Geof Huth's Blog, page 18

Hiding the Facts

Geof Huth, The Makings of "eSSSSSSSSSS" (19 January 2012)
It has occurred to me that, this year, I have been intentionally hiding a number of the works I have made. Usually, I present quite a few of them, showing many of those that I like the most. But this year, I'm keeping them under wraps, showing just glimpses of them, to make the more erotic. Barthes notes, in The Pleasure of the Text, that it is more erotic to see a glimpse of skin through an unbuttoning in a shirt than to see a totally naked person. Hiddenness encourages the desire for me; having everything diminishes that same desire.

Today, I took a little accordion booklet that I've had for years, and I finally made something of it. I started with rubberstamped letters, then I wrote phrases around that text (and all of these phrases, I lifted from poems in Rae Armantrout's first book, Extremities), and finally I watercolored the whole thing.

I am not yet sure that I like the results, but I probably do. The phrases from Armantrout are ones I might have written myself. I pulled them together for unity. And they continue my focus this year, which has been on decidedly non-linear writing. I expect to send this to the next exhibition I'll be in, Handmade/Homemade. I've decided to send less sculptural work this time.


ecr. l'inf.

A Poetics (# 93) (Revised and Monstrously Enlarged)

Anne Gorrick's Photograph of the First Book She Ever Stole (and from a Library): Sylvia Plath's Ariel

93.Converse
AnneGorrick sent me an interesting little illustrated essay of hers about herrelationship to the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She asked me to review it and sendher comments, so I made my usual copy-editing points, complete with too muchexplanation. But I was taken by the essay, by how poetic it was and how it didnot move linearly, how richer it was for being about her as well as Plath andfor being presented with some poetic honor to the word. All of this caused meto begin to respond to the essay in detail. Later, I selected additional scrapsof text from Anne's essay and from her emails to me. Sometimes, I revised thesetexts slightly before responding to them in detail. This, then, is a non-linearpoetics, one built on response and argument with Anne's words, but one indeference to that text that I slashed into tiny pieces so that she would stillbe able to publish her essay as the shimmering whole that it is.

a. [.   ]
I'm sorry about the double spacing afterperiods.  It's in my hands and I can't get it out now.
Poetryis language in all of its formulations, even the typographic, so I am sensitiveto typographic misfortunes: a typeface that presents more than it means, twoletters awkwardly kerned, two spaces trailing a period (like a tooth gap).Poetry pivots, swings, rocks on the smallest of linguistic events: therepetition of certain sounds, the look of words and lines of words on a page,the breath it takes to say a line, a certain conjoining or splitting of meaningin a single word. As a poet, to be a poet, I care about such things more thanmost people can even perceive the possible caring of. (The awkward phrasing ofmine, a leftover from the Russians.)
WhenI decide to change something, the change is immediate. 
Oneday, Joe Singer, a printer who killed himself one day in the early 1990swithout any explanation ever reaching me, convinced me that double spacingafter periods was outmoded. He released a short essay, in his journal The Printer's Devil, that noted thatdouble spacing was used when typing on typewriters with monospace fonts becauseevery letter (from the slimmest i to the widest W) was exactly the same width,allowing little visual dynamics across the line. Every line was, in essencepart of a grid, each letter filling one pre-ordained but imaginary cell on an xand a y axis. But in our modern world, where proportional fonts are those weuse almost exclusively, there is no need for the extra space. Additionally,those extra spaces cause holes in the text, holes made even more dramatic whenthe text was full justified. I abandoned that extra space that day.
Justas I changed my handwriting.
Oneday in the first half of 1977, during the year I attended the American Schoolof Tangier, I was walking in downtown Tangier and thinking about ElizaEastman's handwriting. I admired her hand, how clear and definite it was, butalso how she had simplified her letterforms when she wrote them out inlonghand.  That day, I decided toemulate her handwriting to a degree, eliminating certain extra swoops in thecursive construction of my letters. Primarily, I eliminated the first swoop offthe line, the one that began the letter. This change was most pronounced withthe f, which would from then on start at up far above the line, plunge down tothe farthest point under the line, swoop back in a loop to the middle of that vertical,and continue off to the right towards the next letter. By the time I had walkedback to my dormitory, without even having written another letter on a page, Ihad changed my handwriting.
Andthat is how my handwriting remains, though I often write letterforms in variousways while wrawing my doodled visual poems onto a page. Because differences inletterforms are differences in meaning. Because even a single lost rising of aletter off a line on a page is a meaningful absence.

b. book-stealing
Thefirst book I ever stole. (The wound in the book.)
The book is stolen by the taking of it.The book is stolen by the reading of it. No idea is self-contained, or containedwithin the mind of its author, or contained within a certain set of words.
Poems, as contraptions of language, arevehicles made to move a thought from one mind to another. As modes oftranslinguation, they are meant to transport the mind without moving itphysically. Forwardness of movement may be achieved through physical stasis,while the mind still moves within the carapace of the skull.
The word is contained nowhere but inthe mind, and the book cannot be stolen. Burn the book, and you can stillremember, still recite, words from it. The firemen can come to your house andburn it down, books and all, poems and all, for a house is just a book ofmemories, a poem of childhood.
Hayden Carruth once told us that hecould translate poems from languages he did not know because every poem wasencoded: poem = code. The trick to translation was not to understand theoriginal language but to understand the code. And a decoded message is neverthe coded message itself. It is a mirror to the language, and a mirror may besplintered and still reflect.
There is a wound in the book from beingstolen, a wound in the book from being broken, a wound from being read. Thereis a would in the book, and the reader made it, and from this would is builtthe finest of houses.
And even those houses can burn to theground.

c.cashmere
Facinganother wall of books. The old black coat was cashmere, way too big but warm.Probably there was something to flee. Something.
Black is ink is the bones of the book.The bones of the book give it its structure, allow it to hold itself together,as a piece, like the ribbing of a chest, and breathing, also, comes easier withthis structure in place.  But blackis warm from its size, like breathing, great, and enwrapping. Around the body,around the thinking body of the person who imagined the coat that is black andold, like cashmere, or a boat, there is a thought in little ink words, littlewords with horns so that they might go running across the page and crashingagainst each other in battle.
That is the form that thinking takes inthe dark, which is inky, and the inkhorned beasts beat each other back andforth in the evening, yet it never straightens out, and everything is askew,crooked, but not dishonest, merely curved, so that what light there is, and itis a small light, might ride over it swiftly and jump from the end of the horninto darkness, to become darkness, to become a part of the word horde. There isno running from the word at night, because the world then is nothing butnightwords, of ink born and bred.
With a little jam, we could stick themsomeplace from which they would not escape, until the jolt of an even biggerthought jolted them loose.

d. hair
I hadcut off most of my hair.
I cut my hair each week, there notbeing much to cut, and I am left with a smooth scalp, slightly rounded at thetop, not too unattractive, something, to me, like a domed strip of parchmentthat words might be written upon, but instead the words come up out of it, ahead half-encircled by the tonsure of this mise-en-têtê, but I see eachfollicle producing a hair as a pen or the pinprick of ink, that beginning ofword, and each week as those few hairs grow on the north slope of myself, Ifeel the words forming, the curvature of the scalp, that convex mirror thatfits up into the concavity of the sky itself over the deep blue earth, overwhich sky the universe itself in chartless space, in the three dimensions ofdarkness, is itself another convex mirror fit into the cavity of nothingness.

e.falsely
Shethought of the pack of Tarot cards that seemed important (as it turned out,falsely).
It is a root, I think, and in that waythe cards mean, by teaching how a search for meaning itself is not necessarilymeaning, by teaching that not all answers are true, and neither are allquestions. There were a pack of them, which ran all night howling not at themoon but at the image of the moon on a certain card, or they accumulated likedarkness on a deck looking out over black water, black air, solid black mud.And every message they scrawled with that ink, with their paws, disappearedinto air, earth, water the same color as it. To see what is important requiresthe identification of that which is not, for they are knit as one, woven in warpand woof, and that is their twisted cry.

f.graffiti
thebrutal fleshcut graffiti marking the days
The body is not palette; it is canvas.We write intentionally upon it of things "both wonderful & strange." A bodyis a place for making and marking. Upon it are recorded the ravages of life:the whittled finger, the smashed thumb, the pierced ear, the splinter like astick into the fleshy bottom of the foot, the slices across the arm, thecutting and sawing through the chest, the thinnest of cicatrices just underthat girlish eyebrow, more a velleity than a wish of a mark.
These are our poems, the poetry of thebody, some made by ourselves, some made by the world, unbidden, upon us, somedecorative, some reminders, all cautionary tales. We learn by failing (the sliptknife) more than succeeding (the clean pierce).

g.breathe
barelydaring to breathe, I had to buy tissues
It seems a strange coincidence that Iran out of tissues today, my nasal passages so much clearer than they usuallyare because they have been blown clean, and it is as if I can smell the world,but I seem only able to smell the insides of my nostrils with every intake ofbreath.
Coincidences are meaningless, justsimilar actions that occur at similar times, but it is that connection betweenthe two actions that makes them memorable, or notable, to us, so we give themmeaning, which is the purpose of art. We give meaning to the world. We find themeaning that is hidden before us all. We provide that meaning to people, butoften it is obscured. We hide the meaning under shapes of colors, we submergethe meaning into film, we encode the meaning into poems.
We don't simply want to show themeaning, because nothing meaningful is best appreciated after an explanation.The mind must find the pattern. The poet merely allows the pattern to be found,and found not too easily enough.

