Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke in late 1846 or early 1847

A Bird came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought -
He stirred his Velvet Head

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home -

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam -
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.

I’ve always regarded this poem as an education in metaphor, among other things. As unprepossessing as its first eight lines may seem, what follows on them, from them, is rich and strange in the usual Emily Dickinsonian ways. Consider stanzas one and two, bearing in mind how often poets prior to Dickinson, even unto the point of tedium, had written about encounters with birds:

A Bird came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -

The usual thing is for the poet to identify, somehow, with the bird, even to personify it, to attribute to it, as with fellow-feeling, the sort of stereotyped “affects” we associate with poets: keen observation, “singing” (which meant “writing” long before Whitman ever said “I celebrate and sing myself…”), mournfulness, what have you. Dickinson does, in fact, “personify” her bird. She speaks of it as out for a stroll, along a path beside a wall, for all the world like any other stroller on promenade. And better still, her bird is polite, and gives way to the beetle, who, it would appear, is also out for a stroll. But the personifications are ironic, which is lucky for this reader anyway, because students are typically taught, in American high schools, two things: that all essays have five paragraphs, in which the first person pronoun is assiduously avoided; and that there is a thing called “personification,” and that the reason for reading poetry is largely to find instances of it. Dickinson’s ever so slight derangements of grammar and sense make us aware that her personifications are quite consciously indulged in. The bird gets its angleworm, but then is said to eat the “fellow” “raw.” As against what other way? Well, as in the “I’ll be your server tonight” sort of way. Sautéed? Pan-seared with deep fried garlic chips? Have a look at the board for our specials. Anyway, if “cooked” is what this worm is implicitly not, well, then it must be regarded as a kind of sashimi. As to why anyone should find it worth noting that birds do not cook their worms, the poet remains silent. Of course birds eat worms, but their relationship to them isn’t “culinary” in a strong sense. Another bit of humor, of course, involves Dickinson speaking of the worm as a “fellow,” as if to say: “What a nice chap he must be. Pity he should be eaten raw.”

Near you, doubtless, or soon to be.

Next the bird is said to “drink a dew” from “a” convenient “grass.” The collective noun “grass” doesn’t take an indefinite article of course, unless for the purpose of distinguishing one species of grass from another. “I need a good grass for my lawn,” the man says at his local Home Depot or Lowes. “Got a nice fescue for me?” What’s meant is a blade or leaf of grass, of course. The point, quite obviously, is to bring to mind “a glass” when we read “a grass,” and not for the purpose of mocking anyone’s accent either; the point is have the humanized alternative (glass) present to the mind but denied in print (grass). (It’s rather like printing the word blue in red.)

Your local meteorologist.

Your local meteorologist might speak of “a dew,” of course, but not of one a bird or anything else might “drink.” That would be “a dew-drop.” Note that our bird is also a gentleman, not a pigeon: he hops side-wise to let a beetle pass. (Why not bite that in half also, and eat it raw?) My point is that Dickinson goes about her “personifications” (if use the word I must) in such a way as to make a reader feel them as personifications. The whole business is done as within “air quotes.” So much for the first two stanzas, whose rhetorical and figurative modes are not really complex: here’s a quasi-post-Romantic poet having a bit of fun with the (Romantic) notion of “personifying” a bird—that word again. But then things get better:

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought -
He stirred his Velvet Head

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb . . .

It is possible for eyes to glance “rapidly,” I suppose; nothing figurative here. But eyes, though “rapid,” do not really “hurry all around”; they aren’t trying to get anywhere fast. Such movements are autonomic anyhow, whereas the imputation of motive and purpose somehow hangs about the idea of “hurrying.” Then we are told what these rapid, hurrying eyes look like: “frightened beads.” I think there’s a double metaphor here: eyes as “beads” (an old one, to be sure: beady eyes). But grammatically we are required to think of the beads that the eyes are as frightened. I’ve never seen a frightened “bead” and wouldn’t know how to go about intimidating one. Of courses, it’s simply a matter of Dickinson taking an attribute of the bird (fear) and transferring it the “beads” to which eyes are so often compared anyway. That’s what I mean in speaking of a double metaphor, or perhaps better still, of overlapping ones; we haven’t to do here with “mixture” of metaphor. That a bird may have a “velvet head” is only slightly odd. The fine feathering on its head might well feel, to the touch, like velvet. And yet I like the idea of a “velvet head.” Say it a few times over and feel its strangeness.

