| volume 6 of time remaining: 2017-2018 july-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
 |
|
A lot of revisionary recollection and reading notes. Part 1 struggling with text for House, my Western Front sketchup show. Garden pleasure. Part 4 working on Ditches of Alberta for Peter von Tiesenhausen's Songs for Pythagoras monograph. Part 5, family wedding in the country. notes: Patrick Leigh Fermor The time of gifts, Between the woods and the water, The broken road: from the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, Artemis Cooper Patrick Leigh Fermor: an adventure, Durrell Prospero's cell, Bitter lemons, Reflections on a marine Venus, The Alexandria quartet, Bowker Through the dark labyrinth: a biography of Lawrence Durrell, Twombly, Proulx Barkskins, Margaret Dickie On the modernist long poem, Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, Virgil, Dante, Ovid, Wilhelm Dante and Pound: the epic of judgement, core.jpg, Woolf Jacob's room and Diary vol 2, Stan Brakhage, Adam Bede and Middlemarch, Hilary Mantel Giving up the ghost and Bring up the bodies, Harrod The last sane man: Michael Cardew, Kenner The Pound era, Robinson Lila and Home, Coleridge: early visions, Madeleine Thien Dogs at the perimeter and Do not say we have nothing, Cynthia Shearer, Hvorostovsky, Kaufmann singing Au fond du temple saint, Netrebko and Garanca, Wordsworth The prelude, Sebastian Barry Days without end and Annie Dunne, The Vietnam war 1-5, John Musgrave, Annals of a former world, Abderrahmane Sissako Timuktu, Chris Smith The pool, Aksel Rykkvin, Peter von Tiesenhausen, Malouf An imaginary life, Mike Mills Twentieth century women, Cox's orange pippin, Mirabelle plum, Flemish Beauty pear, Sisters of grass, Selected letters of Vanessa Bell, Rebecca West Sunflower, Alison Macleod All the beloved ghosts, Patrick O'Brian Desolation Harbour, Post captain, HMS Surprise, The Mauritius command and Treason's harbour, Artaud, Robbie Burns, Hegel, Donald Davie Pound, Luis Posse, Wittgenstein, Pergolesi Stabat Mater, Baumann Roses from the steel dust, John Heydon, Olson Projective verse, Empires of the word: a language history of the world, The age of wonder, Helen in Egypt, the Georgics, Ali Smiith How to be both, Holmes This long pursuit, William Godwin and Mary Wollstencraft, Margaret Cavendish, Asghar Farhadi Le passé, Congenial spirits: the selected letters of Virginia Woolf, Neruda, Octavio Paz, Creeley Contexts of poetry, Counting Crows A long December. mentioned: Ken Sallit, Louie E, Miriam Loken, Emilee Baum Trucks, Cheryl Sourkes, Jacob Korzcinski, Lois Home, Mafalda Reis Moore, Kathy Bara, Gianfranco Foscino, Greg Morrison, Don Carmichael, Elaine Diggle, Geneviève Dubé, Stêpán and Iva, Cornelius Wiens, David Prest, Rob Mills, Jam Ismail, Ryan and Tania of Hoodoo Ranch, Randy Paton, Michael Sean Duke, Helen Hattori, Rowen Epp, Nicole at Planet Hair, Jeremy Ball, Luke, Russell Kildahl, Judith Copithorne, Paul Epp, Leah Rosling, David Beach, Tom Fendler, Susan Moul, Joyce Frazee, Jennifer Flower, Paul Grant, Frank Doerksen, Tom Fendler, Doug and Gail *, Ruby-Marie Dennis, Susan Chai, Helga Pakasaar, Oliver Husain, Mike at Nicola Valley Plumbing, George Konrad, Margo MacLeod, Sam and Ellen Gerrard, Gordon Dryer, Julia Smith, Rhonda Dunn, MJ Coutlee, Patrick Goetz. 1890 Granite Ave, Lower NIcola, Black Canyon Road, Packing House Cafe in Spence's Bridge, Nine Mile Gardens, Western Front Gallery, Service Canada office, Coutlee Avenue, Hamilton Hill, Home Hardware and Purity Feeds in Merritt, Colletteville, Merritt Library, Greyhound Station, Wilder Snail Cafe, Union Market, Coquihalla Highway, St Michael's yard, Coldwater River, Brambles Bakery, Canadian Tire, Highway 97, Spius Creek, Patricia Hotel, Grene Wode Farm on Zero Ave, Bradner Road, Ross Road, Mt Baker, Strathcona Community Garden, Voght St. Open mic night at Kekuli Cafe, John Luther Adams, Ursula Le Guin, Nicola Valley Garden Club, Emily Dickinson, Being about, Mordenmiss Clothing in,Hangzhou, Pioneer pottery, Filmoteca de Cantabria in Santander, Laila's birthday, AO Scott, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Nigel Short, Mozart Laudate, Charles Bowden, Shearer The wonder book of the air, Cather, Richard Misrach The sky book, Gilligan, Doubiago, Fuster, Abrams, Vickie Hearne, Talmy, Shepard, Michael Benedikt on architecture, David Masumoto, Craig Childs, Mark Spragg, Barry Lopez fiction, Ivan Doig This house of sky, Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Lee Bontecou, Milo Wolff and Carver Mead, Goldstein The organism, the Georgia Strait, Ursula Le Guin, , Tara Westover Educated: a memoir, The good wife season 2, Gendlin Focusing, Padraic Colum She moved through the fair, West Coast Seeds, Reservoir 13, Catullus, Zukovsky A, Olivier Assayas L'heure d'été.
