but in good spirits . . .
                You find me . . . Well, how do you find me?

        I'm honored, sir, by your welcome, and
        happy you still recall the impetuous
        and perhaps importunate outpourings
        of a faltering youth to Walt Whitman
        many years ago. That makes it easier
        to come to you with my questions again.
        I would not tax your strength for all the world,
        and my own duties—surely I explained
        that my obligations to Sir Henry
        will not permit me to trouble you long
        —there was, in fact, some difficulty
        finding my way to Camden and to you—
        but I'm gratified to be here at last.
        How do I find you, sir? I find you just
        as I hoped you would be: that wonderful
        mane of white hair over your collar, that
        munificent moustache over your mouth,
        to mingle with the mass of flowing beard—
        you know, you are rather like Tennyson.
        You quite remind me of him as he was
        at the Lyceum—you don't mind that, do you?

        Mind! I like it! Why, I'm proud to be told so.
I like being tickled! Irish flattery is best—
                found that out when Mr. Wilde was here,
        had all the sauce an old stomach could swallow.
Still, what a broth of a boy he was! Younger than you,
                I guess—you ever know him, back home?

        I knew his mother, Lady Wilde. She kept
        a sort of salon in the Merrion Square—
        in fact it was there I first met my wife,
        one of those Saturday at-homes. Florence
        —that's my wife—was a friend of Oscar's too . . .

        Hah! You're married, and respectable,
and an author of "fiction" into the bargain . . . not
                often such a man comes to me with
        questions. Young Wilde asked some—a salon, you say?
That explains a lot. all about art they were, art with
                a big A. I spell it small, myself . . .
        If you haven't much time, put your questions, son,
but let me get mine in first. What sort of fiction is it
                that you must "endeavor" to write?

        Well, usually I dash things off, not
        much more that typed-up drafts, to pay debts,
        you know, or to earn some extra cash. but
        lately I seem to have come once again
        under your spell, sir: I too have a sort
        of poem I must write—oh, it's in prose,
        of course, but you understand that—and
        there are characters to speak the lines, and
        in a sense they revolve around one man
        who rather resembles you, sir. He too
        has long white hair and a heavy moustache,
        powerful bearing, something . . . leonine.
        He too longs to pass through the crowded streets
        of mighty cities, to be in the rush
        of humanity, to share life, change, death—
        all that makes us what we are. Is this not
        Walt Whitman's "call in the midst of the crowd"?

        I don't know that it is. Tell me some more, "Bram",
let me hear what you want to do with me . . . Leonine?

        Yes, masterful. You know: the king of beasts.
        I've written quite a lot about the man
        modeled on you. In my narrative,
        all others serve him, or come to do so . . .
        I can even recite for you the way
        Count Dracula (that is my hero's name)
        is addressed by one of his followers
        when the count is introduced: "I am here
        to do your bidding, Master, I am yours,
        and you will reward me, for I shall be
        faithful. I have worshipped you long and far.
        Now that you are near, I await commands,
        and you will not pass over me, will you,
        dear Master, in your distribution of
        all the good things that are within your gift? . . ."

                I don't much like this talk of Masters
        and Counts. What is it he's done, this Dracula,
that everyone is so eager to serve him? Does he serve
                others in return?

        It was you, sir, who gave me the clue, you
        who spoke of adhesiveness, that union
        beyond any binding together of bodies,
        a universal solvent in the blood . . .
        I found it in Leaves of Grass long ago,
        and to what I found have tried to be true.
        It was your own poem, your own words
        which guided me, and which will guide me still.
        Surely you will remember "Trickle Drops" . . . ?

                Make it a rule
        that if I wrote it, I don't remember it.
The Leaves is not a sacred book, but a growing thing.
                The text is in a state of constant
        transformation. To see what I've changed from what
to what, Horace keeps the old book here—you find the poem,
                Abraham, read it to me yourself,
        then maybe I can link my lines to your Count . . .

        The privilege of reading Whitman's words
        to Whitman's ears is beyond presumption . . .
        Here it is, in "Calamus", the teaching
        I have tried to make into a tale . . .

Oh, in "Calamus" is it? Then I don't wonder. That
                was what they wanted me to cut out.
        all the English critics urged me to it: "Your book",
they said, "will go into every house in America.
                Surely that is worth the sacrifice"?
        It would not be any sacrifice. So far
as I care, they might cut a thousand. It is not that—
                it is quite another matter. When
        I wrote as I did, I thought I was doing
right, and right makes for good. I think that all God made is for
                good, that the work of His Hands is clean
        in all ways, as if used as He intended. No,
I shall never cut a line so long as I live. Read
                me the news from naught "Calamus".