h.alarums
Helooked alarmed for a moment because he didn't recognize me.
We take excursions into theunrecognitions of life. It is a battle we fight against but must also fightfor. If everything is too clear, if we understand it too well, we have no basisfrom which to make a poem about it. A poem isn't an understanding (notclarity); it is a misunderstanding (obstruction or eclipse). A poem is notsomething shown; it is something hidden so that someone else can find it.Otherwise, why do I enjoy reading those poems that are unfathomable to me?
Maybe because they are music, as yourpoems are. Or maybe because they are codes, and it is the process of breakingthat code, that of decryption (almost descryption), that is enjoyable. Puzzlesof words designed to create puzzles of thought.
It was good that he didn't recognizeyou anymore. That gave him the opportunity to learn who you were.
If he'd known that all the time, theexperience would not have been worth it to him.  You were the poem in that event. He, the unwitting reader.

i. thwarth
athwarted Plath scholar, dashed at every turn
Art requires conflict, somethingagainst something else, maybe only resting against it, leaning, maybe.  Ian Hamilton Finlay made this point,defining the pwoermd (a poem of only a single word) impossible as an artbecause there could be no tension with it against something else. He didn'tseem to realize that a pwoermd could have internal tension to give it meaning,or tension against the expected forms of the language itself, even tensionagainst the page.
Finlay was, still, a great proponent ofthe one-word poem, but only for those that had titles, thus the text of the poem(a single word) could be in tensional opposition to the title (of any number ofwords). His last issue of his magazine Poor.Old. Tired. Horse.  (number 25,undated) included such one-word poems by a number of poets. One of these wasAram Saroyan, a poet famed for his pwoermds. One of his entries in that issuewas
lovely
lovely
Because Finlay saw the need for titles,the title of Aram's pwoermd was always a repetition of the pwoermd itself.Maybe Finlay perceived some opposition of identicals in that. Or maybe heignored his own belief in this one instance.
So as we are thwarted by something,thus we have the opportunity to create against that conflict. I see yourprofessor here as one who may have actually produced great scholarship, becauseof this conflict, even if the conflict also kept her from publishing any of it.
Thus: a thwarth of action across theface of the conflict.

j.smith
We madea class trip to Smith College to look at the drafts of the poems we had pickedin the Plath papers and see how they had been constructed.
Archives, it occurred to me today, area purified form of knowledge-making, because they are chosen for quiteintentionally saving bodies of information, and this saving is not carried outby those who had originally created them. So Plath might scribble words onpaper, and Smith College might accession them into their holdings, but Plathcould not know if Smith ever would. Archives take in only what they want, onlywhat they believe in, and what they believe in is records that can be used tocreate new knowledge.
Within the records themselves (draftsof poems, let's say, or notebooks, or diaries) there is some knowledge, that ofPlath herself, and the archives, the Smith Archives specifically, needed tobelieve in the value of that knowledge. But the value of that knowledge is inhow it can be used by others to create other knowledge, to understand her life,to understand her art (and are the two separate? or even separable?), tounderstand her times, the world of poetry, maybe even to know the officialverse culture of her era.
We make knowledge out of otherknowledge in the same way that we build poems out of other poems, just as artcomes out of other art, as life comes out of other life.
A small maple seedling growing from thespot where we buried our prairie dog so many years ago. I imagine its delicate whitebranching root as the heart of our dead Couscous, and the living heart insidethe empty chest of that small dead animal, who once was nothing but warmth andthe fiercest desire to dig, but who is now kept alive only in the form of thesmallest tree, which I will yank from the ground before it is too big.
Dig hard enough and long, and you willfind it.

k.great
Plath puta small cloth under her head to cushion her cheek against the oven grate.
Such a delicate thought. If we believein death, we want it to have a sweetness to it, even if it is a sucking in,through the tiny slits of her nose, that sweet natural gas as if it were thealmost-too-strong-for-us scent of a fragrant and gaudy tropical flower.
Or: We believe sometimes, as poets ofthe unrestrained word, the word unrestrained by emotion, that the entry ofemotion is the harbinger of illth, that only the compassion of objectivity, therestructuring of the word according to proscribed (and also prescribed)patterns allows for a poetry with legs, one that will last, one that will walkon its own.
Yet we are grounded by the human insideus, which is a little blood-red muscle sometimes larded with fat, but whichbeats out the numbers of our lives, so much so that the music of our lives goesaccording to the pattern of that ostinato, neverending, ever-rending, untildeath, one that feels like a bastinado of our every footfall.
We are blood and breast and bone. Thesweet edible meat of our skulls makes all of that work, but we measure bymeasures, and we count them by beatings.

l.blizzards
almostdone with sleeping out my own personal blizzards
The winter has just begun, and the snowfalls, lightly, a dusting, confectioner's sugar, but we know the cold of it,the moisture trapped in the false form of whiteness.  The blizzard is blindness and comes sometimes as words.Enough of them, black little inklings, and the world turns white before oureyes. Too white to see.
I don't know what blizzards stop. Idon't know which blizzards stop. They return, or their replacements do, when we don't expect them, thepast merely preparation for the future, merely a different presentation of thefuture.
Maybe it is that blizzards are a sourceof poetry. That a blizzard of the personal life leads to a blizzard of right words,that the hardness of the cold, the wind blowing so hard, the snow pelting theface in surgings leads to a form of poetry, that the self's response to suchstimuli can be poetry. And, as you say, whatever helps the poetry is good. Ifpoetry is your goal, of course.
If poetry is anyone's goal.

m.dance
dancedance dance dance dance to the radio ("Transmission" by Joy Division)
I do have this song somewhere and canlisten to it when I want. It is a good song, but it's not the one I considerthe only good Joy Division song. The name "Joy Division" being a self-madeirony, the artists themselves being the self, and the art, the songs beingmerely the vague representations of self. (TheRepresentation of Self in Everyday Art. Read it.)
The song allows for dancing but doesnot demand it. And it demonstrates Joy Division's debt to the VelvetUnderground. We are haunted by influences, infected by them, infested, investedin them. When we write a line, it is a line of someone else's, a line stone, aline misheard into something else, a line reworked into something else, aseries of lines and a personal experience and someone we loved into something else.We are repetitions of the original, though, building complexity as we go.
Every work of art is a reference toevery other work of art that came before it, and the trick is to find theconnections. Only find the connections.
Everything begets everything else.
The music is better than the singing.It is all beats, music and lyrics, and Ian Curtis has a voice that refuses tolisten. I am curt, is I ?  (Now I'mlistening to all my Joy Division music, starting with "Love Will Tear UsApart." Believe it.)
How could we ever live in Warsaw? Couldwe ever appreciate cheese enough to live in Wisconsin?
I will have to leave you hanging.

n.ocean
theearly promise, the early educational rigor, the way none of it mattered to theocean
Say, "ocean," and I think so often ofthe Velvet Underground song, which is all atmosphere and no land, maybe becauseit is the sea, though foggy, so invisibly so.
So Melvillian, this idea, to beswallowed, as a pebble, by the ocean, recognized less than the death of an antto the mind of god. (There is the pearl of a thought in there somewhere.) Wewrite against a giant darkness of water that surges towards us. We are soslight, thin of bone and flesh, that we disappear into the first lapping ofwave, yet we go on because the choice is always simple: Yes or no. Do or don't.
As you might have wanted, at some pointto have an academic career, I had never, for a second, thought of being anacademic. I was vassal to the word alone. Going off to college for English,people asked me if I were going to teach. I always said, No, because that Nowas always the true answer. My goal was to write, and I went to college becausethat was the next step in the life I led, because we build up what we can do bywhat we know, because the ocean is big, so much bigger than us, but if we canknow it, know it completely, or at least to the greatest extent that we can,then we can ride the ocean, rather than allow it to swallow us.

o.radio
I'dlisten to the radio and wonder, "Is this all there is?" Plath was a hint atwhat might lie at the far end of my poetic transistor dial. Plath was the hintthough.   
"Rock and Roll," The VelvetUnderground. We are looking for something (meaning, connection), and theworking out of art is the working out of these pathways, which we then follow,but which we then hope others will follow. Everyone is lost in the woods. Weate all the bread because we were lost in the woods. No crumbs dropped for thereturn. We don't want to go home anyway. We want to make a new home, to find anew place to be, a new way to be. So we are searching.
Maybe some pathways move to Plath,maybe she is an answer. But when I read your words, I see the answer. It's not"Plath was the hint though."
It's "Plath was the hint through." 
We have to get through something, ormany things, we must get past them. And we have to find that way. And we haveto make that way for others.
As poets, as artists, we have to makethat way.
I am listening to the Feelies now,obsessively. Their hint through was the Velvet Underground, and you can hear itin them. I'd say their specific path was the Velvet Underground's eponymous thirdalbum. They have a delicate roughness to their sound. They are beholden totheir makers (Lou, John, Mo, and Sterling), but they are something else.Influence is a virus, but it is not so much a self-replicating virus as onethat changes constantly, one that mutates fast enough so that we cannot stopit.
Maybe I am infected by that same virusfrom the VU: Velvet Underground (my favorite band), Vanderbilt University (myalma mater), Volume Unit (the VU meter I saw as I played Lou Reed's "StreetHassle" Vanderbilt's student radio station, WRVU), déjà vu (all that I'vealready seen). Lou Reed and I even shared a teacher (Philip Booth) in differentdecades at Syracuse University. In the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane," Lousings of "rules of verse," which I  had heard for years as "Rooseverse." Why the focus on theRoosevelts? I wondered.
Maybe that Rooseverse was just the signof the mutation.
Maybe that's what allowed me to be.