But then we light upon one of those moments in Dickinson’s poetry where the same lines may be construed variously into differing sentences: 1) “He stirred his velvet head, like one in danger. Cautious, I offered him a crumb.” 2) “He stirred his velvet head like one in danger, cautious. I offered him a crumb.” 3) “He stirred his velvet head. Like one in danger, cautious, I offered him a crumb.” Read the poem aloud, and you must take one of the three; you have to know what to do with your voice when you say it. #3 I rule out on principle: it is hardly likely that the speaker feels herself in danger, in the presence of so gentlemanly a bird—a bird, moreover, with a velvet head. #2 is certainly possible: caution and fear often accompany one another. But I prefer #1, so much so that I refuse to read the poem aloud any other way. The “caution” almost certainly belongs to the speaker offering her “crumb.” This problem arises, of course, from our poet’s eccentric habits of punctuation. (The first stanza of one of her best known poems—”The Soul selects her own Society”—may be read as either a single sentence; as two sentences, each different from the other; or as three.) But let’s say that it is “no accident” that the grammar and figurative language of the latter three stanzas becomes ever more strange; and that the turn out of the easy ironic personifications of the first two is “occasioned” by the offering of the crumb, whether it be raw or cooked, as if in fellowship. Aren’t birds and poets supposed to be in fellowship? The British Romantics abused the notion unconscionably, though we can’t lay its invention at their feet, of course. Here we are reading a counter-Romantic poem about a bird. Our sweet singer offers this velvet-headed, frightened bead-eyed, uncooked worm-eating bird a crumb and, and—

And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home -

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam -
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.

Not the feathers, but the wings are deployed, of course—that’s the first liberty with reason taken. Bony things, wings are, but here they may be rolled and unrolled. He’s taking to the wind, to the air, of course, so let’s imagine that the wings are implicitly likened to sails, which we do furl and unfurl.

Republican campaign poster of 1896 attacking Free Silver.

But no, they are oars, which keeps them in the “nautical” bin, as Kenneth Burke might say, but which also specifies them in ways easier to map out: wings are to birds what oars are to rowers; movement on the air is like movement on the water. But no again: These oars “divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam.” Bad rowers make seams, leave wakes, waste energy, “plash” about. I know because I am a bad rower. And just how silver must a thing be so as not to leave a seam? Are the keys to my office too silver for a seam? They are certainly silver in color, if not in composition. Is “silver” in the William Jennings Bryan sense “too silver for a seam”? What precisely is both “silver” and “seamless” in its “division” of “ocean” water? Well, a fish is, or anyway dozens of species of them. So now the bird moves through the air as a fish does through the water, and we are done with any vestigially “nautical” metaphors. We are out of culture altogether. In fact, we are in nature.

Swimming, flying, writing. Let’s have Kenneth Burke’s word on these in Language as Symbolic Action:

A B-2 bomber taking pleasure in a 1994 live-fire exercise near Point Mugu, California.

“As for poetics pure and simple,” he says, “I would take this motivational dimension to involve the sheer exercise of ’symbolicity’ (or ’symbolic action’) for its own sake, purely for the love of the art. If man is characteristically the symbol-using animal, then he should take pleasure in the use of his powers as a symbolizer, just as a bird presumably likes to fly or a fish to swim. Thus, on some occasions, in connection with aesthetic activities, we humans might like to exercise our prowess with symbol systems, just because that’s the kind of animal we are. I would view the poetic motive in that light.” I find the latter motive underlying stanzas one and two in the poem before us here. Dickinson is using certain “symbols” to talk by exchanges between poets about birds that compel the reader to feel them “as symbols,” as “tropes”; and moreover, she does it compel us to do things like read “glass” for “grass,” and to take pleasure in making light of poems in which birds are likened by poets to people—usually, for self-flattering purposes: “singers” in “fellowship,” set apart in depth of feeling from the rest of us. But what of stanzas three to five? Do fish take pleasure in swimming “too silver for a seam,” the B-2 bomber pilots take pleasure in flying too silver for any seam that radar might detect? Are birds wing-using animals, and take pleasure in the use for its own sake? I think cats enjoy being feline, so why not let birds enjoy being avian?

Anyway, there is a further bit of strangeness to be dealt with. Those “Butterflies,” who “leap” “off Banks of Noon,” “plashless as they swim.” In one sense this is easy work: flight has already been likened to swimming. But in what sense does “noon” have “banks”? The occult metaphor must be something to do with the “stream or current of Time,” or some such thing. The “banks” of morn lie upstream, and the “banks” of evening downstream, where the fireflies leap off of those, I suppose, “plashless” as they “swim” through the air, making their bioluminescent love (and hate).

What have I said, then? First, Dickinson enjoys her own prowess in this poem, according to the “poetic motive” as Burke describes it. (That Burke takes birds and fish as his parallel examples is merely a happy coincidence, all the more useful for my purposes here. I  enjoy availing myself of his symbols anyway in doing what I “characteristically” do in the Era of Casual Fridays.) Second, I’ve suggested that at precisely the moment when the poet makes her gesture of “fellowship” with this fine chap of a bird by offering it a crumb—from some “cooked” thing, doubtless (appalling!)—the poem becomes, as I hope I’ve made clear, much stranger in its metaphors, its grammar, and its rhymes, which fall out of full rhyme harmony (saw/raw) into half or quarter rhymes (seam/swim), and possibly into no proper “rhyme” at all in one case (“around” and “head” share a terminal consonant, but “-nd” and “-d” make different sorts of sounds). In sum, Dickinson has given that rarest of things: a new poem on an ancient theme. She is always out of the general rut.

e. e. cummings “was not a wise person, but had the wisdom of his folly, a bravado of spirit, and his own special way of knowing and talking about the world; and these are better than wisdom, to a poet….”