        "Trickle drops! my blue veins leaving!
        O drops of me! trickle, slow drops,
        Candid from me falling, drip, bleeding drops,
        From my face, from my forehead and lips,
        From my breast, from within where I was conceal'd
        press forth, red drops, confession drops,
        Stain every page, stain every song I sing, every word
        I say, bloody drops,
        Let them know your scarlet heat, let them glisten,
        Saturate them with yourself all ashamed and wet,
        Glow upon all I have written or shall write, bleeding drops,
        Let it all be seen in your light, blushing drops".

        Yes, that's right: we put that in ahead of
"City of Orgies". I mind that well—the same fool English
                said it was "a pity not to cut
        certain passages", and I knew just the ones:
"Trickle Drops", then the lines that come at the end of
                "City of Orgies": ". . . These repay me,
        lovers, continual lovers, only repay me".

        Then follow me, sir, as I do you . . .
        to the point where the Count dismisses
        the Vampire Women to claim the bleeding
        youth for his own: "This man belongs to me".
       
                "Vampire Women"? No such thing.
        And is your Count a vampire too? Inspired
by Walt Whitman and a bloodsucker?

        I want to make the voluptuousness
        of death equal to the deathlike nature
        of love. Like you, sir, I dare my readers
        to acknowledge that the mystery of
        sexual love is worth dying for . . .

                                            . . . Not "like me", Stoker!
        Only worth living for, that's my mystery,
if you can call it such. Take your Count back home with you,
                let Sir Henry have him. I've heard of
        his ways. Heard how they're going to settle
the Bacon-Shakespeare dispute . . . Going to dig up
                Shakespeare and dig up Bacon, then let
        Sir Henry recite Hamlet to them. And the one
who turns over in his grave will be the author! Heard
                that one, have you, Abraham Stoker?

        Frequently, sir. And many others too,
        in all the years of my service. You see,
        I am indentured to Henry Irving
        in the same way I once tethered myself
        to you. By doing so, perhaps in both
        servitudes, I've learned that close relations
        between two people, any two, always
        afford vampiric exploitation. Sir,
        I fear you find my expressions . . . misplaced:
        no one, I now perceive, may pluck the heart
        out of Walt Whitman's mystery, who lives
        according to the Eleventh Commandment
        of Modern Times . . .

        As if ten weren't enough. I don't hold much with
commandments, Abraham. What in Hell's the eleventh?

                "Thou Shalt Not Be Found Out".

                That's one I'll obey . . . Abraham, here's
        Horace, he'll take you to the Mickle Street car:
you're sure to find your way with him . . .
Goodbye, son, there's no
                bad blood between us now, am I right?
        Please to give my best regards to Mr. Wilde,
when you see him next . . . Another fine Irish (whisper this)
                man of art. Endeavor to write your
own fiction, young fellow. Good fortune with it.
Nothing to do with me . . .
                                    Good-night, Horace. Leave a lamp.

*

D— I began looking for this poem after T— showed us a link to some correspondence between Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker. Among many wonderful things, this poem recasts a meeting that courses along the grooves set by each man's poetics regarding time and relations.

I loved how the poem so easily reminded me of certain lines from Leaves. For example, Stoker puts Whitman's "what I assume you shall assume" to the test. It seems that what Stoker assumes, Whitman will not assume. And there's a line in "Infirmities" where Whitman asks Stoker, "You find me . . . Well, how do you find me?" which takes us back to "Song of Myself, LII" where Whitman tells the reader to look for him "under your boot-soles."

T—

D—Okay! First stanza then.

letters—tied in green ribbon—from an "Abraham Stoker."

I see how that ribbon could very well be a blade of grass. "letters—tied in green" immediately takes us to Whitman's poetic project and maybe also how it flowered, over time, into a relationship with Stoker. A visual contrast is being set here, Whitman's green "flooding" us before the "trickle-drops" of Stoker's red, Whitman's "life" against Stoker's "death".