p.voice
thesearch for a poetic voice died, allowing my work to become much bigger, sinceit's no longer hinged on the self
I know that this is essentially apost-lyric, post-avant belief, but I don't see the self as being particularlylimiting or freeing, even though I see it as unavoidable. I look at ChristianBök's work, and I see Christian presented to me full bore. Mentioning not aword of himself, he is still fully presented in the poem. The self is thegenesis of all poetry and the conduit through which it comes to us.
I'm not arguing with you here. I'm justriffing off it, giving my own point of view. If I believed your statement here,I would have to conclude that your work is, logically, bigger (a vaguedesignation, I'll grant you) than Lynn Behrendt's, but I actually think bignessis more the domain of Lynn's work than yours. That messy presentation of theself produces her broad-brush expressionistic shipwrecks smashed against therocky shore of self, and these are larger events, in that emotional and sonicway, than yours.  Not morebeautiful, just beauty of a different, more visceral type.
Your size is atmospheric, ErikSatie-like, built upon the altar of repetition (the ground rock of minimalistmusic) and built upon the concept of music, so built upon the concept of time.I'd say Lynn's are more sculptural, monumental, physical, the solid form ofmatter. Her poems are of the instant, even when they are long. They are stringsof instants. We are hit with the size of her poems, but we walk through thesize of her. What hits us feels bigger. A fist as opposed to a mist.
These are the metaphorical forms ofyour voices, as a see them, hear them, feel them. Voices come in differentmanifestations, some even mute. A visual poet, and I am a visual poet when myeyes open each morning, cannot forget the power of muteness.

q.suttee
poetryshould be a cornering of the false self by the true self until a essential voicehappens…well, any poet would kill themselves too if they believed that, or wassurrounded by people who believed that. It's a form of suttee, a ritual killing. 
I read this as an overstatement, so Itake this as a rhetorical stance. But I think that using the word "suttee" suggeststwo things: that society and Plath's husband (as it is with suttees) is thecause of Plath's death, that she is exonerated from her own act ofself-immolation.
Everything, meaning existence ingeneral, pushes people to kill themselves, but in the end it is the act oftaking power over one's life, even if in the cause of ending it. It is theultimate act of self-control and it comes only after mere existence seems worthless.I don't look at suicide as most people do, though. I don't see it as a tragedy.I see it as a right, one that people take when they want nothing else, whenthey actually want nothing. It is cowardly in that it removes one's ability todeal with the pain of the world, but it is brave in that it is irrevocable,final. Your statement here reads to me as an exoneration of Plath. There'snothing to exonerate. It was her personal choice. The people she hurt were herchildren most of all. If she "could live with" that, then that was simply herchoice.
We create, we destroy, we must decidewhich action to end with.

r.rabbit-hole
Theentirety of her final work acted as a spoken spell for the final trap. Therewas no other way out. I'm so very grateful and glad to write in a time whenmythomaning isn't the only way into the poem. The self becomes a deadly, boringmatrix from which to begin. Deadly when it's the only one.
This idea that a focus on the self ledto Plath's death seems an argument just to prove a point, especially given thatit ties into the post-avant rejection of the self as an opening to possibility.I don't see any way to argue this point or to prove it. The self always is thereason for the suicide, because she is the self. The self doesn't disappear inpoems not absorbed by the self.
I still see the self suffusing your ownwork. You are the eye and voice, and it is you, no-one else.  I hear you in your poems, I hear yourvoice, I hear your words and how they sound like no-one else's. And some ofyour poems are simply representations of your experiences, though told in yourfuguelike way.  (And I realize theself is lost in the fugue. Contradiction is the nectar of argument.)
The self can be rejected, but notescaped. And I don't think rejection of the self is antidote to suicide. Afocus on the self might actually be a way to avoid suicide.
I must recognize the self as important,just because we are created by unique circumstances, meaning that each self hasthe possibility of making unique things. Whether the self is a focus or notdoes not matter. All that matters is that the self is—so that the creation isindeed possible. Possibility matters because the nurturing of possibility iswhat makes art.

s.Quietest
probablytoo smart and vibrant to languish as a Quietist poet
I doubt the people reading this will necessarilyunderstand this term. It does define things well enough, even though I thinkRon Silliman's use of it often requires an over-simplification of reality. Forinstance, I think WCW was very Quietist at times. That's the secret of hissuccess. But WCW cannot be Quietist because he railed against that strand ofpoetry in his attacks on TSE.
Whereas, I say, what we say and what wedo are never the same thing.
Why, I wonder, too, is the Quietist thequietest one? Why would the poet focused on personal experience necessarily bequiet. Wasn't Plath louder than most, and wasn't she also merely leaning out ofthe circle of Quietism? Isn't she the definition of the lyric poet? agreat-granddaughter of Sappho? Wasn't her loudness what made her work work? Wasn'ther self-making in her poems precisely her art?
My problem with "Quietism" is that theterm requires binary thinking. It makes the world of poetry black and white. Inthe world of microfilm, bitonal representation of documents is common; mostmicrofilm captures only black and white, no greys. Continuous tone microfilmthat captures the range of greys between the blacks and the whites is rare. Itcosts more. So documents are captured as black words on white paper, even whenthe paper is yellowed with age and the ink is brown.
Even if we cannot capture the fullcolor of the world in our representations of it, shouldn't we at least capturethe greys?

t. L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E
[stealing, via the title here, theone-word poetics of Dan Waber]
Plathmight have embraced L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E once she tired of the self as beginning.
Wishful thinking. I don't thinkanything like this ever would have happened. Otherwise, it would have happenedto Adrienne Rich. Most people set a course early and follow it through a seriesof changes, but they rarely veer onto other paths.
Should, maybe, Plath's daughter, FriedaHughes, then, have taken this, or some other, more adventurous path? Wouldn'tshe have been the one to grow?
But who grows much after becoming a completedadult? In childhood, we are caterpillars. In pubescence, we are chrysalises,asleep in ourselves but becoming. In adulthood, we are finally ourselves,butterflies of sorts, moths some of us, some small and flittery, some withgiant dust-green leaves that allow us to glide, to float, but we don't changeinto other forms afterwards, not into butterflies if we're moths. The world candamage us, we may be blown into a different field, or a small grey lot in acity, but we are essentially the same. Even when we do change, we almost alwaysstay within the boundaries of acceptable change.
Rae Armantrout changes almost not atall over a long career, forty-five years or so, probably more like fifty. Apoem from her first book would not look out of place in her last. And she is aLanguage poet, one for whom we might think there are no traps of poetictendency. Yet, even without significant growth, she is a great poet. LarryEigner continued with the same poetics of personal observation guided by alineated poetry centrally concerned with the mise-en-page, yet his change isminor over the course of decades of writing.  His lines do become shorter, his language more cropped, thediagonal leaning of his text distinctly more pronounced. But he did not escapehis own tendencies. Few of us ever do.
There's no hope of knowing the answerto your mulling, though, without the continued living of Plath. Only theexistence of self makes the possible real. Or makes real the possible.
I'm not sure there is a differencethere, but I can feel one.

u.possibilities
Thesign that makes up the boy / his possibilities in terrible detail
We make possibilities out of signs.That is how we know we are poets. My entire poetics, of which these few wordsto you are but a fragment of, I can reduce to that single concept: possibility.
Deciding that one brand of poetry issuperior to another has no value in my thinking. Value accrues at the level ofthe poem. Still, I would agree that some types of poetry produce fewer goodpoems, but why would that require us to avoid all exemplars that poetry?Shouldn't discrimination force us to do the hard work of finding those poemsworth finding in the broader spectrum of poetry?
Although my reading of poetry isomnivorous, even I tend to read poems in a particular realm, one where I ammore likely to find poems I enjoy, but to embrace possibility I have to embraceall poetries.
In my own work, you'll understand this.I am a visual poet. Most people think of me as such, as opposed to anythingelse. (Binary thinking always requires the making of a single choice.) But my poetryconsists of one-word poems, poems written in unintelligible scripts, poemspainted onto canvas or assembled within boxes, poems spoken or sung and audio-or video-recorded during the moments of their creation, poems created withinnature and left to disappear back into it, and even syntactic text separatedinto lines. Each of my poetry performances attempts to use the full extent ofmy body to examine the limitations of poetry. I believe in the body as thepoem, the poet as the poem.
I believe in poems that you can tasteand smell and feel. I believe in rhyme and punning. I believe in meter andhumming, in the beat of the line of the heart at the center of the poem. Ibelieve in the poem of an instant, of the eyeblink. I believe in the poem thatis books in length. I believe in the poem with no opening to see it. I believein the poem that folds open to greet you. I believe in life as the poem, theself as the poem. I believe in the eradication of self, the focus on the word,the power of the concept or the shape or the sound over the word as amesmerizing whole. I believe in the mesmerizing whole. I believe in the hole,in the gap, in praecisio, in the poem unsaid. I believe in precision. I believein disorder. I believe in the beautiful. I believe in the ugly. I believe inmusic, in architecture, in opera, in the Gesamtkunstwerk, in the smallest thingwith the biggest effect. I believe in the game, the joke, the jest. I believe,in all seriousness, in seriousness. I believe in the word, in the language, incommunication. I believe in acceptance. I believe in refusal. I believe inaccentual-syllabic rhymed verse. I believe in the poem without borders, thepoem without words, the poem without letters, the poem of images alone. Ibelieve in the forged poem and the authentic poem. I believe in the forged poemand the found poem. I believe in the improvised poem, the aleatoric poem. Ibelieve in the made poem. I believe in the found and aleatoric poem. I believein the poem as a drawing, as a photograph, as the description of a poem nevermade. I believe in the poem carved into the flesh.
I believe in poetry. I believe inpossibility.

v. joy
what Ilistened to: Joy Division
Sorry about expending your time with whatmust seem like argument. I'm not a partisan myself (though I'm a member of aspecific brigade), so I don't come to poetry from one pole of binary thought. Idon't believe in experimentalism. Or the avant-garde. Or the hope fororiginality, or even unoriginality, both of which are impossible. My focus ison possibilities. My focus is plural, not singular, so it leads me to differentconclusions, or the rejection of conclusions in somecases.
Somethinkers require that their thinking be replicated, that their thoughts bebelieved, because they know the real truth, the false truth having beenuncovered by them. I have no need to be believed, or even a need, really, toargue. I place my thought in front of another's thought for the purposes ofcomparison and contrast. I desire that my thought is known, but the mirroringof my belief in another is not important to me. If my belief creates adisjunctive thought in another, I have helped carry forth the process ofthinking, and that is the best I can hope to want.
Itake joy in these divisions of ours.