The exact same could be said of Gertrude Stein.

Cover, 1st Edition, 1936

In Robert Frost’s 1936 volume, A Further Range, appears a section archly titled “Ten Mills.” It is a suite of ten short poems—some of them epigrams of a sort—originally published in the April 1936 issue of Poetry magazine. A mill, of course, is one-tenth of a cent (a sense fallen now almost entirely out of use). Which is to say, in this little suite of very brief, and very mischievous, poems, Frost is putting not his proverbial “two-cents” in, but merely one. The last of the “ten mills” is the following poem, which has always struck as by far the most interesting among them. In fact, at times I find it baffling. A bit of lore lies behind the poem, chiefly having to do with its title. But first, the poem itself, which is done up curtly in couplets, each line of which bears four accents (the ratio of accent to syllable is not regular):

“In Divés Dive”

It is late at night and still I am losing,
But still I am steady and unaccusing.

As along as the Declaration guards
My right to be equal in number of cards,

It is nothing to me who runs the dive.
Let’s have a look at another five.

And now for the lore. In the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible, Luke 16:19-31, we read the following: (N.B. I highlight the most relevant passage in red bold type, and the rest in color-coded type alone, to point up the correspondences between this Latin, of which I am myself no reader, and the English that follows it): “homo quidam erat dives et induebatur purpura et bysso et epulabatur cotidie splendideet erat quidam mendicus nomine Lazarusqui iacebat ad ianuam eius ulceribus plenus cupiens saturari de micis quae cadebant de mensa divitis sed et canes veniebant et lingebant ulcera eius factum est autem ut moreretur mendicus et portaretur ab angelis in sinum Abrahae mortuus est autem et dives et sepultus est in inferno elevans oculos suos cum esset in tormentis videbat Abraham a longe et Lazarum in sinu eius et ipse clamans dixit pater Abraham miserere mei et mitte Lazarum ut intinguat extremum digiti sui in aqua ut refrigeret linguam meam quia crucior in hac flamma et dixit illi Abraham fili recordare quia recepisti bona in vita tua et Lazarus similiter mala nunc autem hic consolatur tu vero cruciaris et in his omnibus inter nos et vos chasma magnum firmatum est ut hii qui volunt hinc transire ad vos non possint neque inde huc transmeare et ait rogo ergo te pater ut mittas eum in domum patris mei habeo enim quinque fratres ut testetur illis ne et ipsi veniant in locum hunc tormentorum et ait illi Abraham habent Mosen et prophetas audiant illos at ille dixit non pater Abraham sed si quis ex mortuis ierit ad eos paenitentiam agent ait autem illi si Mosen et prophetas non audiunt neque si quis ex mortuis resurrexerit credent.” The King James Bible renders this text as follows (again, the relevant phrases are highlighted as above):

Painting depicting the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus, done by Meister des Codex Aureus Epternacensis (ca. 1035-1040)

“There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence. Then he [i.e., Divés] said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him [i.e., Lazarus] to my father’s house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent. And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”

1823 facsimile of the engrossed copy of the "Declaration."

In short, by tradition, “Divés” is the name given to “that certain rich man” [homo quidam erat dives] in most commentaries on the parable of the beggar Lazarus; and it is he who runs the “dive” of Frost’s poem. Frost places us, then, in a cheap gambling dive, in the middle of the Great Depression, run by a corrupt rich man bound for Hell. And Frost’s “steady and unaccusing” speaker, the man doing all the “losing,” somehow takes heart from the fact that, so long as “the Declaration guards [his] right to be equal in number of cards,” it is “nothing to [him] who runs the dive.” All he wants is “a look at another five”—five cards, that is, as in a “deal.” The game in question is obviously poker. And the poem is just as obviously allegorical. The “house rules” in this “dive” are, it appears, those of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The general metaphor underlying the poem could not be any clearer:

America is a cheap gambling dive run by corrupt and wealthy men; to be in America is to be in Divés dive.

Langston Hughes, in the 1930s, photograph by Nickolas Muray.

But what we are to make of this metaphor, how we are to take it? That’s no easy question to answer. Consider a thought experiment, along these lines: Read the poem not as written by Robert Frost, but as written instead, say, by Langston Hughes, in his fellow-traveling Communist days in the 1930s. Hughes might well have written such a poem (and as Frost himself was told in conversation with the poet Sterling Brown, “Divés,” and the parable in which he figures, was a theme touched on in Negro Spirituals, for reasons perfectly obvious). We might then conclude: Well, obviously, Hughes is saying what any poet on the far left during the ’30s might have said: The Declaration, and every other guarantee of ‘equal protection under the law,’ are nothing but ideological shams. The nation had been, was, and always will be—short of a second revolution—one run by, and in the interests of, the wealthy and the corrupt. And anyone who thinks otherwise, as the “unaccusing” gambler in the poem apparently does, is a naïve fool. For who but a fool would ever go into a “dive” run by the likes of Divés and lay a single dollar on the table? Clearly this poem is a clever and wicked satire not merely of America, but of anyone who expected, say, that the “New Deal” (“let’s have a look at another five!”) was anything other than a measure meant to shore up capitalism, by curbing its excesses, so as to save it from committing suicide.