|
26 July 2017 Hot early afternoon in a high-walled little enclosure in the shade of a sparsely branched old sour cherry tree. Above me bright very ripe red cherries against bright green leaves; at the foot of the ladder on ground pecked clean three young hens murmuring. Tracey in the shop next door sometimes banging a nail, afterward holding up the nozzle of a hose lying on the ground so I could wash my hands in hot water. I could see she was pleased to own her new domain. We smiled into each other's eyes. Then I was driving with my bucket of cherries past weather-scorched pioneer buildings and through wide views of the valley, bouyant in high summer brightness and neighbourly kindness, feeling yes I live in the right place. 3 August Fourth day of smoked air with a bit of heat in the afternoon. Still trying to dry apricots, trays on the porch. 6 August This morning I was lifting the flounced skirts of the wildflower edge and sweeping California poppy seeds into the dustpan. Same with the light husks under the alfalfa heap. Scattered both onto bare sections of the fence beds. 8 Saw Erin across the road at the Tuesday soup kitchen and have sent her away with a box of potatoes, chard, carrots, beets, beans, squash, parsley, basil, cucumbers. - While I was trying to fall asleep last night something happened that I was realizing often happens and that I thought I should try to describe. I'm not sure I can summon it at this moment. It's when I think of Mary as she is now, when I think of what has become of her. It's as if all value drops out of life, as if a hole opens into black vacuum under or in front of me. It's a sensation not a judgment. 13 August When I woke it had rained some. Clear skies and wind today. A hard night, couldn't sleep, little aches all over. Thought I'd be good for nothing but went out into the kind light and weeded the whole of the fence bed from raspberries through iris and asparagus to the lattice. 17 August Proulx Barkskins. She's skilled, why do i find it trivial. Skilled how. Sensory detail and historical research. I liked the sensory detail in chapter 1 but soon could see her throwing it on in handfuls for no reason but vivid prose. Why do I love sensory detail and historical research in O'Brian and not her - I asked that and the answer was that O'Brian invents a friendship. He is fond of his characters and joyful in the world's fullness. Barkskins is panoramic etc but it's loveless and joyless. 28 August Formating In America - which it has become in retrospect - American years. In what way, particularly - Tom and Tom's story, I lived in Tom's life, made my own inside his - belonged to an American union, paid American taxes, had a social security number and a California driver's license, was a para-citizen, and at the same time was looking about me with traveler's interest in foreign ways. Was nation as such more real to me than at home? Maybe yes, in the way it is more real to Americans, who are so avowed to themselves as that. And the sense of consequence about US politics, naturally. The elections. The mad right wing, a concentrated extreme of elaborated stupidity. More of them, a more developed subculture. September 4th Six half-pints of sungolds canned whole like little plums; two pints of black cherry tomatoes canned whole too; four half-pints of red tomatoes put through the blender for frothy juice; all with a bit of salt and a couple of tsp of cider vinegar, the wholes with sprigs of basil and the frothed with big cloves of garlic. Canning has got more casual, I do it while I'm doing other things, but when the jars have cooled I still climb up on the counter to arrange them nicely on the blue shelves and then get down and gaze at their lovely colours. Then mop the kitchen floor's mud tracks and spilt water. Working on the couch in the verandah these days. It's summery. Screen door propped open lets in a cool breeze. There's a bamboo blind I can lower in the morning. Blue tool chest next to me for the laptop or a cup. Street voices. Cyclamen and geranium pink and red behind the dark red not-wicker armchair in the corner. Scent of rose geranium drying on the table. September 17 Sunday 11:19, boiler grumbling, weak sun through smoke, passionfruit scent of basil in a vase. Have been farming - rough skin on my thumb and forefinger - clearing the long paths, hauling piles of mostly tomato vines to the compost, digging potatoes, curing squash on the porch, picking tomatoes and giving them away, picking plums and canning them or setting them them on trays to dry in the jeep, collecting seed. September 22 In the background of the work with sketchup textss ome thought about the winter's work whatever it'll be. Sense of the otherness of what I've called the Orpheus work, as if a realm away from, other than, personal limitation. Reader's notes. Long weighing of voices, assembly of loved companions. Always an irritable eager ear. September 23
the later cantos are bathed in words of love, just as they are resplendent with light The true intuition in flow, light, crystalline heaven etc is the granular void fabric of cosmos. Just as well he didn't study physics because it hadn't got far enough in his time. He recognized the vision to come in what he read here and there, and was free enough to gather it from out of its mistaken contexts. Why is granular void fabric of cosmos self-evidently a realm of love for me? It is god by any reasonable meaning of the term, but that doesn't say why it is love - does it seem love because it recollects amnion? It says no. Is it love as to an ultimate parent? YES.
Paradisal scent of Persian basil here next to me by the window in a glass box that has it seems kept it fresh in clean water and let it put out white threads of root. September 25 Red-winged blackbirds in the sunflowers. I was telling Rob on the phone last night about the Persian basil staying fresh by putting out little roots and he told me estate gardeners would keep grapes fresh into the winter by holding cut vines in water. fa di clarità l'aer tremare love is not a substance but a movement within a substance What I saw is a granular form with a hovering current within it.
My god how does he do it! September 27 By the Thompson - it's low - flat, slow, very slightly roughened - I wanted to say green but no - directly in front of me slate with a golden glaze - downstream the glaze is a uniform violet-blue. A breeze, a yellow butterfly, a bit of sagebrush for the scent, a bluegreen stone, every stone a different color, sweet tiny insistence of a cricket, a fish's authoritative whack. River's edge more golden now, littlest chuckle of water on stone. Between Cache Creek and Spence's Bridge the colors grey, burnt sugar, sage, pine's black green, dry grass not pale but that intense scorched-looking caramel. Across from me now a scarp subtle like my cliff used to be. Sky over the hill blue, blue. Trucks on Highway 1. Black god-mountain of Spence's Bridge. Breeze in a saskatoon bush so dry it's clacking. The river - ... its evenness of flow. Peace like a river. I fell silent. I took the Logan Lake road outbound. The mine stood in its grand colored tiers like a massive off-earth temple. The long drop into the Thompson's vast gorge at Ashcroft astonished. It was oh a splendid day, fast, bright and fresh. I brought home sagebrush, books, pears, grapes, windfall apples and two trees. As I came through Shackan there was someone in the nursery for the first time, a woman with a hose and a girl with her hood up sorting seeds. "I was wondering if you could sell me a ponderosa pine and a couple of trembling aspens." "I think I can do that." She was short and broad with a round open face. When she carried the pine to the jeep she asked my name, said she is Shawna Bara. I said I know a Bara in Merritt ... Kathy. "She's my cousin." - The way she said 'cousin' with a softening in her voice. September 30 I sent for vol 2 because I wanted to see her writing Jacob. She's less in it than in vol 3, social notes, gossip, but her habit already so swift and visual. "I don't know whether memory poured a little mist." "Stout Dorothy was bathing Timothy and smoking - a truncated woman, amiable, red, a little beery, anyhow cheery, & Moore said, very kindly, dearie to the baby, crying for food, like a wise old nurse. Rather they were like a couple of fat beavers with their young. Fine little cubs too, fat, hard, sturdy, likely to do us all credit when we are all dead." Moore the philosopher. 