w. unlearning
I had to unlearn most of what I learned there.
Unlearningis most of learning.  Be happy forthe opportunity to unlearn, which was made possible only by the originallearning.
Learningis just a way of talking about the representation of experience within aperson's memory. And experience is the important thing. We can make only out ofour experiences. It's not that our experiences have to be directly representedin our poems, but the broader our experiences, the greater our possibilities,so we must learn everything we can, everything wrong, everything right, everythingunknowable, everything accepted as fact but impossible to be true, andeverything we think we have forgotten but which we carry within our body as anunheard pulse.
Unlearningis a sifting. We sift through what we have experience, and we dispense with it:the insignificant others, the signs of distress, the truths we cannot accept,the falsehoods we cannot abandon, the children we have, the children we didn't,the children we lost, the pain, the pleasure, the abandon. Whatever it is wedon't want. And we simply don't believe in it anymore.
But,you know, we never abandon anything. Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, the ending of it:
Because we don't know whenwe will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everythinghappens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. Howmany more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, someafternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive ofyour life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yetit all seems limitless.
Whatwe think we don't ever think about is what we never forget. What we haveforgotten is all we will ever know.

x. intestate
Plath died undivorced and intestate, so theHugheses control her estate. 
Shewas born intestate.
Ihate this kind of control over information, which has been the same for Salinger,and to some degree  from Paul Zukofskyvis-a-vis his father.  As anarchivist, I desperately want records be used and for something else to be madeout of them. I want people to gain insight by the records we preserve.
WhenI donated my papers to a university library (almost ninety boxes of it now, notcounting eighty-five boxes of books about words), I put no restrictions on anyof it. My private letters to people, the evidence of my successes and myfailures, the geneses of my poems, their exoduses, their final (conceptual)immolations, my work, my life, my art, evidence of my shallow footprints, noteven as deep as a shadow, upon the face of the earth are available for anyoneto see and use, to make knowledge of, and not at all necessarily about me. Weare not separable individuals; we are individual parts of different wholes. Soit is that my papers give evidence of what an archivist was, what a poet was,what a 1980s zinester was, what the literary underground was, what thenocturnal artist was, what it is, maybe what it might be, what a mailartist is,what a family was, what it wasn't, even what I was, what I might have been,what I always had failed to be.
Somany of the donated papers of individuals (imagine the papers of politiciansfor a moment) and of organizations are no longer corporeal wholes. They havebeen gutted. Their skeletons are left, and that exterior shroud we call theskin, but the heart has been removed, and the spleen. My papers are notcleansed or sanitized. Everything is there. It is my memory, my own memory ofmyself, a memory becoming hazier now in my second half-century of life, and Idon't want it lost. I say that I cannot regret my life, not my shortcomings,not my failures, not my disasters (you must try, sometime, losing control of acar approaching 100 miles an hour and turning and turning and turning, inmotion so slow you can count each hair on the back of your hands, until yourcar slams backwards into a telephone pole, and you are still alive and totallyunhurt until the police officer snaps open that membrane of skin clinging to yourskull with a billy club).
Ibelieve in openness. The truth of the matter. The inability to sidestep a badlife. The need to accept what cannot be escaped.
Similarly,I believe in fair use, the practice of taking something and reasonably makingsomething else with it. I believe in copyright, but with restrictions, andnever permanent. Copyright, as it is now practiced (as an act of aggression) inour culture may be the death of art, and the weakling we call poetry might bethe first to go. Those who try to control the future by controlling theevidence of the past eventually lose, but rarely soon enough.

y. I(art)
I… One reason you are my friend isbecause you understand that art is supposed to make more art.
Quoting:"Could you turn it [that camera] off? This is not art. This is life!" (CharleneSwansea to Ross McElwee in his film Sherman'sMarch [1966], repeated in his film TimeIndefinite [1993])
Artcomes out of art. I art art. To be that art, there can be a lifelessness. Focusis both nourisher and depriver of nourishment. But could artlessness be better?Is balance better or the abrogation of responsibility? Or are we—I shudder tothink—beset with too many responsibilities (personal, familial, societal,human, profession, artistic) but with no way of meeting each? Is time soindefinite to us that we live fully whatever life is closest to us because wedo not know when it all will end? Is our only thought, the only mover of anaction, the realization that we cannot recall our beginning but that we knowour end without ever seeing it? Are we ready for the surprise of thatrealization?
Canan art be made well without the obsession to make it too much, too often, toocompletely with the body and the mind? Does that create a friendship of artthat occludes a friendship of the beating, or beaten, blood?
Inthese terms, I think of Robert Creeley, who, one-eyed most of his life, sawwithout any depth but guessed at it from the size of things, who could not seethe dimensions of things, their particular roundnesses, and how light,therefore, wrapped around them, who wrote a crabbed line, in fits and stops,and clawed from that language an originality that befalls the smiths of theleast word, a focus borne forth from an inability to focus elsewhere. I thinkof the human evidence in these poems of his, amulets, maybe, possibly histalismans against his leftward focus, maybe touchstones to prove his connectionto three families. All of this in a string, as every life is, a pulled threadtaut enough through the cloth so that it holds two pieces together. But whatholds in place that thread? What threat did he encounter from the living oflife that the living of art protected him from?
CanI be a friend without being also a poem?

z. ☞☞☞☞☞☞

 really gets me thinking about this stuff—the relationship ofour work to our selves, how the self might emerge in the work, is that animportant goal/endpoint or a moment?
Weare only here for thinking and for making people think and for allowing them todo the same with the little thoughtthings we create.
Ilive by building something atop something else. My poetry is a poetry ofaccretion, but all poetry is. It is merely the fact that I have been able tolive on the beach in the Caribbean, close enough to snorkel out into thosebands of blue ending in ultramarine, and to swim among the corals and to watchthem build their cities atop one another—it is only that that pushes me harderin this direction. I know no other way, and unlike coral I am mobile.
SoI build these words, a poetics, upon relationships, comparisons, extensions. Iam divesting myself of words, of memories, of thoughts. Put enough words down,and I might find I have come to the end of talking, of writing. Or not. ElieWiesel once wrote, "I write to understand as much as to be understood." JohnSteinbeck once said that he wrote in order to know what he thought. Maybe I writeto understand what I think. Or to confirm it.
Iam sapiens, thinking, made for it. Poetry is made for the thinking, for thetinkerer, for the engineer. We set free these contraptions of words to travelwhere they might and mean as they can. Comprehensibility is not ensured. Success is unlikely. Yet the travelentrances.
We still have the thinking, we still have the thinking ofit, the thinking through. The thread, the line of thought, the impulse in thepulse of a thought.  The reason Irarely publish anything is that publishing is an act unrelated to thinking. Itis not the thing I want. I want the writing, the writhing body at the desk, thewrinkling of the brow in contemplation's temple. All poetry is a philosophy,sometimes ecstatic, sometimes subdued, sometimes considered, sometimesslapdash. 
These words are a poetics, a poetry, a philosophy, a person.
Me. I am still here, self, selfless, and selfishing. Mywords are indistinguishable from me and will persist, at least for a whileafter me. Yet persistence doesn't matter, not mine in trying, not my words instaying, in remaining present, even in the future. What matters is theexperience of the thought, the running-through of an idea.  The richness of that intellectualexperience, that purely human living in the realm of the abstract, the concept,the idea.
In that way, we go forward.
Followthe fist: forward.

A Poetics (# 93)

The First Book Anne Gorrick Ever Stole (and from a Library): Sylvia Plath's Ariel

93.Converse
AnneGorrick sent me an interesting little illustrated essay of hers about herrelationship to the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She asked me to review it and sendher comments, so I made my usual copy-editing points, complete with too muchexplanation. But I was taken by the essay, by how poetic it ways and how it didnot move linearly, how it seemed richer for being about her as well as Plathand for being presented with some poetic honor to the word. All of this causedme to begin to respond to the essay in detail. Later, I removed even more bitsof text from Anne's essay, sometimes, slightly revising them, and then Iresponding in detail to those. This, then, is a non-linear poetics, one builton response and argument with Anne's words, but one in deference to that textthat I slashed into pieces here, so that she would still be able to publish heressay as the shimmering whole that it is.

a. [.   ]
I'm sorry about the double spacing afterperiods.  It's in my hands and I can't get it out now.
Poetryis language in all of its formulations, even the typographic, so I am sensitiveto typographic misfortunes: a typeface that presents more than it means, twoletters awkwardly kerned, two spaces trailing a period (like a gap in a tooth).Poetry pivots, swings, rocks on the smallest of linguistic events: therepetition of certain sounds, the look of words and lines of words on a page,the breath it takes to say a line, a certain conjoining or splitting of meaningin a single word. As a poet, to be a poet, I care about such things more thanmost people can even perceive the possible caring of. (The awkward phrasing, aleftover from the Russians.)
WhenI decide to change something, the change is immediate. 
Oneday, Joe Singer, a printer who killed himself one day in the early 1990swithout any explanation ever reaching me, convinced me that double spacingafter periods was outmoded. He released a short essay, in his journal The Printer's Devil, that noted thatdouble spacing was used when typing on typewriters with monospace fonts becauseevery letter (from the i to the W) was exactly the same width, allowing littlevisual dynamics across the line. Every line was, in essence part of a grid,each letter filling one box on an x and a y axis. But in our modern world,where proportional fonts are those we use almost exclusively, there's no needfor the extra space. Additionally, those extra space cause holes in the text,holes made even more dramatic when the text was full justified. I gave up onthat extra space that day.
Justas I changed my handwriting. One day in the first half of 1977, during the yearI attended the American School of Tangier, I was walking in downtown Tangierand thinking about Eliza Eastman's handwriting. I admired her hand, how clearand definite it was, but also how she had simplified her letterforms when shewrote them out in longhand.  Thatday, I decided to emulate her handwriting to a degree, eliminating certainextra swoops in their construction. Primarily, I eliminated the first swoop offthe line, the one that began the letter. This change was most pronounced withthe f, which would from then on start at up far above the line, plunge down tothe farthest point under the line, swoop back in a loop to the middle of thatline, and continue to the next letter. By the time I had walked back to mydormitory, without even having written another letter on a page, I had changedmy handwriting.
Andthat is how my handwriting remains, though I often write letterforms in variousways while wrawing my doodled visual poems onto a page. Because differences inletterforms are differences in meaning. Because even a single lost rising of aletter off a line on a page is a meaningful absence.