What’s the use of this thought experiment? To illustrate, among other things, how thoroughly we let knowledge about the author of a poem govern our reading of it—Roland Barthes & Michel Foucault notwithstanding. Most middling readers of Frost simply take it for granted that he couldn’t possibly hold any such views as those just entertained in our little experimental attribution of the poem to (say) Langston Hughes. Surely, they think, there must be something else afoot. Surely no man is altogether a fool to place his faith in the guarantees of the Declaration and the Constitution (with, say, its 14th amendment, making good, at least on paper, Jefferson’s great promise of “equality”). And though it be true that the parable of Lazarus figured in the sorrow songs of the slaves, we find it in a number of English ballads dating back centuries, and from the other side of the Atlantic altogether. Richard Crashaw wrote two quatrains on the theme in his Steps to the Temple. It is a veritable commonplace (though, admittedly, Frost gives it specifically American coordinates).

Title page of the first edition (1646).

“Upon Lazarus’ s tears.”
Rich Lazarus! richer in those gems, thy tears,
Than Dives in the robes he wears:
He scorns them now, but O! they’ll suit full well.
With th’ purple he must wear in Hell.

“Dives asks a drop. — Luke xvi. 24.”
A drop, one drop, how sweetly one fair drop
Would tremble on my pearl-tipp’d finger’s top!
My wealth is gone; O! go it where it will,
Spare this one jewel; I’ll be Dives still.

But let’s take ourselves for something more than your middling reader of Frost. And then let’s see what we make of the poem. It raises a number of questions, of course: To what extent is personal prosperity a “gamble” in a nation that considers itself a “democracy”? To what extent should prosperity be a gamble in such a nation? In reading “In Divés Dive,” we do well to bear in mind what Frost says in his 1935 Introduction to E.A. Robinson’s King Jasper:

“Yester­day in conversation, I was using ‘The Mill.’ Robinson could make lyric talk like drama. What imagination for speech in ‘John Gorham‘! He is at his height between quotation marks.

Portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson by Lilla Cabot Perry, 1916.

The miller’s wife had waited long.
The tea was cold, the fire was dead.
And there might yet be nothing wrong
In how he went and what he said.
‘There are no millers any more,’
Was all that she had heard him say.

‘There are no millers any more.’ It might be an edict of the New Deal against processors (as we now dignify them). But no, it is of wider application. It is a sinister jest at the expense of all investors of life or capital. The market shifts and leaves them with a car-barn full of dead trolley cars. At twenty I commit myself to a life of re­ligion. Now, if religion should go out of fashion in twenty-five years, there would I be, forty-five years old, unfitted for any­thing else and too old to learn anything else. It seems immoral to have to bet on such high things as lives of art, business, or the church. But in effect, we have no alternative. None but an all-­wise and all-powerful government could take the responsibility of keeping us out of gambling or of insuring us against loss once we were in.”

Really? This is cold comfort, if we take Frost at his word. I’m not all in for it. There’s more than a little overstatement in the phrasing here: “None but an all-­wise and all-powerful government could take the responsibility….” Well, ought a partly-wise and moderately powerful government take due responsibility for ameliorating the larger risks of living and working in a decidedly capitalist economy? And isn’t that what FDR had attempted to do with such institutions as the FDIC an the SEC?

And yet, with “In Divés Dive,” nuances and complexities remain. All manner of queries and provocations hang about it, as if to make good sport of (or with) the reader. Does Jefferson’s old adage have anything to do with “outcomes,” so to speak? Does it have more to do with equality in opportunity than with equality in results? Does it have anything at all to do with “equality” in the “results” of (say) our several hundred million American “gambles” in our several hundred million American lives? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. And for that matter, are “New Deal” policies—don’t forget that terminal line: “Let’s have a look at another five”;—are New Deal policies that aim at marginalizing personal risk warranted by either the Declaration or the Constitution, no matter what value they may have in themselves? And does it even matter whether or not these efforts to marginalize risk, and to protect the weak from the worst abuses of the Capital, have a “constitutional” warrant, or some other sort of authority—say, vested in Jefferson’s immortal words? Indeed it might not matter. Hence our ongoing debate, even unto the autumn of 2009.

And still harder questions remain. Does Frost “parody” or “cite” the view taken of America in the poem before us here—that is to say, the Langstonian view of it I took in my thought experiment—and then step aside, as if to say: “I’m not giving it a Yea or a Nay—don’t try to fix me there.” Or, could the poem be a kind of playful enigma, tossed out to Frost’s leftist critics—the ones who’d been after him ever since 1928—as if to say: “Here. Deal with this, if you’re so sure you’ve got me pegged as some sort of reactionary.” And must we reach a conclusion as to whether or not Frost expects his readers, of whatever stripe, to regard his “unaccusing” American “gambler,” firm in his faith in the Declaration, as a damn fool? I can hardly read the poem otherwise myself (though I can imagine a reader who might shake his head at me for doing so). For who but an idiot would keep up the gamble “late into the night” in a joint identified for us as “Divés dive”? How much patience, in the face of how much loss, is too much patience in the face of too much loss? Everybody knows that the “House Always Wins” with its credit default swaps—that the “House” always gets its “bailouts,” even as “gamblers” in sub-prime mortgages lose their three-bedroom bungalows on the south side of Chicago, or their ranch-houses in Florida.