6:39 in the chair, lucent ivory above Hamilton Hill, one star over the church roof doubled by the double panes, Russian olive - always irritated by having to name it with two words - stirring in fine-cut silhoette below two lines of wire, an old cat with drooping belly trotting privily across the corner - cats on the street have a wilful defiant look because town sentimentalists insist they be kept indoors. Why is it that I dote on her metaphoric ways but sternly forbade metaphor in my students. I think because of the way she floats along, it's native to her, she's in the right rhythm for it and she's reading straight off what she sees, is attentive enough to get it exact. With them it clanked, it jarred, it was like a box deposited on a sidewalk. October 4 A solid frost last night. The garden lies in wilt. October 7 Two old men in a small house on one of the short east-west streets in Lower Nic. The ad said tools so I was there early. Bought a reciprocating saw for $10. "I'll give you some more blades I've got" he said and went back into his shed. Some clamps, a little nail puller. I had the feeling I get when objects are passing out of someone's life into mine. The Uhls. Antlers over the garage door. I realized I could use the saw to cut the last broken limb off the plum so then I had to take it to Home Hardware to have someone show me how to change the blade for a longer one. That took a time because it's an old model, and five people not counting me, but I like standing around in Home Hardware, I've been there a lot, I know the faces, some know me. It's the only community I sort of belong to here. It rained last night, at midday was windy enough to knock the bench off the porch, but then in the afternoon was golden warm. I tore down the bean vines, dug the last carrots in the pea bed, hauled frozen heaps to the compost. Tom the Home Hardware lumber man I like was walking past and when I'd waved stepped in past the mushroom compost to say all summer he'd enjoyed looking at my garden. October 8 The fantasy sketchups have been about dreaming up a man I could feel worthy of me and I've seen my novelists doing that too in their most energized books: Randolph Henry Ash, Shevek, Thomas Cromwell. Woolf doesn't need to and Dorothy is her own hero. Shearer's Harrison Durrance is about loving someone who's a hero only in energy. Mehring some kind of partial hero, a hero of privilege maybe. October 20 Her creamy tone. They ride up-country towards Katharine without banner or display, a tight knot of armed men. It is a clear day and bitter cold. The brown tussocky land shows through layers of hard frost, and herons flap from frozen pools. Clouds stack and shift on the horizon, slate-grey and a mild deceptive rose; leading them from early afternoon is a silvered moon as mean as a clipped coin. Katherine is sitting by the fire shrunk into a cape of very good ermines. The king will want that back, he thinks, if she dies. She glances up, and puts out a hand for him to kiss: unwilling, but more because of the chill, he thinks, than because she is reluctant to acknowledge him. She is jaundiced, and there is an invalid fug in the room - the faint animal scent of the furs, a vegetal stench of undrained cooking water, and the sour reek from a bowl with which a girl hurries away: containing, he suspects, the evacuated contents of the dowager's stomach. If she is ill in the night, perhaps she dreams of the gardens of the Alhambra, where she grew up: the marble pavements, the bubbling of crystal water into basins, the drag of a white peacock's tail and the scent of lemons. I could have brought her a lemon in my saddlebag, he thinks. 'We called him the New Year's prince,' Wolsey had said. 'He lived fifty-two days, and I counted every one.' England in winter: the pall of sliding snow, blanketing the fields and palace roofs, smothering tile and gable, slipping silent over window glass; feathering the rutted tracks, weighting the boughs of oak and yew, sealing the fishes under ice and freezing the bird to the branch. Since his return from Kimbolton, London has closed around him: late autumn, her fading and melancholy evenings, her early dark. 'Stack and shift,' 'shrunk into,' 'sliding snow,' 'smothering,' 'feathering,' 'the drag of:' she's good at exact unexpected verbs. She tells Cromwell's thoughts to keep us inside him and makes them kind, interesting thoughts so that we like being him. We like the particularity of what he notices, 'faint animal scent,' 'vegetal stench,' and the way his fantasy enriches us sideways into a white peacock and the scent of lemons. She's gorgeously rhythmic, elasticizes many sentences with colons and semicolons. - When I arrive at my curb these days I sit in the jeep looking sideways at the garden. It's cleared to dark earth and what's left is colored. Gooseberry arms, raspberry bushes: pink, orange, rust, maroon, purple. Golden crescents under the peach. Greengage yellow. Pear, apricot, cherry starting to turn. Nectarine dropping its leaves without turning. Sunflowers standing in rags. Iris straps lying down. California poppies still budding along the warm sidewalk. October 22 Cardew and Pound. How they are similar. 1901, 1885. They were both pre-war. Neither caved to the flab of their own time, both founded themselves in the whole history of their craft. Compared to their peers their work has hold. Not all of it but when it does. I want to say tight but like gravity, like the moon. The well-wrought urn stands utterly self-possessed. November 12 Robinson's Home. It's better than Lila, simpler and tighter, I mean strung tight with the best kind of suspense, the true kind about whether people are going to hold it together. I liked Jack, the drunk prodigal son, but I didn't think she was honest enough about him. She let it be thought his disaffection was just a mystery but it seemed to me he was outside the family because he knew they were all lying about god. From childhood he was the only honest one. He drank because he hadn't sorted it out to be able to know with clarity that they were wrong and he was right. Apart from her religious nostalgia I liked the grey steady voice she found. I felt it would be useable to write about Tom. But then whenever I get into the actual record of Tom and me I don't see that any voice would be adequate to our story. November 21 Three nights later he was sitting at his post under a bright moon - "how hard to describe that sort of Queen's metal plating, which the Moonlight forms on the bottle-green Sea" The word plating. I thought of reading Tom the description of his plated smile in my room in the West with a pang, not because it hurt his feelings - it did, he was furious - but because he instantly got my use of the word. There it was: there was why. Then I stamp my foot and scold him: we should still be together, you. November 23 How did I get to Hvorostovsky last night. Sideways-rummaging in Youtube from some source I don't remember, in Au fond du temple saint struck by his exceptional sexy all-out embodiment, looking for more. Someone in the comments said RIP. He's dead? It turned out he'd died yesterday morning in London. When someone of stature dies does notice of him diffuse through space to reach even this dull dirty outpost? Not 'his spirit' but people's response, which in a way is 'his spirit'. I mean in the sense that it's about him, a wave in his key radiating invisibly and received unconsciously. Kaufmann when he is singing Au fond du temple with Hvorostovsky gestures operatically and when Hvorostovsky is singing is visibly getting himself ready to sing again. Hvorostovsky doesn't gesture and his face when Kaufmann is singing is full of privacy, responding minutely to what he sees in the audience and to his own thoughts. Hvorostovsky in his fifties was in full gleam, whereas Netrebko and Garanca in their forties have lost their gleam I assume to motherhood. Netrebko's smile has gone old-tarty in a blown-up moon face. Exquisite Garanca is thickened and I think saddened. They sing well but singing wasn't all they were. When does beauty last into middle age and is it self-sacrifice that spoils it? "If you're pleased with what you're doing it's the ultimate happiness in the world." Hvorostovsky seemed generous but I doubt he did what he didn't want to do. So then why did he plant a little death-seed in his brain? Was it his way to want to leave at his peak? The Moscow concert he did with Garanca in 2015 when he and she and his family already knew his diagnosis was like saying goodbye to a marvelous life. He picks up the pile of bouquets to distribute to the women of the orchestra. His children get on stage to help him. He leans over to kiss his mother in the front row. At the last he sings a Russian folk song a capella and Garanca at the side of the stage wipes tears. The audience is in raptures. He lays his hand on his heart. 13 December Fresh snow, one set of footprints crossing the street. Sickle moon. I put on long underwear and went out and scraped the sidewalk. It's loud when people are sleeping. Schoolbus drives north trailing quiet curlecues of snow off its roof. Taxi going home silently turns the corner onto Granite. 