b. book-stealing
Thefirst book I ever stole. The wound in the book.
The book is stolen by the taking of it.The book is stolen by the reading of it. No idea is self-contained, orcontained within the mind of its author, or contained within a certain set ofwords.
Poems, as contraptions of language, arevehicles made to move a thought from one mind to another. As modes oftranslinguation, they are meant to transport the mind without moving itphysically. Forwardness of movement may be achieved through physical stasis,though I mind moves within the carapace of the skull.
The word is contained nowhere but inthe mind, and the book cannot be stolen. Burn the book, and you can stillremember, still recite words from it. The firemen can come to your house andburn it down, books and all, poems and all, for a house is just a book ofmemories, a poem of childhood.
Hayden Carruth once told us that hecould translate poems from languages he did not know because every poem wasencoded: poem = code. The trick to translation was not to understand theoriginal language but to understand the code. And a decoded message is neverthe coded message itself. It is a mirror to the language, and a mirror may besplintered and still reflect.
There is a wound in the book from beingstole, a wound in the book from being broken, a wound from being read. There isa would in the book, and the reader made it, and from this would is built thefinest of houses.

c.cashmere
Facinganother wall of books. The old black coat was cashmere, way too big but warm.Probably there was something to flee. Something.
Black is ink is the bones of the book.The bones of the book give it its structure, allow it to hold itself together,as a piece, like the ribbing of a chest, and breathing, also, comes easier withthis structure in place.  But blackis warm from size, like breathing, great, and enwrapping. Around the body,around the thinking body of the person who imagined the coat that is black andold, like cashmere, or a boat, there is a thought in little ink words, littlewords with horns so that they might go running across the page and crashingagainst each other in battle. That is the form that thinking takes in the dark,which is inky, and the inkhorned beast beat each other back and forth in theevening, yet it never straightens out, and everything is askew, crooked, butnot dishonest, merely curved, so that what light there is, and it is a smalllight, might ride over it swiftly and jump from the end of the horn intodarkness, to become darkness, to become a part of the word horde. There is norunning from the word at night, because the world then is nothing butnightwords of ink born and bred.
With a little jam, we could stick themsomeplace from which they would not escape, until the jolt of an even biggerthought jolted them loose.

d. hair
I hadcut off most of my hair.
I cut my hair each week, there notbeing much to cut, and I am left with a smooth scalp, slightly rounded at thetop, not too unattractive, something, to me, like a domed strip of parchmentthat words might be written upon, but instead the words come up out of it, ahead half-encircled by the tonsure of this mise-en-têtê, but I see eachfollicle producing a hair as a pen or the pinprick of ink, that beginning ofword, and each week as those few heads grow on the north slope of myself, Ifeel the words forming, the curvature of the scalp that convex mirror that fitsup into the concavity of the sky itself over the deep blue earth, over which skythe universe itself in chartless space, in the three dimensions of darkness, isitself another convex mirror fit into the cavity of nothingness.

e.falsely
Shethought of the pack of Tarot cards that seemed important (as it turned out,falsely).
It is a root, I think, and in that waythe cards mean, by teaching how a search for meaning itself is not necessarilymeaning, by teaching that not all answers are true, and neither are allquestions. There were a pack of them, which ran all night howling not at themoon but at the image of the moon on a certain card, or they accumulated likedarkness on a deck looking out over black water, black air, solid black mud.And every message they scrawled with that ink, with their paws, disappearedinto air, earth, water the same color as it. To see what is important requiresthe identification of that which is not, for they are knit as one, woven inwarp and woof, and that is their twisted cry.

f.graffiti
thebrutal fleshcut graffiti marking the days
The body is not a palette; it is acanvas. We write intentionally upon it of things "both wonderful &strange." A body is a place for making and marking. Upon it are recorded theravages of life: the whittled finger, the smashed thumb, the pierced ear, thesplinter like a stick into the fleshy bottom of the foot, the slices across thearm, the cutting and sawing through the chest, the thinnest of cicatrices justunder that girlish eyebrow, more a velleity than a wish of a mark.
These are our poems, the poetry of thebody, some made by ourselves, some made by the world, unbidden, upon us, somedecorative, some reminders, all cautionary tales. We learn by failing (theslipt knife) more than succeeded (the clean pierce).

g.breathe
barelydaring to breathe, I had to buy tissues
It seems a strange coincidence that Iran out of tissues today, my nasal passages so much clearer than they usuallyare because they have been blown clean, and it is as if I can smell the world,but I seem only able to smell the insides of my nostrils with every intake ofbreath.
Coincidences are meaningless, justsimilar actions that occur at similar times, but is that connection between thetwo actions that makes them memorable, or notable, to us, so we give themmeaning, which is the purpose of art. We give meaning to the world. We find themeaning that is hidden before us all. We provide that meaning to people, butoften it is obscured. We hide the meaning under shapes of colors, we submergethe meaning into film, we encode the meaning into poems.
We don't simply want to show themeaning, because nothing meaningful is best appreciated after an explanation.The mind must find the pattern. The poet merely allows the pattern to be found.

h.alarums
Helooked alarmed for a moment because he didn't recognize me.
We take excursions into theunrecognitions of life. It is a battle we fight against but must also fightfor. If everything is too clear, if we understand it too well, we have no basisfrom which to make a poem about it. A poem isn't an understanding (notclarity); it is a misunderstanding (obstruction or eclipse). A poem is notsomething shown; it is something hidden so that someone else can find it.Otherwise, how do I enjoy reading poems when they are unfathomable to me?
Maybe because they're music, as yourpoems are. Or maybe because they are codes, and it is the process of breakingthat code, that of decryption (descryption), that is enjoyable. Puzzles ofwords designed to create puzzles of thought.
It was good that he didn't recognizeyou anymore. That gave him the opportunity to learn who you were.
If he'd known that all the time, theexperience would not have been worth it to him.  You were the poem in that event. He, the unwitting reader.

i. thwarth
athwarted Plath scholar, dashed at every turn
Art requires conflict, somethingagainst something else, maybe only resting against it, leaning, maybe.  Ian Hamilton Finlay made this point,defining the pwoermd (a poem of only a single word) impossible as an artbecause there could be no tension against something else. He didn't seem torealize that a pwoermd could have internal tension to give it meaning, ortension against the expected forms of the language itself.
Finlay was, still, a great proponent ofthe one-word poem, but they always had titles, thus the text of the poem (asingle word) could be in tensional opposition to the title (of any number ofwords). His last issue of his magazine Poor.Old. Tired. Horse.  (number 25,undated) included such one-word poems by a number of poets. One of these wasAram Saroyan, a poet famed for his pwoermds. One of his entries in that issuewas
lovely
lovely
Because Finlay saw the need for titles,the title of Aram's pwoermd was always a repetition of the pwoermd itself.Maybe Finlay perceived some opposition of identicals in that.
So as we are thwarted by something,thus we have the opportunity to create against that conflict. I see yourprofessor here as one who may have actually produced great scholarship, becauseof this conflict, even if the conflict also kept her from publishing any of it.
Thus: a thwarth of action across theface of the conflict.

j.smith
We madea class trip to Smith College to look at the drafts of the poem we had pickedin the Plath papers and see how it was constructed.
Archives, it occurred to me today, area purified form of knowledge-making, because they are chosen for saving quiteintentionally and not by those who created them. So Plath might scribble wordson paper, and Smith College might accession them into their holdings, but Plathcould not know if Smith ever would. Archives take only what they want, onlywhat they believe in, and what they believe in is records that can be used tocreate new knowledge.
Within the records themselves (draftsof poems, let's say, or notebooks, or diaries) there is some knowledge, that ofPlath herself, and the archives, the Smith Archives specifically, needed tobelieve in the value of that knowledge. But the value of that knowledge is inhow it can be used by others to create other knowledge, to understand her life,to understand her art (and are the two separate? or even separable?), tounderstand her times, the world of poetry, maybe even to know the officialverse culture of her era.
We make knowledge out of otherknowledge, as poems are built out of other poems, as art comes out of otherart, as life comes out of other art.
A small maple seedling growing from thespot where we buried our prairie dog so many years ago. I imagine its delicate whitebranching root as the heart of our dead Couscous, and the living heart insidethe empty chest of that small dead animal, who once was nothing but warmth andthe fiercest desire to dig.
Dig hard enough, and you will find it.

k.great
Plath puta small cloth under her head to cushion her cheek against the oven grate.
Such a delicate thought. If we believein death, we want it to have as sweetest to it, even if sucking in, through thetiny slits of her nose, that sweet natural gas as if it were the almost toostrong for us scent of a fragrant and gaudy tropical flower.
Or: We believe sometimes, as poets ofthe unrestrained word, the word unrestrained by emotion, that the entry ofemotion is the harbinger of illth, that only the compassion of objectivity, therestructuring of the word according to proscribed (and also prescribed)patterns allows for a poetry with legs, one that will last, one that will walkon its own.
Yet we are grounded by the human insideus, which is a little blood-red muscle sometimes larded with fat, but whichbeats out the numbers of our lives, so much so that the music of our lives goesaccording to the pattern of that ostinato, neverending, ever-rending, untildeath, one that feels like a bastinado of our every footfall.
We are blood and breast and bone. Thesweet edible meat of our skulls makes all of that work, but we measure bymeasures, and we count them by beatings.