We could also follow what you said about green as youth and passion, because that makes for a telling image, a man in search not only of a certain youth but also of his own youth, that young man's letters, yes, but also his own work, the Leaves of a younger man.

have a look at him. Either way, I must lay hands on

The progression of seeing to touching here reminds me of something Whitman says about his Leaves: "This is no book; Who touches this, touches a man". There's a spiritual mystery at work: as Christ is bread, so is Whitman book. Howard echoes this in how "I must lay hands on" is cut, as if Whitman was a baptist in search of a disciple, a spiritual heir.

K—

D— I agree to all three. I had been concentrating on the first that I have only obliquely sensed the second and I think I completely neglected the third. But now that you mentioned it, yes, there's that and it's there, and all three really pour into each other.

Likewise, the Leaves take into account the paths of influence. The "I" there so self-assuredly contradicts itself and assumes that we assume what it will assume, the Whitman "I" that posits his "myself" as cosmos does so at times by figuring itself as "atom", and during those times, I think Whitman unravels for us the mysteries of solitude, much like the infinity in Blake's grain of sand and Emily's narrow hands.

Perhaps Howard's poem is most strong whenever it dwells in what you call "easily missed opportunities for communication" because that's what's his and not Whitman's, cannot be Whitman's as the premise of Leaves would not allow it, for there absorption is instantaneous, expression generous. But those aborted "opportunities"—misreadings?—indeed remain, and that's why Stoker missed Whitman's point (at least in Whitman's eyes) so completely when he summoned a Dracula from the poet's open, fertile ground.

K—

D— Happy new year! You said that Dickinson "seems more modern than Whitman (in her best poems, anyway)." I've been thinking about that point. For some reason, "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun" comes to mind. Though if I keep reading the Beats and the Goldsmiths, it'll be difficult to place Dickinson as "more modern". But I suppose I'd think so given other sensibilities: Armantrout, Stevens.

Thanks for pointing out "A Noiseless Patient Spider" because it's true that solitude was entirely within Whitman's sense of "Self".

"Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same" says Whitman, but within one man he found both an Abraham and a Bram and did not (could not?) "receive them the same." Maybe this was also an infirmity he perceived, how a Walter could not possibly live up to the poetic inclusiveness of the "uniform hieroglyphic" that is the Leaves of Grass.

K—

TERMS: business and parable in “Vespers”

I wish to end summer (or begin ending summer) by replaying my parts in a collaborative reading of Louise Glück. The poem:

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.

I think that a certain mode of interaction with divinity is at work in this poem. Glück’s “Vespers” takes me to some parables, in particular those where a landlord leaves the land to his tenant and returns after a time to call them to account. The Parable of the Talents is perhaps the most famous, but there are others. The persona here sounds like a tenant, but one who recognizes the landlord for the divinity he symbolically is (one who could “withhold// heavy rains”).

I am interested in the diction, especially in the words found at the outset, such as “anticipating,” “return on investment,” and “principally,” all of which where ripped right out of a business management textbook. Because of these words, by the time we arrive at the addressee’s “heart” and the persona’s “doubt” regarding his understanding of it, “that term” takes on another meaning (or understanding) as a period in the venture, or a phase (“twelve weeks of summer”). That’s in business, but it glides (too smoothly, perhaps) into parable where the “term” is the span of time that the lord allotted to the tenant in order to work the land and, in the process, to prove the worth of the earth as well as of the self.

“That term” has another layer for me: metapoetry. Here we return to the place (or figure, as in this poem) where the word “term,” like other words, could be taken in all its multivalence to bear fruit, become “heart”. In fact, we can make a case of the addressee here as poetry itself, as that which withdraws inspiration (in your absence) so that the poet is forcefully abandoned to work the earth.

While doing so, she believes in a return, a second coming which is desired, of course, but also dreaded, because she will be called into account (the Vespers, the evening prayers, the closing of the day), and she fears coming to poetry empty-handed, especially as that would mean that all she has done was waste “that term”: earth, time, and precious life, the span of her heart (perhaps also not only her life, but the lives of those she “grows” such as tomatoes, relationships, children).

"Vines" here is a particularly cruel word. In parable, that means grapes, and wine, and crushing. But the vines also are entangling, like flaws in verse, or wrong life-choices. And there must be a sense of power here, for the persona, when she takes responsibility for that which provides life as well as chokes it out of us.