17 December In a sheet called working that has current bits I see that I'm better now - I didn't know that. And that recognizing intuition of cortical structure is as philosophically radical as recognizing prebirth intuition. The seeing-through talent found another task. Slow work both. 18 December When I look at the bits gathered from earlier years I see that I'm more in the clear now, not tethered to other people's language as much. Balanced not looking for balance. - Look at that, I did go out and cut a tree. Road allowance a bit of the way up 97 where I'd seen little pines last summer. It sprawls the way young ponderosas do, branches far apart with a messy brush of needles only at their tips, but I could smell it even in the jeep. Hugh was coming out of what he called a nooner when I curvetted into my parking spot, kidded me about being on the run because I didn't have a cutting permit and gave me a sideways hug because I was being charming. 21 December Diffusing plumes hundreds of feet tall over the town night and day, mills and the new hog-fuel plant. 22 December When white reflects upward the tender skies of winter. 31 December Deep snow in the garden showing tracks along the west side of the house and diverging across the beds. Not human, a human would have used the shoveled paths. Something quite large and more than one. Narrow tracks but deep. - Little valentine shapes, deer prints. 7 January 2018 Dark quiet Sunday night after 10. I'd turned off the room lights and was looking out to see whether the sidewalk I scraped this aft was freezing. There was a deer on the road, light leggy thing hesitating on the far side of the snow bank, gazing sideways into my yard. Would it come in. No, it crossed carefully toward the parking lot as if wary of ice. - There it comes back the other way - or is this one larger - followed by another. January 10 Out at eight this morning shoving wet heavy snow off the sidewalk, Doug in his sweatshirt hood and plaid jacket coughing over by his own fence. Grey mist so low I can't see the hill. It has silvered the blue spruce lightly all over. The Mac Pro fan is whining as it copies Here onto Dropbox for the show. January 22 Along the high pass a sheet of falling spangles under every orange lamp, behind them steep banks with deeply padded fir trees deep in snow. Oncoming headlights, snow streaking horizontally past the large black window, my young Brit with his head back asleep like a child. The big bus riding softly silently forward into the dark. January 31 Living in such a sense of peril. Is there a tiny raised edge that can trip me, is there hidden ice that will throw me flat, should I be aware of what I'm carrying in case I fall, is there raised concrete I could crack my head on, will these boots cause me two weeks of pain. Standing at the counter just now, turning toward the sink holding the blender's blades, my right leg suddenly wasn't there under me so I sat down hard and cut my finger. There's a bruise on the sole of my right foot just from walking on it. February 1 From In America 6-5 notes on AG. "Started a volume of Aphrodite's garden at random and there found such another texture, someone I've forgotten I was." February 4 It was about being - I can say that. I was a solid young person. I turned to air. The beautiful work is air. February 6 Working with the Dames rocket page of summary statements about the mind of the time - I needed a lot of focus to put the statements into an order. It's work I'm frail in, not easily holding the parts known in a whole - is that the way to say it - bluntly - what I'm seeing is a transparent medium I was moving something in, moving something also transparent - something like that. It's hard to do, I shy from it, want to go away. There's a grasp in these little lines that I don't have in the journal of that time. The lines say what I was doing, what was happening with a precision that the drugs ruined in writing. Not only drugs, that's one of my questions - thinking this section is the trickiest, I have most to do in it, blending that time with this one - not only drugs because I opened abandonment and then went into defensive scrambling. I didn't know how to work with it. February 7 Peter's offer suddenly. Twelve days. [Peter von Tiessenhausen asks me to write a piece for his Pythagoras catalogue.] February 8 What do I know. Ditches of Alberta, what it's like there. Something Greek. February 10 Recalling what it's like to step onto the line in art. What is this really, what is the depth of this, what is the best I can make with this, the truest. February 13 After the raspberry season an afternoon topping broccoli for a Sikh family. Judy was there too so it would have been the second summer, 17. There was a boy a bit younger than me working the next row. I got into a race with him. Afterward we collapsed leaning back on our arms at the ends of our rows watching everyone else still working their way up. I sometimes think of it, why. Young brightness. The pleasure of sudden good company, we'd flashed into something together. There was more too, I was doing something I'd never done before, focusing at speed. I set a gallopping rhythm that forced me to find and slash each broccoli head on the fly. If I missed one I didn't break rhythm. What exactly was it like: close green and speed but not blurred, a sensation of crystalline grip. I remember it, though I've never described it, because it was conscious. February 14 Am I learning how to work with shreds. Don't quote, rework. Keep finding how much more can be carved off. February 15 Cadence. Lightness. Exact unusual word. Reflexive notice. Cutting everything explicit and letting the network carry the matter. I'm in it, I can begin to see clumps, dimly maybe a longer wave, but then my head darkens and stiffens, I have to stop. Will I have enough time. February 16 A sort of chime by word-substitutions. - How to say that: I've written a word but hear another when I see it, then substitute the one I heard but with the first word as if still hanging in the net. February 17 Such a nice photo-book dream. Small book with interesting small photos that held steady so I could study them. Three people standing in a subway car, a young man by himself on the left, a bright look on his face. A plain little plaza. Quite a complicated approaching group of a few adults and what at first seemed to be children but were upright furry animals wearing clothes. He - someone - asked where I'd got the book. "From my fool in Afghanistan." The way it can be in a dream where you don't know what you're going to say. February 18 Here's how it ends:
February 23 Another white morning. People don't seem to describe white skies. What is this secure silent white vacuum good for. Secure and so endangered when I move among surfaces that can split my head. Wind lifting a flux off a roof. Is there a word for that brief jagged lightly driven twisting current of spangles. Feeling yes these last years I do have a task and I know what it is and yes the white vacuum is right for it. What spine of story. Not his tedious useless cast of men he loves or hates. The story of fading. Conversations. The present. Personal universal scraps. Dissociation, myth in which I'm both searching and waiting to be found. Small self and larger self. Not personas but vistas. Cosmos rather than history. February 25 Pound chants his poems in a heavy lagging growl and in as if an Old English accent. Hearing him I can understand how any cranky rubbish he puts together in that voice and cadence can seem to him to be poetry. There was another man in the film speaking with the light natural flex of an educated American, who by contrast seemed a marvel of humane intelligence. Ezra was trying to impersonate Homer and other tribal scalds? If he composes in that pretentious voice how does he come to the sublime lines there also are? And the coarse jocularity of his letters to other men, how can his taste be both so fine and so vile? February 26 Olson for instance saying his goddesses are programmatic and uninteresting. I think his goddesses and crystalline-somethings and water and sky are essential in some technical way. They're true invocations of hormonal and network dynamics that found his best effects, yes? And refer to network dynamics he unusually intuits. His many languages had become natural to him over time. They help him stay out of explanation don't they. They give the lit industry things to do too and maybe he thought of that. I'm seeing what a mess the Cantos are along with their little bursts of loving perfection. February 28 From 2013 last winter in Mesa Grande:
March 2 There isn't wind but the air is full of sensitive motion. Snow falling through the corner's amber spotlight plunges, hesitates, drifts sideways, eddies briefly upward; is driven, pauses, funnels down, mills loosely, twists, arcs, schools like small fishes. The shape of fall next to the window shows there's an air envelope around the house. It's after eleven, no traffic and by now a sparkling inch on what had been a bare street. On the Coque semis can't make the hill and others are jack-knifing on their way down. March 4 Preference for exile is an instinct for living on my actual foundation.