What to say by way of conclusion? That Frost, yet again, is “rumpling our brains,” as he liked to put it. He’s messing with us. And I append here two little-known observations Frost made on the subject of capitalism, of which he was well-prepared to be wary. Both are printed in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost (Harvard, 2007). The first is taken from Lawrance Thompson’s otherwise unpublished “Notes on Conversations with Robert Frost.” In it you will find this account of a 21 February 1940 conversation with Frost: “In his ideas on politics he thinks of civilization as giving us a right to indulge our individualities, our eccentricities, even our perversions. A government is like a great breathing monster—giving out greater freedom, liberty, license—and then at times taking it in. A communal state is a taking in. A democracy is a letting out. But even a democracy, in time of war, calls all its liberties in, temporarily, for the communal good. Capital in Wall Street indulges its liberties to the extent of perversion and then is checked.” The second observation dates from a visit Frost made to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1954, to attend the World Congress of Writers. Frost delivered the following remarks in English. They were subsequently translated into Portuguese for publication in the official proceedings of the Congress, Congresso International de Escritores e Encontros Inteletuais (Sau Paulo, 1957). Robert Johnson of the University of Massachusetts then translated them back into English at the request of G. Stanley Koehler of the Department of English at Amherst. The text of Johnson’s translation is held both at Amherst College and at the Jones Library, Amherst. I reprint it here with a few emendations suggested by Barbara Joels of Rutgers University, who (years ago, now) kindly agreed to check-read Johnson’s translation against the original Portuguese. Johnson, in passing his translation along to Koehler, adds in passing that Frost’s remarks “must have left quite a few delegates with mouths ajar.” One can readily see why. Following is the better part of Frost’s speech at the Congress, as refracted through Portuguese and back into English: “Our basic principle—that of Americans I mean—is somewhat complex. But note: John Adams was the man who decided upon our separation from the Old World, Europe. He imagined, for example, that there scarcely existed between us a degree of kinship. Afterward, Tom Paine noted that the war was not so much a war of separation but rather one for liberty and the inspiration of the French Revolution. Now, that man almost had his head chopped off, having escaped because he fled from his prison thanks to a fortunate accident. But our world did not revolt struggling for equality; scarcely anything was done in equality’s name. The great realization, the real consequence of the revolution was the separation, and I should be greatly troubled if we remained separate from Europe—the Old World—without demonstrating some originality to the world. Because I always want to have the hope and satisfaction of knowing that we possess something new and fresh to contribute to the future of humanity. The enthusiasm for equality, for the distribution of land, wealth, and finally the enthusiasm for humanity—that enthusiasm disappeared from our earth, and I can see nothing through the Iron Curtain. The truth of the matter is that everything disappeared with the disappearance of Tom Paine. Another point that we must observe is the following. We must avoid a great danger that threatens us: big capitalism that never remembers to hold back, to restrict itself. It is necessary that big capitalism remain constantly under observation, principally by other countries. The saving grace is that our army never adhered to big capitalism, for, if this were to happen, it would be our end.”

A Pillsbury Mill above St. Anthony Falls, Minneapolis. These were the enterprises that ensured that "there were no millers anymore."

N.B. Frost quotes only a small part of “The Mill” in his Introduction to Robinson’s King Jasper. But the poem as a whole is well worth reprinting here, as a bitter envoy. “The Mill” records two suicides, undertaken out of despair created by the “great progress” of industrial capitalism in the late 19th century—owing, indeed, to what would come to be represented by the Pillsbury Doughboy.

“The Mill” (Edwin Arlington Robinson)
The miller’s wife had waited long,
The tea was cold, the fire was dead;
And there might yet be nothing wrong
In how he went and what he said:
“There are no millers any more,”
Was all that she had heard him say;
And he had lingered at the door
So long that it seemed yesterday.

The Pillsbury Doughboy

Sick with a fear that had no form
She knew that she was there at last;
And in the mill there was a warm
And mealy fragrance of the past.
What else there was would only seem
To say again what he had meant;
And what was hanging from a beam
Would not have heeded where she went.

And if she thought it followed her,
She may have reasoned in the dark
That one way of the few there were
Would hide her and would leave no mark:
Black water, smooth above the weir
Like starry velvet in the night,
Though ruffled once, would soon appear
The same as ever to the sight.

“…Anselm—I direct this at you:
How do you do it? Was it easy for you and your brother toget into the poetry scene because of your background? Already Famous Ted? Already Famous Alice? Do you know that the things you are writing are good or do you, like some smelly pier fisherman, simply cast your lines and let us mercury fishies nibble? Because my audience is poisoned. Either they know me and like me personally, so they will actually read me…or they have no clue/don’t care about this passion. You are so brave, Anselm, to put down words that make us work, to write phrases that don’t MEAN (in the utility sense) but mean to “me.” Do you write for your friends? Are they the substantial bulk of your audience?