l.blizzards
almostdone with sleeping out my own personal blizzards
The winter has just begun, and the snowfalls, lightly, a dusting, confectioner's sugar, but we know the cold of it,the moisture trapped in the false form of whiteness.  The blizzard is blindness and comes sometimes as words.Enough of them, black little inklings, and the world turns white before oureyes. Too white to see.

m.dance
dancedance dance dance dance to the radio ("Transmission" by Joy Division)
I do have this song somewhere and canlisten to it when I want. It is a good song, but it's not the one I considerthe only good Joy Division song. "Joy Division" being a self-made irony, theartists themselves being the self, and the art, the songs, being merely thevague representations of self. (TheRepresentation of Self in Everyday Art. Read it.)
The song allows for dancing but doesnot demand it. And it demonstrates Joy Divisions's debt to the VelvetUnderground. We are haunted by influences, infected by them, infested, investedin them. When we write a line, it is a line of someone else's, a line stone, aline misheard into something else, a line reworked into something else, aseries of lines and a personal experience and someone we loved into somethingelse. We are repetitions of the original though, building complexity as we go.
Every work of art is a reference toevery other work of art that came before it, and the trick is to find theconnections. Only find the connections.
The music is better than the singing.It is all beats, music and lyrics, and Ian Curtis has a voice that refuses tolisten. I am curt, is I ?  (Now I'mlistening to all my Joy Division music, starting with "Love Will Tear UsApart." Believe it.)
How could we ever live in Warsaw? Couldwe ever appreciate cheese enough to live in Wisconsin?
I will have to leave you hanging.

n.ocean
theearly promise, the early educational rigor, the way none of it mattered to theocean
Say, "ocean," and I think so often ofthe Velvet Underground song, which is all atmosphere and no land, maybe becauseit is the sea, though foggy, so invisibly so.
So Melvillian, this idea, to beswallowed, as a pebble, by the ocean, recognized less than the death of an antto the mind of god. (There is the pearl of a thought in there somewhere.) Wewrite against a giant darkness of water that surges towards us. We are soslight, thin of bone and flesh, that we disappear into the first lapping ofwave, yet we go on because the choice is always simple: Yes or no. Do or don't.
As you might have wanted, at some pointto have an academic career, I had never, for a second, thought of being anacademic. I was vassal to the word alone. Going off to college for English,people asked me if I were going to teach. I always said, No, because that Nowas always the true answer. My goal was to write, and I went to college becausethat was the next step in the life I led, because we build up what we can do bywhat we know, because the ocean is big, so much bigger than us, but if we canknow it, know it completely, or at least to the extent that we can, than we canride the ocean, rather than allow it to swallow us.

o.radio
I'dlisten to the radio and wonder, "Is this all there is?" Plath was a hint atwhat might lie at the far ends of my poetic transistor dial. Plath was the hintthough.   
"Rock and Roll," The VelvetUnderground. We are looking for something (meaning, connection), and theworking out of art is the working out of these pathways, which we then follow,but which we then hope others will follow. Everyone is lost in the woods. Weate all the bread because we were lost in the woods. We don't want to go homeanyway. We want to make a new home, to find a new place to be, a new way to be.So we are searching.
Maybe some pathways move to Plath,maybe she is an answer. But when I read your words, I see the answer. It's not"Plath was the hint though."
It's "Plath was the hint through."  We have to get through something, ormany things, we must get past them. And we have to find that way. And we haveto make that way for others.
As poets, as artists, we have to makethat way.
I am listening to the Feelies now,obsessively. Their hint through was the Velvet Underground, and you can hear itin them. I'd say their specific path was the Velvet Underground's eponymoussecond album. They have a delicate roughness to their sound. They are beholden totheir makers (Lou, John, Mo, and Sterling), but they are something else.Influence is a virus, but it is not so much a self-replicating virus as onethat changes constantly, one that mutates fast enough so that we cannot stopit. Maybe I am infected by that same virus from the VU: Velvet Underground (myfavorite band), Vanderbilt University (my alma mater), Volume Unit (the VUmeter I saw as I played Lou Reed's "Street Hassle" Vanderbilt's student radiostation, WRVU), déjà vu (all that I've already seen). Lou Reed and I shared ateacher (Philip Booth) in different decades at Syracuse University. In theVelvet Underground's "Sweet Jane," Lou sings of "rules of verse," which I heardfor years as "Rooseverse." Why the focus on the Roosevelts? I wondered.
Maybe that Rooseverse was just the signof the mutation.

p.voice
thesearch for a poetic voice died, allowing my work to become much bigger, sinceit's no longer hinged on the self
I know that this is essentially apost-lyric, post-avant belief, but I don't see the self as being particularlylimiting or freeing, even though I see it as unavoidable. I look at ChristianBök's work, and I see Christian presented to me full bore. Mentioning not aword of himself, he is still fully presented in the poem. The self is thegenesis of all poetry and the conduit through which it comes to us.
I'm not arguing with you here. I'm justriffing off it, giving my own point of view. If I believed your statement here,I would have to conclude that your work is, logically, bigger (a vaguedesignation, I'll grant you) than Lynn's, but I actually think bigness is morethe domain of Lynn's work than yours. That messy presentation of the selfproduces her broad-brush expressionistic train wrecks, and they are larger, inthat emotional and sonic way, than yours.  Not more beautiful, just beauty of a different, more visceraltype.
Your size is Erik Satie-like, builtupon the altar of repetition (the ground rock of minimalist music) and builtupon the concept of music, so built upon the concept of time. I'd say Lynn'sare more sculptural, monumental.
Voices come in differentmanifestations, some even mute. A visual poet cannot forget the power ofmuteness.

q.suttee
poetryshould be a cornering of the false self by the true self until a essential voicehappens…well, any poet would kill themselves too if they believed that, or wassurrounded by people who believed that. It's a form of suttee, a ritual killing. 
I read this as an overstatement, so Itake this as a rhetorical stance. But I think that using the word "suttee"suggests two things: that society and Plath's husband (as it is with suttees)is the cause of Plath's death, that she is exonerated from her own act ofself-immolation.
Everything, meaning existence in general,pushes people to kill themselves, but in the end it is the act of taking powerover one's life, even if in the cause of ending it. It is the ultimate act ofself-control and it comes only after mere existence seems worthless. I don'tlook at suicide as most people though. I don't see it as a tragedy. I see it asa right, one that people take when they want nothing else, when they actuallywant nothing. It is cowardly in that it removes one's ability to deal with thepain of the world, but it is brave in that it is irrevocable, final. Yourstatement here reads to me as an exoneration of Plath. There's nothing toexonerate. It was her personal choice. The people she hurt were her childrenmost of all. If she "could live with" that, then that is simply her choice.
We create, we destroy, we must decidewhich action to end with.

r.rabbit-hole
Theentirety of her final work acted as a spoken spell for the final trap. Therewas no other way out. I'm so very grateful and glad to write in a time whenmythomaning isn't the only way into the poem. The self becomes a deadly, boringmatrix from which to begin. Deadly when it's the only one.
This idea that a focus on the self ledto Plath's death seems an argument just to prove a point, especially given thatit ties into the post-avant rejection of the self as an opening to possibility.I don't see any way to argue this point or to prove it. The self always is thereason for the suicide, because she is the self. The self doesn't disappear inpoems not absorbed by the self.
I still see the self suffusing yourwork. You are the eye and voice, and it is you, no-one else. The self can berejected, but not escaped. And I don't think rejection of the self is antidoteto suicide. A focus on the self might actually be a way to avoid suicide.
And I must see the self as important,just because we are created by unique circumstances, so each self has thepossibility of making unique things. Whether the self is a focus or not doesnot matter. All that matters is that the self is so that the creation is indeedpossible.

s.Quietest
probablytoo smart and vibrant to languish as a Quietist poet
I doubt the people reading this will necessarilyunderstand this term. It does define things well enough, even though I thinkRon's use of it often requires an over-simplification of reality. For instance,I think WCW was very Quietist at times. That's the secret of his success. But WCWcannot be Quietist because he railed against that strand of poetry in hisattacks on TSE.
Whereas, I say, what we say and what wedo are never the same thing.

t. L≠A≠N≠G≠U≠A≠G≠E
[stealing the one-word poetics of DanWaber]
Plathmight have embraced L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E once she tired of the self as beginning.
Wishful thinking. I don't thinkanything like this ever would have happened. Otherwise, it would have happenedto Adrienne Rich. Most people set a course early and follow it through changesbut don't veer onto other paths.
Should, maybe, Plath's daughter, then,have taken this, or some other, more adventurous path?
There's no hope of knowing any of this,though, without the continued living of Plath, though. Only the existence ofself makes the possible real. Or makes real the possible.
I'm not sure there is a differencethere, but I can feel one.

u.possibilities
Thesign that makes up the boy / his possibilities in terrible detail
We make possibilities out of signs.That is how we know we are poets. And these possibilities can be of manydifferent types.

v. joy
what Ilistened to: Joy Division
Sorry about expending your time withargument. I'm not a partisan, so I don't come to poetry from one pole of binarythought. I don't believe in experimentalism. Or the avant-garde. Or the hopefor originality, or even unoriginality, both of which are impossible. My focusis on possibilities. My focus is plural, not singular, so it leads me todifferent conclusions, or the rejection of conclusions in somecases.
Itake joy in these divisions of ours.

w. unlearning
I had to unlearn most of what I learned there.
Unlearningis most of learning.  Be happy forthe opportunity to unlearn, which was made possible only by the originallearning.