the lightness, the dexterity, the rhythmic music of the Georgics luminous fields where the true / and faithful gather March 12 In Whitehall a grey drizzle wept down upon the Admiralty, but in Sussex the air was dry - dry and perfectly still. The smoke rose from the chimney of the small drawing-room at Mapes Court in a tall, unwavering plume, a hundred feet before its head drifted away in a blue mist to lie in the hollows of the downs behind the house. The leaves were hanging yet, but only just, and from time to time the bright yellow rounds on the tree outside the window dropped of themselves, twirling in their slow fall to join the golden carpet at its foot, and in the silence the whispering impact of each leaf could be heard - a silence as peaceful as an easy death. 'At the first breath of wind those trees will all be bare,' observed Dr Maturin. 'Yet autumn is a kind of spring too, for there is never a one but is pushed off by its own next-coming bud.' HMS Surprise 1973. Third day of sun. That openness too, the year suddenly opened wide. Shrunk lumps of dirty snow, St Michael's peeling white picket fence, the spruce tall and composed lifting just the last inches of any branch in fading westerly light. The love book. The way that little girl hid her love for her father in a chocolate box under the floor of her first house. Hid it from herself by feeling it for a boy who looked as Ed must have looked when she was a baby. He didn't want her but she needed to love and found a way. That was admirable but it was the root of all the imaginary boyfriends. March 14 I'm seeing something. The Orpheus story is a sort of transparent structure drifting underlaid like a large branch of seaweed. It's the story of looking for the lame little girl. March 15 Notes in origin. The origin was early love. Working every day on my shreds. Something is forming but I so easily lose my sense of it I HAVE to stay in touch with the work continuously from now on. March 17 Dozing this morning I saw the peaked cullet lit by a sharp spotlight at ninety degrees so it was just a couple of lines of hard-edged white reflection. Why is that worth telling. Because it was like being given a photo taken by someone else. Because it shows the brain's sophistication. If it were speaking to me what would it be saying. The peaked cullet is as if the transparent work or its worker. It would be saying see it lit from another angle? The peaked cullet is the brain. And the world.
March 18 'Thank you,' said Stephen. 'But the being upon whom I am about to wait, though eminent for precedence, does not stand on ceremony.' 'What can he have meant by eminent for precedence?' asked Mr Prote. 'Anyone who is anyone, apart from us, is at the Governor's.' In fact the being's precedence was merely alphabetical: for in the gaiety of his heart Dr Maturin had referred to the aardvark. It stood before him now, a pale creature with a bulky hog-backed body close on five feet long, a broad tail, an immense elongated head ending in a disk-like snout, short stout legs and disproportionately long translucent ass's ears; it was partially covered with sparse yellowish hair that showed the unwholesome nightwalker's skin below; it blinked repeatedly. The aardvark was acutely conscious of its position and from time to time it licked its small tubular lips, for not only had it been measured and weighed, while a tuft of bristles that could ill be spared had been clipped from its flank, but now it was being looked at through a diminishing-glass and drawn. It was a meek, apologetic animal, incapable of biting and too shy to scratch; and it grew lower and lower in its spirits: its ears drooped until they obscured its weak, melancholy, long-lashed eyes. 'There, honey, it is done,' said Stephen, showing the aardvark its likeness: and calling upwards through the ceiling he said, 'Mr van der Poel, I am infinitely obliged to you, sir. Do not stir, I beg. I shall lock the door and leave the key under the mat: I am going back to the ship, and tomorrow you shall see the egg.' The Mauritius command 1977. b.1914. He was 63. 'Calling upwards through the ceiling' - when has anyone else ever seen that. -
Seeing how my years of physics notes gave me concepts for other uses. March 20 Struggling in the folder called The air. It doesn't sort to any fineness: a shred I slot into any category can resonate in some or all of the rest. And that resonance is what thrills me so what to do. March 24 It's a dead season bare and grey-brown. Closed sky again. A robin looking cold. In Washington the March for our Lives led by teenagers pressing to vote out anyone accepting NRA money. 800 other events. Emma Gonzales' crying naked face. March 27
The winter has been mostly windless but at this moment a stiff wind from the south herding gravel dust up the street. Long arms of the spruce shoved sideways and swaying back. It's like a June wind. March 31 Discontent, antsy. April is shabby, raw, bare and ugly. I'm sick of eating carefully and having no fun at all. April 1st, Easter Sunday
it's the flight and droop of the sentence, where the accent falls, the full stop. When one feels something remote, separate, pure, thats style. And, I think, almost the only permanent quality, the one that survives, that satisfies. And we went to Daphnis, and wandered in olive woods, and to Sunium, the temple on a cliff, which cliff is soft with flowers, all again no bigger than pearls or topazes. Sounion. I've copied that for the pleasure of having stood where she stood - not stood, but crept into a tent with Alain Olivier and a handful of poppies to fuck in honor of the gods, that Sunday morning having been brought Turkish coffee by a tall ecclesiastic where we were sleeping on the beach below the temple. At night, in the still heat, we stood on the balcony and saw the procession go by, singing in a minor key, some, to me, impressive and solemn dirge around a bier, and the clergy with beards and long hair and stiff catafalque like robes sang, and I can assure you all that is in me of stunted and deformed religion flowered under this hot sensuality, so thick, so yellow, so waxen; and I thought of the lights of the herring fleet at sea; everyone holding a yellow taper along the street and all the lights coming out in the windows. April 12
What do I have to live for.