Tommy—I know we have the same questions:
What can I possibly capture in this life that would make YOU want to read—but if you’ve met me its always “let’s keep our eyes open for this kid’s shit”—empty flattery? Will they only know I’ve published if I tell them? What do I care for the audience anyway? It’s all pretentiousness about the art. Seriously—let me know why I do this everywhere in the middle of a million people everyone

and everyone

doing

nothing.

I’m almost out of pens.
Ink-fumes escape from gnawed-on tips.
Scribbles fill the notebooks that fill the room.

I can hear a silent snowfall out my blinded window.

stuck in this starless motel room.”

I recommend checking it out in its less restricted entirety in my Portfolio section.

Jazz

- Ancestoral flashbacks intertwined with present day narratives

- Embodied emotions in connection with intense sensory details

- Free flowing, lyrical, improvisational

Ceremony

- “Myths” inserted during modern times, parallel between past and present

- Extreme and/or violent war flashbacks

- Ceremony itself as an expressive figure

The Crying of Lot 49

- Detective or search narrative as form of discourse

- Lack of certainty and closure at beginning and end of novel

- Creation of “networks” or “spokes of a wheel” relationships

- Chronological, step-by-step problem solving (inductive reasoning)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

- Search narrative

- Insertion of pictures into narrative, often do not make sense until later clarification in novel

- Use of letters and interviews

- Transitions in points of view across generational lines

translation
of the experience
of the gaian
petri dish
from biology to ideology
to understanding
is poetics.

for earth-lives
live
regardless of regard
the die off
is always coming

The Thread begins a new series on London’s Resonance FM, starting with an episode entitled ‘The Poetics of Twitter‘. The Twitter device reveals interesting and often counter-intuitive phenomena that challenge pre-conceived philosophical and aesthetic notions – about formation of the self, about Ego, about what ’space’ or ‘network’ might mean, about semiotics.

Most fascinating are the multifarious manipulations of the Twitter form by artists, poets, academics: a piece of software designed to attract followers according to an exponential scale and then groom these followers according to a specific demographic; another that posted every letter typed into a particular PC directly onto a Twitter account, revealing intimate details of a person’s activities; another using Twitter as the structural framework for a kind of automatic poetry.

Fascinating also is what the response to such new media may be from traditional academic circles. In an attempt to keep up with hyperspeed technology, will we see more fragmentary, topical discussion-based analysis and less long-form literature?

Related articles:
Experimental Philosophy
By Joshua Knobe , University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill
(Vol. 1, November 2006)
Philosophy Compass

The Text-Performance Relation in Theater
By James Hamilton , Kansas State University
(Vol. 4, June 2009)
Philosophy Compass

“Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.” — Mark Twain (1835-1910) American humorist

“Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.” – Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet (1809-1892)

The court is like a palace built of marble; I mean that it is made up of very hard and very polished people. – Jean de la Fontaine, poet and fabulist (1621-1695)

“The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.”

Geert Goiris

What I try to seize upon in my work might best be described as traumatic realism, assigning to the word “trauma” its surgical meaning: Of a breaking point, not in the psychological sense of coping with an unresolved past, but as a short transitory glimpse of another reality.
My images refer to familiar fictions.Simultaneously, they register authentic locations. The fusing of fact and fiction is precisely the fracture that I intend to conserve. I try to preserve viewpoints in all their perplexity. The first acquaintance with a place is important: the strong impression that interferes with a number of stored-up but unpronounced images from our collective memory.
Everything I photograph is real, unlikely as it may seem. I don’t manipulate the photographs, but push their insinuating capacities forward by carefully choosing the moment, framing and viewpoint. To me, a picture is successful when the representative and the narrative elements alternate.
For the past five years, I have been working on this series of images to be compiled in a book called Resonance. These shots are a kind of derivate of media-images: cinema, television or other photographs.
The individual works are connected with each other in a cryptic narrative, like a fabricated memory. The series functions as a distant memory, which is not specific. Rather than bringing me back to the places they depict, these pictures remind me of a way of seeing.
I discover all the images “by accident”. Often there is a central motive that points at human presence, but this is not a formula. Somehow I try to install a doubt into the notion of the sublime landscape by imposing an anomaly onto it. Often there is an allusion to catastrophe, a calamity or disaster: some final event to put the materialistic myth of progress in perspective.
These images are mainly set in landscapes, found at the outer reaches of society, touching on the confines of civilization. These places have a face, a particular physiognomy that bears traces of a bygone or human presence.
By bringing together various regions and climates, a mental landscape emerges. The significance of the location shifts from reality to the realm of ideas.
I do not aspire to make a reportage in the sense of imparting something essential about the country or area where the picture was taken. On the contrary, often only minor details such as the relief or the vegetation are left as vague indicators for orientation. The places I visit are obviously of capital importance, because they are all unique. But I choose not to play out the specific. I try to level intrinsic geographical, climatological and sociological qualities into a global mental image, where different worlds seamlessly fuse their various characteristics and externalise a feeling of anxiety, foreboding and fear. Together they demonstrate a detached yet intense association with my surroundings.
I often use extremely long exposure times, allowing the effect of blur to render the specific time frame indistinct. I trade the moment for state of being. Instead of using a camera to cut a slice of time, I use it to gather evidence of duration, without a clear “before” and “after”. In order to undermine the attributed “realism”, I make it evident that this is not a reality: these are images of a reality.