—

“Verse” shares the same etymological root as words like reverse, converse, and inverse and traditionally same sense of the “turn” (These turns are ascribed to the rows of farms, the furrows, which are seen as correlates of the lines in a poem. Aside from formal turns, a poem is usually expected to make a turn in narrative or rhetorical turns. A sonnet takes this turn or swerve usually after the 8th line. Shakespeare takes it further than Petrarch by introducing the couplet, which some read as a further turn, or at least an introduction of a nuance of the turn. It follows rhetorical ends, because you must first show the persuasee that you know his or her mind before you take him or her turn to your point of view).

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that the farming language commingles metapoetry, business, and parable quite naturally because of its place at the root of civilization, that which gives rise and perhaps makes necessary the forms of commerce, religion, and literature we know today.

—

—

—

God, poetry? Perhaps death is what’s immune to foreshadowing? This a puzzle in the poem for me.

I can’t take vines as a purely beneficent, life-giving image. Maybe because weeds also come in the form of vines. The god of wine, Dionysus, uses vines to collapse buildings, ships. It can be viewed as an entropic symbol, or if that’s too exaggerated, at least a symbol of the earth taking back (in) the constructs of man, as well as man’s own corporeal form. I suppose that the persona’s claiming responsibility over her constructs, her verses, even her life. But the way it sounds to me, she seems likewise staking a claim upon her own death, or at least its form: how she has decreed her decline to proceed entwined with her the fortunes of her verse.

—

Early on, I wanted to know the implications of using tomatoes, and this reading fits! It’s a weekly, almost daily thing, so much so that you could lose that all that color (we love it in every one of its stages, from green to red, and all the minglings of yellow and orange in between) and succulence if you don’t pay good attention, the type of attention an artist would give. Of course also, a poet like Glück.

It’s not a special occasion fruit, or something so otherworldly as the pomegranate, it’s almost unsymbolic because of its dailiness (almost). What fun to see your poetry (vocation?) in the image and likeness of a tomato.

—

The Forever Hiccups of "I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed"

A toast to summer with a poem by Emily Dickinson. By all means stop at her signature, but you are welcome to join me for a further reading. The poem:

I taste a liquor never brewed —
From Tankards scooped in Pearl —
Not all the Vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air — am I —
And Debauchee of Dew —
Reeling — thro endless summer days —
From inns of Molten Blue —

When "Landlords" turn the drunken Bee
Out of the Foxglove's door —
When Butterflies — renounce their "drams" —
I shall but drink the more!

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats —
And Saints — to windows run —
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the — Sun —

At once, the first line short-circuits the mind. It's almost impossible to move beyond that conceit: how can anyone drink liquor never brewed? How can it be considered liquor in the first place? How are we sure the liquor exists? Or, by association, the "I" of this poem?

It's akin to dwelling in Possibility. We normal folk reside in fact, in the "is" and not the perhapses of numerous windows. Likewise, we can only drink normal brewed alcohol. Dickinson's liquor did not go through this earthy process. On top of this, there's the added distinction of being "scooped in Pearl." In this line, we have a clash of registers. As cups go, "Tankards" are base things, cheap, a matter of pubs. "Pearl" connotes the finest of the fine. It carries the sea inside it, along with the sense that it was once hidden in a shell. Yet Dickinson commingles them (and stirs them in together with those r sounds), as if distinctions between high and low, between public and private have all but become irrelevant—that is, at least, in terms of this blurry-eyed drunkard and her fantastical liquor.

In "Not all the Vats upon the Rhine" we get the idea (especially with that exclamatory Alcohol) that this is a superior drink, better than any in the world. I hear, again, soundings of "I dwell in Possibility". If we have those narrow hands in the last stanza of that House, in this Tankard we have throat and tongue. If "Alcohol" is an equivalent of "Possibility," maybe we can extend this to signal a poem about poetry. To test this claim, let us follow the tongue...

In the second stanza, we rise from water. "Inebriate of Air—am I—"

Drunk with breath, with life? Much more! Our poet here is intoxicated with the taste of air, that plaything of the tongue, the spring of all words. The poem is distilled of speech, the more meaningful array of sounds, the supreme use of air. The dashes in this line (and in the whole poem, especially in the last line) not only make the poem sound drunk. They also embody the drunk state. They sound like the drunkard's hiccups here, air trapped and released, something that's never "under control". Because the poem is drunk, the metaphors sway to and fro. From the brewed wine of the first stanza, we have shifted to the juice of nature.