April 13 Are single lines the only value in poets I've thought I liked? Seferis too. April 19 'Where would conversation be, if we were not allowed to exchange our minds freely and to abuse our neighbours from time to time?' said Stephen. April 20 Someone else in 1838: "... yet (as he said last night) how small a portion of what he has felt or thought has he been able to reveal to the world, and he will leave it, his tale still untold." April 25 Four days of heat and the garden is in bliss: iris, peaonies, garlic, strawberry and hollyhock, chives, grape hyacinths at the gate, last year's volunteer tulips showing buds, bed edges self-sown with white johnny-jump-ups, self-sown Iceland poppies in whiskered bud, shirley poppies in thick swaths, first moss phloxes showing bits of mauve and white, first five blossoms open on the apricot, round pink buds on the nectarine, comfrey in aggressive clumps, raspberry leaf tufts both on the ground and along the canes, gooseberries and currants in full leaf, bumblebee in the arabis, juncos and white-crowned sparrows creeping in the grass, sometimes a ring-necked dove, once or twice a mourning dove, one cabbage white. An aura of soft youth, a basking look that fills me up.
government of the words as our responsibility. What outrages the articulation of feeling in language, what makes language subverted to the meager reality of distorted and finally criminal acts - what distorts and beguiles and coerces by means of language can only, I think, be confronted by a use of language which makes obvious that criminal distortion on the part of those who make use of it. - What so outrages me in Trump, his criminality in language, and what mystifies me in his followers, that they don't disqualify him for its sheer dumb primitivity. Trump clocked in around mid-fourth grade, also uses the fewest "unique words" (2,605) of any president - Obama was the best at 4,869 - And see how stiff and wordy Creeley is here. May 1st Sometimes I do like the way blank verse taps every syllable, for instance in or-ange:
His pleasures are familiar. "the lines / of curling mist," "the level plain / Of waters coloured by the steady clouds."
"a day / With silver clouds and sunshine on the grass / ... / A perfect stillness," "a sense of touch / From the warm ground" May 2 A sudden brightness, a suddenly vast visibility, something about homelessness, something about water, a roar, a dark deep thoroughfare and he feels that's it, that's the essence of value, that's my whole stack, Nature, soul, Imagination, mind. The editor says of the 1850 version that none of the great passages of the Prelude suffer as much in revision, alterations consistently for the worse. What was his doubt? I'm thinking of Paul sitting with me in the garden saying he wants no more of women telling him what men are. I said we've had to study men; for instance I've had to understand philosophy as produced specifically by men. So: body denial, pre-birth and birth-denial, mother-denial, defense of male prestige by projection into ineffable mightinesses, etc, along with messed-up remnant intuition that needs to utter all of these indirectly. Along with a birth memory he's feeling the roaring chasm as medulla oblongata, the brain's chasm into noncon body? Or/and intuition of larger self as I know it - do you think? It says yes. May 3 A Flemish Beauty pear, a Mirabelle plum, a Golden Wings, a Golden Celebration and Blanc Double to replace the ones I killed, a little saxifrage, an artichoke. Coming home the sweet smooth swerving lope of 5A, hills in bare early spring, aspen groves the most delicate definite chartreuse clouds of new leaf amid sage-blue and pale new bunchgrass clumps. May 4 A cold, covered morning with moving air and platinum streaks. I don't want to say it - memory failing. Very recent memory. What was the book I was reading yesterday? Last night when I was planting what I'd brought I was thinking, where should I put the Golden Wings? I'd planted it along the fence half an hour before. - There some blank moments - really blank - and then I start to recall the Irish priest. But also: the policeman's dog was Molly. May 6 There's a scent when I step outside, flowers and leaves, a soft pervasive bliss. Yes the purple iris. The clove currant's round arms outlined in yellow. Gooseberry rummaged all over by bumblebees. Evans cherry against the garage's blue shingles in young pride of white bloom. The Whitney crab's apple blossoms red and white. What to say about paeonies. Clumps of thin legs wine red or bronze holding up jagged lumps of still-crimped leaves, taller every day and very gradually unfolding. May 7 The Nicola is high and fast, an even milk-coffee brown. I was next to it on a grass bank eating lunch liking the blackbirds, half a dozen of them sheltered inside a chokecherry's thicket of fine branches sometimes singing a trill. In treetops around the river's bend a dove sang continuously. Whiffs of balsam poplar and something flowery. Brilliant small cumulous clouds. May 9 This morning wet air greying the hill to a dark outline, damp streets, everything motionless, specks of pink showing on the crabapples and a bitty green foam in the Russian olive. May 10 When I pulled up at Nicola Valley Meats there was a fifties Impala parked at the door, a glorious thing, long, midnight blue, canted forward, lot of chrome. Curled-up dog looked up mildly when I peered in. Three people at the counter, two scrawny old things and a big sloppy bear of a man. He left first. I paid for my butter chicken sauce and followed him out. "What year is it?" as he was opening his door. "1955." Said he'd just bought it. I was noticing what a beautiful white-toothed smile he had. Something right about him, a pure happiness. He'd worked in San Francisco he said. Doing what? Working on a tunnel. Hadn't liked where he was living though, "Too city. I'm from here." Meantime he'd opened his paper-wrapped package and bitten off a chunk of sausage. When I was getting into the jeep he said "See you around." I said over my shoulder "You have a good dog too, it didn't bark when I looked inside" meaning I hoped I would, I liked him. - Last evening in dim overcast so feminine, so touchable and airy a photo of the Cox's first bloom. "... we will eat a last year's pippin of mine own grafting, with a dish of caraways" in Henry IV. Add to my list of things to live for the vast scarcely-broached history of English words. May 12 I thought yesterday it was so much what Roger would have chosen. One was more conscious of the beauty of life than of anything else and it seemed enough explanation of everything. Why should one want more than that people like him and music like Bach's and such incredible loveliness as one sees all round one should exist and that one should know them. They do not really ever stop. Vanessa wrote after Roger's funeral. May 13 Smart people who held onto each other through all their lives. The huge advantage of sustained good company. First that the best of young men found each other in Cambridge; no, first that Leslie Stephens' children clubbed together against those not their kind and then that the brothers brought home the best of the Cambridge young men. Then that all of them were well-placed enough to be of practical use to each other (this isn't emphasized) in matters of money and shows and publication and politics, and successful enough to go on interesting each other. They kept lively by indiscrete adventures with each other, shared widely in unashamed gossip. Together they herded London culture their way. Virginia made them immortal but Vanessa by her practical generous self-deprecating affection seems to have warmed their commerce. She stayed good friends with her ex-husband and ex-lover and all their ex- and current lovers and lived devotedly with homosexual Duncan to the end of her days. - First mosquito. Hummingbird working the clove currant. Baths and laundry forbidden because the city's septic system will back up. May 15 On the road after A&W where I sometimes sit the river is higher than the pavement, level with the grassy