In All due intent, catalogue Manifesta 5, 2004, pp.156-157.

Geert Goiris

Gallery ART : CONCEPT

Thanks to Maureen Auriol – mentions obligatoires

…Economy of words, economy of a text. these words suddenly mean more to me now. Because I’m a poet? No, because I more recently have been opened up to a whole sense of my own poetic. Perhaps it was reading about all these other poetic philosophies… or maybe all these things that I’ve been reading over these years have finally come to a giant, foaming head.

Voila! I’ve finally burst from Zeus, fully formed, spoken like a word…

N.B. Thomas Hardy often wrote prefaces—at times, wonderful documents—for his books of verse. But none, in my view, or in the view of most other devoted readers of his poetry, rivals the one reprinted here, which is by turns cagey; deftly unapologetic (though “Apology” it be called); satirical; and perfectly in temper with the poetry that this book, like all of Hardy’s later books of poetry, contains. Hardy surveys, along the way, and in relatively short order, the history of English poetry at least since the earliest Romantics; and he offers up, with a concision altogether admirable, a summary of certain philosophical developments, from Schopenhauer to Darwin and beyond to Einstein, that English poetry had yet—except in Hardy’s own case—taken fully into account.  The preface appeared first in Hardy’s 1922 volume Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses. I reprint it whole, here, in the spirit in which I began this web-blog two months ago: as a commonplace book, a definition of which you will find at the top right margin of The Era of Casual Fridays.

Thomas Hardy, "evolutionary meliorist."

APOLOGY

About half the verses that follow were written quite lately.  The rest are older, having been held over in MS. when past volumes were published, on considering that these would contain a sufficient number of pages to offer readers at one time, more especially during the distractions of the war. The unusually far back poems to be found here are, however, but some that were overlooked in gathering previous collections. A freshness in them, now unattainable, seemed to make up for their inexperience and to justify their inclusion. A few are dated; the dates of others are not discoverable.

The launching of a volume of this kind in neo-Georgian days by one who began writing in mid-Victorian, and has published nothing to speak of for some years, may seem to call for a few words of excuse or explanation. Whether or no, readers may feel assured that a new book is submitted to them with great hesitation at so belated a date. Insistent practical reasons, however, among which were requests from some illustrious men of letters who are in sympathy with my productions, the accident that several of the poems have already seen the light, and that dozens of them have been lying about for years, compelled the course adopted, in spite of the natural disinclination of a writer whose works have been so frequently regarded askance by a pragmatic section here and there, to draw attention to them once more.

I do not know that it is necessary to say much on the contents of the book, even in deference to suggestions that will be mentioned presently.  I believe that those readers who care for my poems at all—readers to whom no passport is required—will care for this new installment of them, perhaps the last, as much as for any that have preceded them.

William Wordsworth, painter unkown (at least to me)

Moreover, in the eyes of a less friendly class the pieces, though a very mixed collection indeed, contain, so far as I am able to see, little or nothing in technique or teaching that can be considered a Star-Chamber matter, or so much as agitating to a ladies’ school; even though, to use Wordsworth’s observation in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, such readers may suppose “that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association: that he not only thus apprises the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded.” It is true, nevertheless, that some grave, positive, stark, delineations are interspersed among those of the passive, lighter, and traditional sort presumably nearer to stereotyped tastes. For—while I am quite aware that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed, is scarcely allowed, now more than heretofore, to state all that crosses his mind concerning existence in this universe, in his attempts to explain or excuse the presence of evil and the incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible—it must be obvious to open intelligences that, without denying the beauty and faithful service of certain venerable cults, such disallowance of “obstinate questionings” and “blank misgivings” tends to a paralysed intellectual stalemate. Heine observed nearly a hundred years ago that the soul has her eternal rights; that she will not be darkened by statutes, nor lullabied by the music of bells. And what is to-day, in allusions to the present author’s pages, alleged to be “pessimism” is, in truth, only such “questionings” in the exploration of reality, and is the first step towards the soul’s betterment, and the body’s also.

If I may be forgiven for quoting my own old words, let me repeat what I printed in this relation more than twenty years ago, and wrote much earlier, in a poem entitled “In Tenebris”:

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst:

that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism. But it is called pessimism nevertheless; under which word, expressed with condemnatory emphasis, it is regarded by many as some pernicious new thing (though so old as to underlie the Christian idea, and even to permeate the Greek drama); and the subject is charitably left to decent silence, as if further comment were needless.