Then comes my favorite line: "And Debauchee of Dew—" which is again a marriage of the filthy and excessive with the pristine and minuscule (recall Tankard and Pearl). "Reeling—" in pain? No, more in keeping: in ecstasy, all throughout the "endless summer days". The frenzied whirling reiterates this endlessness. It's the drunkard's excess, the loss of a stable but pedestrian sense of time. "Reeling" is a stationary type of perpetuity in the sense that the poet is whirling in place. Again, there's the feeling here of being housed and condensed in finitude ("inns"). It's non-linear (which is the sense I get from the narrow hands in "I dwell in Possibility," how they trace lines upward to Paradise and thus somehow approximate it, then "gather" it). Here, it's circular. Like the Mobius strip, it's infinite not because of an endless number of points (or days, as in eternal life) but because it can turn and return upon itself within a finite set of points. Assume, for example, that the poet has but 64 summer days. These become endless because she visits them again and again through means of memory or art. Or maybe the poet has a finite set of themes, but through craft and insight, she can release the spirit of one poem to populate other poems/possibilities.

This infinity inside finitude is one of the greatest humanist compliments that can be paid to us creatures who have to suffer not only mortality but also the awareness of mortality.

After Dickinson's "endless summer days" we find an equivalent expansion of space when we hear "inns of Molten Blue". This line is reminiscent of the gambrels of the sky, Dickinson's grand domestic restructuring of the oppressive "dome of the sky" of the ancients. "Molten" is truly interesting (and looks like a Dali painting to me) maybe because it subtly prefigures a deluge. The previous line was about infinity, but in this one, the sky is falling.

Still in keeping with the manner of a true drunkard, the poem slurs toward another set of metaphors. Loosely from the dew (but greatly interrupted by summer days and those curious inns) we turn toward insect life. But who are the "Landlords" here? A story that says fairies inhabited these flowers. Or are they gods, are they foxes? What turns the poor bee out? If it's a glove, perhaps those are fingers (human fingers or the hand of God?) that shoo away the bee. As for the butterflies, what "drams" are they renouncing? Cocoons? Flowers? In the first, we have the meaning of new life, in the second, death.

Whatever they are, our poet/drunkard and her brew surpasses them. She exceeds these creatures who drink to survive (Niedecker's "Grandfather advised me" has the word "trade" for this). To reference another Dickinson favorite, the poet "comprehends" the nectar even more than the butterfly. Maybe she wants it more precisely because it's beyond reach, for how can the dew satisfy her who hungers so mightily for it? And how can anyone drink this brew of the "Possible"? This poem attempts to do just that—I believe, it succeeds.

Here we have the last stanza. The drunkard, the metaphor, the poet has taken flight to the extreme.

As with Butterflies and "drams," Debauchee and Dew, and Tankard and Pearl, "Seraphs" and "Snowy Hats" also makes (divine) use of the clash of registers that are commingled in terms of sound linkages and the sense of drunkenness  There's swinging too, for good measure, as if displacing the halos just wasn't drunk enough (or do these gestures hint at the rebel boiling inside the angels?). It's another shift in metaphor, but there's always a sense of movement (as in "The Brain, within its Groove") that keeps us in step with the poem, or at least in step with the drunkard in the/that is the poem. For example, the Bee and Butterfly's flight leads to the Seraphs and Saints above. It's possible that these Seraphs and Saints are parallel to the "Landlords" that could turn away all sorts of creatures (or sentence them). Anyone, that is, except for the poet who is locked in an impervious thrall, drinking "the more," "Reeling" well beyond her earthly limits.

Has the poet cheated death here, leaning as she does against "the—Sun"? With only that telling dash, the poet/"Tippler" comes closest to the Sun than all the others. While she is "leaning against" it, the Seraphs have need of hats, the Saints have need of windows. But what is "the—Sun"? Is it illumination? Death? Perhaps it is the wisdom that comes from the drunk striving of the poet, she who is most intimate with finitude.

Just now I realized that Dickinson's endless summer days must somehow extend the "summer's day" of Shakespeare's similar conceit ("when in eternal lines to time thou grow'st"). She places herself as the hiccup in Shakespeare, in the poetic tradition of the English language (as she is also perhaps the splinter in "The Brain, within its Groove"). Whatever Dickinson has begun, it shows no signs of relenting. For here we are, aren't we—dear reader—our minds reeling (happily, I hope!), these summer days of our brilliant dead yet carousing inside us, drinking in us, drinking of us, and with us—this Alcohol of the Ages. Cheers!