bank containing it, a flat surface moving past like a conveyor belt. May 17 I worked for hours, like old times. Cleaned up the verandah because it's time to use it. Where did that come from, I don't know. May 18 Alison Macleod's stories. There was one about a lecturer talking to the man who comes back four days in a row to work on plumbing renovations in her new place. It was familiar in something I've never seen written, the kinds of conversation I've had many times with working class men I don't know. A woman not of their kind speaking to them in ways their own women don't; the way they open up and the way she feels their story; how true it can get. May 21 What it's like to begin to be old. When I looked at the pile of Mafalda's letters it seemed the person they had mattered to was someone else, someone whose light clear sweetness I could feel for a moment. - There I look up and see the loveliest clotty streak of radiant white against blue. People I used to be fond of seem accidental attachments of another person but the person I am now belongs to the world more than she did. Yes there's that. May 22 Stephen could remember an evening when he had sat there in the warm, deepening twilight, watching the sea; it had barely a ruffle on its surface, and yet the Sophie picked up enough moving air with her topgallants to draw a long straight whispering furrow across the water, a line brilliant with unearthly phosphorescence, visible for quarter of a mile behind her. Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail - not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch - and he and Jack on deck sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music, until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great, the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak. - Rowen, Rowen! They are coming next Monday. He's 33 today. May 23 There stands the new bookcase looking so just-right with its neat vertical strips of color. I was thinking yesterday that as my muscles are shredding and organs getting shabbier and still shabbier I'm clinging to visual order, sweeping, putting dishes away, wiping the counter, placing vases. That corner between the lit-up curtain and the parlour door is giving me pleasure now, it finishes the room. - The wind breathed up the long hillside; remote clouds passed evenly across the sky. June 3 In shallow sleep last night I dreamed I heard someone, a man, saying "Ellie Epp's journal, I don't read it because it's all about her, what she feels, what she thinks." Was considering what he said: yes but maybe the impression is partly stylistic, the way I'm always scrupulously tagging observations as local. June 6 There have been weeks of worry about not being able to walk, my hip slipping, and then my wrist swollen and hurting so much, and not being able to work in the garden and having to just lie around killing time reading. When I'm injured I feel it might always be like that from now on and I should find a way to die, I should start taking apart what I've made here rather than assembling more for other people to deal with. Then from that background of misery and aloneness going to a shabby doctor's office where I'm weighed and measured and have my blood pressure taken and a tape put around my waist, and then sitting waiting alone in a bare ugly room till a very blank young man comes in to decide whether he'll take me as a patient. I was applying for help to someone I could tell could not see me, who could not imagine my circumstance or feel for me, and who when I was trying to give him a larger sense of me could only want to talk about the one thing he had scope to notice, my blood pressure, which he will want to treat with meds. It took overnight for me to be able to say this. Is often like that, I don't know what I'm feeling when it's happening. So then further, what can I do about the grimness. Allan is making my work table. The only thing that can help is work. June 9 On second try at Home Hardware this morning I decided on a colour for the laundry room chest, bench and mirror frame. Dark sage green maybe not dark enough but such an excellent paint, a cabinet paint, smooth and hard like an enamel. Pleased to have figured out how to re-cover the bench's seat with fabric that's so pretty with the green. June 10 Assembled and lovely, a grouping, green, white, red. I'll take a photo. June 12 Had set up cardboard shields behind the laundry room rad and this morning opened windows and doors, put on a glove and a mask and spray-painted it with heat-resistant silver. June 18 First nasturtiums. Work table! Perfect evening half-hour on the porch. Honey bees in the salvia nemorosa. The garden's aisles cleared enough to show dark. Here and there poppies on their long stems swaying a very little in no breeze at all. It was warm. Nothing hurt. June 19 Again wanting to stay alive. Not hurting, bright warm air, joyful in the room of my work. Self formed and found, long-loved companions. I have a sense of authority in it now. For instance it's easy for me now to separate writing bits from bits that were theoretical recognition. I can instantly trim to the kernel. I might be starting to feel how all the loci can belong in one field of work. June 21 A search site says Tom is back in the West room 139, comment in an online newspaper yesterday. Poured rain this aft, drops leaping 3' high on the pavement, a bit thrilling. June 22 Tom back in the West, what about it. It's 23 years later, he was 48 and is 72. Is he back where he started, bedbugs, drugs, running behind with money and every month in debt to wicked Ari? Or quietly safe among his people with enough money to eat well, pleased walking through the Gaslamp to the Embarcadero, writing in the library. - The desk is eager happiness but what to make. A storm sky north of the spruce. Is there a name for that luminous porous perfectly even blue-grey. Something about the light too as if it's cleaner, a bit whiter. June 24 These mornings I go out with a bowl and rummage the strawberry beds then walk up the fence edge to see what's blooming among the California poppies - first few low-down hollyhocks white, pale pink, rose. Lift cucumber leaves, three but not ready yet. Pull a few weeds, throw them on the path to dry. Pick some red poppies, some white, singe their stems, set them with blue hyssop for the desk. - A day like yesterday: I zonked all day, tried something for a bit in the morning then lay about reading Treason's harbour till it was done, slept, ate cherries and this and that till my face swelled, and then had begun watching The good wife season 2 before the sun was over the yardarm and on and on till bedtime. Knew it was bad. Helpless. So what was that. Stopped; not knowing what to do. More than that? Freaked by where I'd tried to go? It says no. It's something that happens again and again. I'm in it and then I'm not. June 27 Hegel on aether and quantum mechanics. A kind of reading that suspends not only belief but most comprehension and at the same time watches itself. Long affection for the man, bafflement about how Hegel could have meant his idealism and yet a question whether it coincides with something I know, a reminder to read male metaphysics as displaced mammalian intuition, watchfulness for something about my own feel for the notion of air-cortex-amnion-space etc. June 28 What is it I want to find in Hegel. Cosmos one fabric neither material nor mental. Self-ordering self-creating cosmos with nothing outside it. A unitary ground supporting relative stability amid multifarious propagation of effect. Could that have been what he meant by Geist or at least what he was intuiting? When I was reading him in final year I liked the idea of consciousness developing individually and historically; just that, I think. I knew it in myself, for instance I'd had a moment realizing it in Sexsmith in grade twelve: I'm smarter now, there's more happening in the way I am. I thought of the Phenomenology as a sort of poem or novel about human intelligence developing through time. I liked his dark groping quality. Now I notice the Greek-loving anti-Christian assumptions of his context - Goethe, etc - in the mid-1700s and later - and his wish to defend wholeness against religious proscriptions. June 29 my poet / breathing / horizontally is Luis Posse incense rising / from the burning / of today winds like these July 1 It's the most appalling passage in the journal. 