x. intestate
Plath died undivorced and intestate, so theHugheses control her estate. 
Ihate this kind of control over information, which has been the same for Salinger,and to some degree from Paul Zukofsky vis-a-vis his father.  As an archivist, I desperately wantrecords be used and for something else to be made out of them. I want people togain insight by the records we preserve.
Similarly,I believe in fair use, the practice of taking something and fairly makingsomething else with it. Copyright, as it is now practice (as an act ofaggression) may be the death of art, and the weakling we call poetry might bethe first to go.

y. I(art)
I… One reason you are my friend isbecause you understand that art is supposed to make more art.
Quoting:"Could you turn it [that camera] off? This is not art. This is life!" (CharleneSwansea to Ross McElwee in his film Sherman'sMarch [1966], repeated in his film TimeIndefinite [1993])
Artcomes out of art. I art art. To be that art, there can be a lifelessness. Focusis both nourisher and depriver of nourishment. But could artlessness be better?Is balance better or the abrogation of responsibility? Or are we—I shudder tothink—beset with too many responsibilities (personal, familial, societal,human, profession, artistic) but with no way of meeting each? Is time soindefinite to us that we live fully whatever life is closest to us because wedo not know when it all will end? Is our only thought, the only mover of anaction, the realization that we cannot recall our beginning but that we knowour end without ever seeing it? Are we ready for the surprise of thatrealization?
Canan art be made well without the obsession to make it too much, too often, toocompletely with the body and the mind? Does that create a friendship of artthat occludes a friendship of the beating, or beaten, blood?
Inthese terms, I think of Robert Creeley, who, one-eyed most of his life, sawwithout any depth but guessed at it from the size of things, who could not seethe dimensions of things, their particular roundness, and how light, therefore,wrapped around them, who wrote a crabbed line, in fits and stops, and clawedfrom that language an originality that befalls the smiths of the least word, afocus borne forth from an inability to focus elsewhere. I think of the humanevidence in these poems of his, amulets, maybe, possibly his talismans againsthis leftward focus, maybe touchstones to prove his connection to threefamilies. All of this in a string, as every life is, a pulled thread tautenough through the cloth holds two pieces together. But what holds in placethat thread? What threat did he encounter from the living of life that theliving of art protected him from?

z. ☞☞☞☞☞☞

 really gets me thinking about this stuff—the relationship ofour work to our selves, how the self might emerge in the work, is that animportant goal/endpoint or a moment?
Weare only here for thinking and for making people think and for allowing them todo that with the little thoughtthings we create.
In that way, we go forward.
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When not-spring

Geof Huth, "Ffth ssssssSSPRNGGggg" (2003)
Every time I come across this poem of mine, I am surprised by its beauty, not having remembered it. This is a small Letraset poem from an unfinished book of such poems, but it has a visual kinesis that I never expect. It is a poem about the bursting of spring, apparently in May, which is really when spring arrives in this area of the world. This hasn't been much of a winter around here, but we are still in the middle of winter, arguably not even one third of the way through it, and much more cold and snow may come to us. So I'll look forward to the next season now, especially since I'm ready for it, especially so since I've somehow acquired a cold in the middle of it.


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the flesh end

Geof Huth, "Myology, Plate XII" (detail of visual poem in progress, 14 January 2012)
I woke up today with a parched throat. The bedroom was dry since the heat is on. It is the middle of winter even though almost no snow has fallen so far.

After arising, a threw a few handsful of water into my mouth, swallowing them down. The swallowing made me realize that my glands were swollen quite large. I imagined them as delicately cooked sweetbreads that I could bite into gently but eat with gusto. Later in the day, a headache revealed itself, followed by a running nose. I'm using Kleenex (that actualy is the brand) generously right now. Decorating the floor with it.

Since I'm sick, I have been less productive today than I had intended to be, but a mug of hot ginger tea has calmed my throat a bit. The day has been spent more in watching than making, and deep reading was too much for me. The discomfort of a cold disturbs my concentration.

Still, I wanted to make things today, wanted to make things under the influence of a cold, so I sat at a table and began working on "Myology, Plate XIII." I am working backwards numerically through these plates, coloring them in with different materials as I go, and writing on them with different types of writing implements. These are my most colorful visual poems, and my least sequential. Text is scattered withing them and there is no one way to read the text, maybe no one way to understand each. While working on this, I regained my concentration, which allowed me to move through the work quickly. I'm not quite done with this one, but if I die tonight (a definite unlikelihood), enough of it will be left behind for it to be interpretable. (There is much more going on in it than the detail I've provided shows.)

listen to ‘Sickbed Song’ on Audioboo

I also did two audio pieces today, which I had hoped would capture some sense of my illness, so that my illness would be a partner in their creation. But except for some coughing in the second of these, which I enhanced a little as part of the performance, there was little real evidence of my illness. I was able to overcome it, able to focus on creation, incapable of being influenced too deeply by my body. A kind of failure it was.

listen to ‘Sickbed Audio Play’ on Audioboo
The first of my audio pieces was simply a glossolalic poemsong, which I realized (during its creation) was reusing a tune I'd used before. So maybe the illness has taken away my imagination. The second audio piece was an audio play, a duodrama, but also a piece that is simply too long. So maybe my illness keeps me from making anything very good.

Right now, my feet, socked and under the covers, are too hot, my head hurts, as do the insides of my nostrils from all the blowing. I am sniffling and a little achy, my eyes are stinging a little, and my legs are aching, maybe from too much time in bed. Yet I have no fever. Maybe this ailing will dissipate by the morning, and I'll be returned to my normal state of creativity, questionable enough by itself.


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His b's are 6's, his w's are long-armed x's, and his k's are crossed V's

Márton Koppány is one of our greatest poets because he knows when best to use words: almost never.

He is a perfectionist because he is minimalist, or it may be the other way around. Regardless, his focus is intense, and his intentions are focused. He makes a poem out of the smallest possible pieces. Sometimes even smaller.

And his success rate is so high, especially given his productivity, that he is the human equivalent of manna, human manna who drifts down from the heavens to nourish our impoverished minds.

Given Márton's focus on the minimalist, I find it strange to hold in my hand a poem that is a small chapbook of many pages and which stretches across a range of at least 200 words. How did he become so prolix?

By trimming the words back, by holding them in check and breaking them into lines, by making every page of this extended sentence a poem unto itself, by created enjambment across the break in a page, across (especially) the break of the turned page.


The book is designed as a performance, but not one by Márton, but one by us, the readers. We are the ones who dutifully turn the page when the page says to us "(he turns the page)," the parentheses suggesting a whisper, a slight prodding.

And it is a book about imagination, about the reader's process of imagining a book into existence, even though it is presented in the voice of the writer, a writer Hungarian, but a writer in English, a foreigner in a taken native tongue.

The turned page breaks the flow of the words. (The parenthetical does.)

But the breaking of flow is the flow. Or floe. It floats, it continues, it is, as a breathing is, continuous, otherwise it would compel us unto death.


This book (called, I should tell you, The Reader) is written in Márton's hand, a hand I know but a hand that, in this artistic pose, is more printed than cursive, a hand that isn't the shape of waves that Márton's hand usually is, and one that has a gentle quirkiness I like, some letters looking like other characters, and sometimes the word breaks into a burst of cursive before dying away: li is always a cursive ligature, a liquid form.

So we have a book about us and our thinking by a man writing in his own hand, in the most personal way, on beautiful blue quadrille pages, and all those little boxes, all those little blue lines, cannot hold us in place.

This is a book about thinking, which are what the most beautiful books are made of.

I am breathless again around Márton, because he teaches me I should give up writing. He will be enough for me. I don't need my own words.

I bend down into muteness and tip my hat.

Which is my name held in my hand.

__________

Koppány, Márton. The Reader. Second edition. Port Charlotte, Fla.: The Runaway Spoon Press, 2011 [1988].

(The book isn't listed on The Runaway Spoon Press Catalogue page, but maybe Bob Grumman, the publisher, will comment on this posting and tell us how to acquire a copy for ourselves, or -self.)


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The Start of Don Huth

Don Huth (circa 1938)
Myfather will turn 75 in a couple of months, so I've begun typing out a littlebiography of him, maybe 100 pages or so. This is not really appropriate contentfor this weblog, but I've been working on it for a couple of hours, and Ithought this rough draft of the opening might entertain at least me. I don'tknow where I'm going with this story, even though I know everything thathappens, so I'll just keep typing until I find the right voice for it. Rightnow, my tone is informal and a little jovial, but it still seems wrong for theupcoming event, if not for the story itself.
From my father, Ilearned the meaning of the "obtain" when it didn't mean to acquire. When welived in Bolivia, you see, I asked him who his favorite philosopher was, and hechose Marcus Aurelius, desiring possibly to be associated with that rare breedof philosopher who was also a general.
My father, Donald Edward Huth, was at 2:22 pm on the23rd of March 1937, weighing seven pounds and seven ounces and 21inches long, at Saint Anthony Hospital, 10010 Kennerley Road, St Louis,Missouri. My father is a genealogist, so he has handy detailed data on hislife, though, as is common with genealogies, these bits of information abouthis life do not add up to a man. They allow us to know everything about him andyet know nothing at all. So the only way to find out something about him is tounderstand what someone who knows him knows. And that is my role, as the writerin the family, as the only person likely to be able to write a book in a fewmonths, as his eldest son. And in anticipation of his seventy-fifth birthday.
As would eventually become common for people in ourfamily, my father was born in a place his family wasn't really from. The Huthsimmigrated to New Orleans and stayed there for a couple of generations, but theLehrs on his mother's side were from a place near St Louis, from the stateright across the Mississippi from his city of birth, from western Illinois. Butnot quite St Louis. He was born among family but not truly in a place offamily. He exhibited the homelessness that became the defining characteristicof his children's lives. Even today, when all of his children are in theforties and fifties, I at least am uncomfortable when I say I am fromsomewhere. I have never felt as if I were of any place at all.
My father's parents were George John Huth andCatherine Ann Lehr, whose ethnic backgrounds were primarily German. The Lehrswere primarily German, with French and German varieties of Swiss mixed in. TheHuths were more mixed. My grandfather (Grandpa to us) was one half Alsatian,one quarter Irish, and one quarter Corsican. I could say that he was threequarters French, but that would give no indication of his real ethnicity.
Donald was George and Catherine's first child andonly surviving child. They had one stillborn daughter (whom they named MaryAnn) a few years later, and then no others, so my father was a special child,firstborn, male, and only, all of which characteristics made him something tobe treasured. These facts may explain why three baby books survive describinghim and his early life, and these also made him an important part to the continuationof the family, actually the essential part. This need to continue the familywas something I felt growing up, as my brothers probably also did, for my fatherwas the last of his line.
His father George and Uncle Edward were orphaned aschildren, their parents having succumbed to the prevalent and virulent diseasesof New Orleans and then dying in the twenties. Edward himself did marry butnever had children, maybe because he and his wife could not. This last myfather as the only pioneer left to multiply the family after the firstimmigrant (another George) arrived in New Orleans in 1855. Just a little morethan a century after his great-grandfather had arrived in the United States, myfather began, with the help of my mother, to build a family of six children,three of them boys.
I like to imagine that my father was named after afamous Duck, and I'm sure his name led to some teasing while growing up, but hewas named if he were named for anyone after his uncle Edward, receiving hisuncle's name as his middle name. Later, my brother Rick also received this as amiddle name: Erick Edward. This avuncular transmission of middle names is evenmore exaggerated, and regular, in my case. My great-uncle Joseph Anthony Reilly'smiddle name was transferred to his nephew, Paul Anthony Tanner. And Uncle Paul'smiddle name was transferred to me, Geoffrey Anthony Huth. Finally, at least fornow, my middle name has been given to my nephew, Nicholas Anthony Huth.
(to be continued)
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A Poetics (# 88 - 92)

Geof Huth, "Phyllotaxis 001"
88. Discipline

"And most artists," says an anonymous architect in a film entitled My Architect: A Son's Journey, "don't have any discipline." And later tonight, I realized that, since I will be giving a reading of "mathematical poetry," that means the organizer is a mathematician, that her desire for order exceeds even mine, and mine always requires some significance to the number of poems in any book I create. Entire poems of mine are guided by various means of counting, of putting in place possibly invisible order.

Yet I cannot understand the need to have every biography of every poet be 129 or 130 words in length (and those with 129, I assume, are giving some dispensation). I cannot understand why my name cannot appear in space, six months before the reading, with a number of poems that doesn't coincide with numbers of poems of those other poets.

There are many kinds of discipline, and the poet's is, foremost, the discipline of the word, a discipline that sometimes requires the happy acceptance of chance, the messiness of error, mere dirtiness. Sometimes, control is the ability to allow something to fly out of your hands, to exist even if you do not guide it.

Discipline is more a trying than a making. The disciplined poet is the one who makes a poem with some regularity or the one who waits until the time for making it good. Discipline is the act of knowing when you can do what you must do.

Discipline is a seeing, the perception of pattern, and then the capture of the pattern. Poem as a pattern of words. Voice as a pattern of sounds. Sight as a pattern of letters or lines or blocks of text.

We live within patterns mathematical, and not. Chaos works only in that it surprises our expectation for pattern, but that unexpected pattern that brings light to the small world of the mind is the one that brings us joy. For pattern is almost a sign of the existence of meaning in the universe.


89. ear

Here, it is.


90. (ear)2

Gotta have one.


91. Punk

chore.


92. Hand

It is the hand who's the maker. Let the mind take the credit.

Tendons that prove we are fleshy marionettes. Move the fingers, through dancing, as the makers of meant.

Hand, and then to it. Hand that can mold.

Hand that perceives through a sense that must touch. I tap and I write and I scrawl and I be.

I crib and I crave and I crawl, and I be. I cradle with fingers the pen who is me.

I cradle with fingers the pen who is me. I write every word as if it were true.


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In Aprill I Will Have Done What I Had Done Last April

Every April, for the past few, I've promoted the crazy idea of International Pwoermd Writing Month, a month in which members of a self-selected group of poets each writes at least one one-word poem a month. One of the contemporary masters of the form, someone who so often surprises me with his new ideas, is Jonathan Jones, lately of Brussels, but a citizen himself of the United Kingdom.

Last April, he not only participated in InterNaPwoWriMo, he also produced a little booklet in green (the color of spring) of the pwoermds he had created. and a few months later he sent me a copy, along with an unnecessary note excusing the delay. So I have now waited about half a year to actually write a few words about this book. Delay is what keeps the world moving.

He called this booklet "apri'll," because April will, and he opens the book with this epigraph from Octavio Paz

No one is a poet unless he has felt the temptation to destroy language or create another one, unless he has experienced the fascination of nonmeaning and the no less terrifying fascination of meaning that is inexpressible.

which is a good enough opening to a book of pwoermds, a book of new and reformulated words.

Since "apri'll" is such a small book, my commenting on even a few pwoermds constitutes uncovering a larger than usual percentage of the book, so I will chew only briefly on only a few pwoermds:

'lossom

The blossom is broken because it is not quite full, not quite blooming. That is how I take it, though I assume we could read it that the blossom has begun to drop its petals. But that doesn't fit with the theme of spring, and that would better be a blosso' (which doesn't work at all as well as a poem).

chimpanzed

Simply an American chimpanzee translated into a British chimpanzed. So it is merely a joke, but a joke about language, and one that requires some understanding of language use across dialects. And you have to avoid pronouncing it as a two-syllable word.

thumbrella

A beautiful little pwoermd about a tiny umbrella, maybe one used by a 

dwarful

which might be a small handful or might be an awful small thing.

kn&t

My favorite of these is the unpronounceable one, the one that is purely itself, the one that has tied its round circle of an o into a knot.

And for a few more I give you a green page from the book, which has only a green cover and white pages. I made it green so you could appreciate its vernal fecundity. And don't forget to appreciate his found pwoermds (and the wonderful bibliographic detail that accompany them).



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The Great Unread

I am sitting in a small room with a tiny percentage of my books. Even after donating away about 2,200 books last month, I'm sure I still have at least one and a half times that number left, and maybe double.

As I was looking throw the three small bookshelves here for a tiny book by Jonathan Jones (apri'll) and not finding it, I realized that I would probably not ever finish reading these books of mine. They would surround me, but they would not be inside me. Or not completely. I will have skimmed them, or flipped through them. I will have read a chapter or two, or looked a fact up in them. Yet I still will have become them.

These books, even unread, define me. Take one shelf, and you'll see that I am interested in the typographic, the visual, the poetic, the conceptual. You will already see, from this small sidetable's holdings, that I am a visual poet (or, less likely, one of those very rare few who enjoy visual poetry yet never create any).

While looking through the shelves, I noticed that two books were shelved upside down, something I simply never recall having done before. But there they were: Jackson Mac Low's Representative Works: 1938-1985 and Michael Harney's The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea were resting on their heads. They would they saw was in some ways backwards, but in other ways just right given the place where they live, a place overwhelmed by poetry, but accepting others in as well, along with art supplies, clean clear bottles that used to hold scotch, the beginnings of sculptural visual poems, or just the pieces for them.

Oh, there are books I've read sitting around me as well, but this is primarily a selection of books I intend to read relatively soon, probably about 250 of them, but maybe more. I have brought them around me, brought them close, so that they might keep me warm with their thoughts, even if I haven't allowed those thoughts to penetrate me yet. And I have not penetrated them myself.

Because reading is an interpenetration. A physical penetration (but also intellectual) of the book by the reader. An intellectual penetration of the reader by the book.

Yet we will all die, soon enough, without having read so many score of the books we had intended to read. Still, we feel somehow increased by them. It is strange, sometimes, to think of the books I've never read. For instance, Moby-Dick, yet I feel something of the book, I've picked up pieces of it. (Read all the encyclopedic matter in it once in Ghana, read the Classics Illustrated comic book version as a child in Barbados, and I've seen so many famous and unknown illustrations of it—but I've never seen a movie version.) We are increased even by what we only tangentially experience.

Tangenitally.

It is all about penetration, and degrees of penetration. What we learn about it, and how deeply we learn. But having that unread book is important.

A friend of mine believes that the most potent review is the review of silence, a total lack of response. She says that that silence speaks of a deep inability to like and, therefore, to respond to the author of a work. She claims that silence means the book, the poem, the story has not been loved. But I don't believe that.

First, I realize that some books go years without being read, even books on my shelves. Then one day seems, for unknown reasons, the day to read that book, and when I read it I am exalted. It is at least possible that I know the unread books well enough to know when it feels right to read that book, and then I find myself in the perfect frame of mind to enjoy the book.

A frame of mind is a frame of reference. It controls the book as much as the book's contents do.

So some people don't respond because they have not had time to read the book.

Second, sometimes people find it difficult to respond to a book. I have found myself loving a book, found myself constructing a review in my head, and then never writing the review because the time doesn't feel right, because I'm tired, because I feel empty of useful sequences of words. And I write more than most people, and probably with more ease. Yet response is hard.

Even if the books gives in to you, gives itself over to you, gives everything of itself to you, you still have the requirement of a personal response, one that fits the time, the place, and one that fits the response the book is giving you.

Interpenetration. You have to give to get.

Or we never read a book. We merely read versions of ourselves.

I'm thinking of this, having tried to find a little book I thought I was ready to respond to, one I loved, one I'd never forgotten, one that I'd planned to respond to tonight, one that I've lost, however temporarily. Yet, no matter how temporary that loss is, I feel it like a void inside me.

Because I want to respond, because I want people to know when their work moves me, because I feel a responsibility to respond. Because even the least of us writers, those who work in the small time that I do, they have voices, and when they yell them into a canyon they want to hear the voice, somehow changed, and somehow reassuring and different from the original, echoing back.

For the book is the voice yelled out, and the echo is the reader responding.

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