1987, Rowen was two. I want to erase it but I won't. I want to list reasons but I won't. Joyce said integrating my father but does that mean anything. I was stronger and clearer after. But at the expense of a baby? July 2 It is as though everything were soluble in the aether of the world; there are not hard surfaces. Wittgenstein July 6 Friday. A dark morning, sprinkler on, white hollyhocks staring in at me with their yellow-green eyes. Later I'll get in the jeep and ride south. - Grene Wode Farm on Zero Ave. Hay field, swallows skimming, brilliant cumulous pile to the northwest. Not many miles away a dogwood clump with initials carved. Not many miles away a lost old woman in the unintelligent care of strangers. Rowen handed me his phone with his list of vows. It struck me at the heart. 'What are you feeling?' 'It's what anyone would want to hear.' Vancouver July 8 It was a hand-fasting. They'd had the legal ceremony the day before in a café with a Wiccan officiating. The best moment was when we heard music and there was Rowen beautiful in a chevalier tailcoat and Jack Sparrow eye makeup carrying a bouquet advancing with Hank behind him holding a sword upright, from the opposite direction Freya advancing in white gauze and a tight-laced green bodice, circlet on her forehead, her best man in Highland kilt behind her with sword upright. Rowen offered his bouquet, they linked arms and came down through our assembly to the flowering arch. Rowen spoke his memorized vows sentence by sentence slowly. They stood firm and clear and declared his quality. She crumpled at the second line. Peacocks stood on a high rail yelling Help all day. Roosters crowed. Three large old sloppy dogs begged for love from anyone. Thick legs and arms with tattoos, bushy beards on unimpressive young men. A hawk circled high over the cornfield, corn ten inches high in an even grid next to the long row of parked cars. July 12 After Spences Bridge the home road, fruit stands in blazing heavenly day, basking cliffs, pines on the slopes. I stopped on the verge to pick sage for the dash. July 14 Projective verse 1959 I don't like Olson but did he add something. Closed verse Wordsworth's jiggety-jog, boxes on the page. Field yes, cortical field as has to be. But projective? His gluey ejaculate? 1910, the trochee's heave Dactyl, trochee, iamb, spondee: poetry, garden, delay, Pound's hyphenates like blue-shot, green-gold. certain laws and possibilities of the breath Tensions and relaxations but is it breath? Do I feel it in the diaphragm? what stance toward reality brings such verse into being ... may lead to a new poetics Okay but maybe not in his version of either. must, at all points, be a high energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge Why don't I like this. Energy-discharge is more of that male strutting isn't it? And at all points? Language can have moments of more than usual grip - is grip necessarily the same thing as more charge in circuits? Maybe, but moments of more grip are embedded among moments of less. Maximus flabs on and on. means keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can His doing it there shows how banal it can get. I don't want to be entrained by someone in a speedy verbal state that doesn't let non-language work in its slower silent way. Flights and perchings. Does Pound do that I suppose, elliptical bits following fast, but it only works when he's in strong state of feeling. Yes a charged state. USE the process at all points That has had a good use in the Americans, I'm thinking of Notley and Carson, process notes in the run of the poem. Why is it good, it's closer to, it entrains in a more complex way. Being in someone's head. But it's not the only way. Sometimes it must have been implicit - textural. that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath He insists on his and man and I hate that, and I hate his priestly absolutism altogether (and don't at all hate Pound's) but bodily micro-pressures is right, and auditory attention certainly. But what else. Lexical precision, and that is something else. the syllable Noticing that more, now. to step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language El-e-ments and mi-nims. To-step-back-here, alright it's for the tap-tap-tap, but how is it stepping back - it's going aural, more - backwards from prefrontal to auditory cortex? the syllable and the line the head shows in the syllable There he goes into dualist stupidity. Attention to syllables is body as much as line is. Has he never thought about what 'mind' is? He could say line carries feeling, Clynes' sentics, and syllable is fine-tuned present-moment perceptual attention. They both register and carry cognitive state, which is body-mind obviously, and uncon as well as con. is it not slow things, similes, say, adjectives, or such, that we are bored by? The Inferno's similes are swift and thrillingly precise. Adjectives inflect a net when it needs to be sharpened or broadened. He means women. descriptive functions generally have to be watched, every second ... Observation of any kind is properly previous to the act of the poem Gendlin's focusing. O has said show your process, show yourself moving; focused perceiving widens and deepens and you can carry a reader by showing it happening: Woolf and Munro leaving their traces. He has a male cowardice about being fucked by what he sees doesn't he. every element in an open poem (the syllable, the line, as well as the image, the sound, the sense) must be taken up as participants in the kinetic of the poem Kinetic is right but he's separating syllable and sound because he has that kink about believing syllable is mental? Because some of them are archaic roots. these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world. He seems to be wanting a status for his creations equal to the world's - he's competing with the world. That strain again. It had a dying fall, Yup. I mean what it's like now. If he suspends a word or syllable at the end of a line he means that time to pass that it takes the eye Yes and line end suspensions do more than that. They often double sense. If he wishes a pause so light it hardly separates the words, yet does not want a comma - which is an interruption of the meaning rather than the sounding of the line - ... follow him when he uses a symbol the typewriter has ready to hand: What does not change / is the will to change How can he say a comma isn't a pause. It's often too much of a pause. The slash is a harder pause than he says. For what he's describing I'd say two spaces. If the beginning and the end is voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts I do think it's voice in its largest sense, has always been, and is so more transparently in what he calls an open form. It comes to this: the use of a man, by himself and thus by others, lies in how he conceives his relation to nature 'Nature' meaning whole cosmos. Not how one conceives it, how one is about it, how one is it. getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego Ie evading sneaky wishes to impress, which do include his all-us-boys-together pose and the subtle bragging of his many subordinate clauses. And when a poet rests in his physiology then he works in that area where nature has given him projective size. But only if his or her physiology has, not size - though his hugeness has given him social advantage - but excellence of perception, feeling, drive, etc. 'Projective' is so wrong and 'projective size' so masculinist it disgusts. Such works could not issue from men who conceived verse without the full relevance of human voice, without reference to where lines come from, in the individual who writes. Ie writing should be embodied and that sentence for instance isn't.
|