Happily there are some who feel such Levitical passing-by to be, alas, by no means a permanent dismissal of the matter; that comment on where the world stands is very much the reverse of needless in these disordered years of our prematurely afflicted century: that amendment and not madness lies that way. And looking down the future these few hold fast to the same: that whether the human and kindred animal races survive till the exhaustion or destruction of the globe, or whether these races perish and are succeeded by others before that conclusion comes, pain to all upon it, tongued or dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum by loving-kindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and actuated by the modicum of free will conjecturally possessed by organic life when the mighty necessitating forces—unconscious or other—that have “the balancings of the clouds,” happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may not be often.

Frederic Harrison, English jurist, historian, and a "positivist" follower of Comte (in his philosophy)

To conclude this question I may add that the argument of the so-called optimists is neatly summarized in a stern pronouncement against me by my friend Mr. Frederic Harrison in a late essay of his, in the words: “This view of life is not mine.” The solemn declaration does not seem to me to be so annihilating to the said “view” (really a series of fugitive impressions which I have never tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently assumed. Surely it embodies a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic. Next, a knowing reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man, speaks, with some rather gross instances of the suggestio falsi in his article, of “Mr. Hardy refusing consolation,” the “dark gravity of his ideas,” and so on. When a Positivist and a Catholic agree there must be something wonderful in it, which should make a poet sit up. But . . . O that ‘twere possible!

Matthew Arnold

I would not have alluded in this place or anywhere else to such casual personal criticisms—for casual and unreflecting they must be—but for the satisfaction of two or three friends in whose opinion a short answer was deemed desirable, on account of the continual repetition of these criticisms, or more precisely, quizzings. After all, the serious and truly literary inquiry in this connection is: Should a shaper of such stuff as dreams are made on disregard considerations of what is customary and expected, and apply himself to the real function of poetry, the application of ideas to life (in Matthew Arnold’s familiar phrase)? This bears more particularly on what has been called the “philosophy” of these poems—usually reproved as “queer.” Whoever the author may be that undertakes such application of ideas in this “philosophic” direction—where it is specially required—glacial judgments must inevitably fall upon him amid opinion whose arbiters largely decry individuality, to whom ideas are oddities to smile at, who are moved by a yearning the reverse of that of the Athenian inquirers on Mars Hill; and stiffen their features not only at sound of a new thing, but at a restatement of old things in new terms. Hence should anything of this sort in the following adumbrations seem “queer”—should any of them seem to good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful conceptions of this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot help it.

Such divergences, which, though piquant for the nonce, it would be affectation to say are not saddening and discouraging likewise, may, to be sure, arise sometimes from superficial aspect only, writer and reader seeing the same thing at different angles. But in palpable cases of divergence they arise, as already said, whenever a serious effort is made towards that which the authority I have cited – who would now be called old-fashioned, possibly even parochial – affirmed to be what no good critic could deny as the poet’s province, the application of ideas to life. One might shrewdly guess, by the by, that in such recommendation the famous writer may have overlooked the cold-shouldering results upon an enthusiastic disciple that would be pretty certain to follow his putting the high aim in practice, and have forgotten the disconcerting experience of Gil Blas with the Archbishop.

To add a few more words to what has already taken up too many, there is a contingency liable to miscellanies of verse that I have never seen mentioned, so far as I can remember; I mean the chance little shocks that may be caused over a book of various character like the present and its predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant, effusions; poems perhaps years apart in the making, yet facing each other. An odd result of this has been that dramatic anecdotes of a satirical and humorous intention (such, e.g., as “Royal Sponsors”) following verse in graver voice, have been read as misfires because they raise the smile that they were intended to raise, the journalist, deaf to the sudden change of key, being unconscious that he is laughing with the author and not at him. I admit that I did not foresee such contingencies as I ought to have done, and that people might not perceive when the tone altered. But the difficulties of arranging the themes in a graduated kinship of moods would have been so great that irrelation was almost unavoidable with efforts so diverse. I must trust for right note-catching to those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half a whisper, whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however, should any one’s train of thought be thrown out of gear by a consecutive piping of vocal reeds in jarring tonics, without a semiquaver’s rest between, and be led thereby to miss the writer’s aim and meaning in one out of two contiguous compositions, I shall deeply regret it.

Samuel Talor Coleridge, painting by Peter Vandyke (1729-1799)

Having at last, I think, finished with the personal points that I was recommended to notice, I will forsake the immediate object of this Preface; and, leaving Late Lyrics to whatever fate it deserves, digress for a few moments to more general considerations.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, painting by Amelia Curran (1775-1847)

The thoughts of any man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot but run uncomfortably on the precarious prospects of English verse at the present day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the birth and setting forth of almost every modern creation in numbers are ominously like those of one of Shelley’s paper-boats on a windy lake. And a forward conjecture scarcely permits the hope of a better time, unless men’s tendencies should change. So indeed of all art, literature, and “high thinking” nowadays. Whether owing to the barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, “a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” (to quote Wordsworth again), or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a new Dark Age. I formerly thought, like so many roughly handled writers, that so far as literature was concerned a partial cause might be impotent or mischievous criticism; the satirizing of individuality, the lack of whole-seeing in contemporary estimates of poetry and kindred work, the knowingness affected by junior reviewers, the overgrowth of meticulousness in their peerings for an opinion, as if it were a cultivated habit in them to scrutinize the tool-marks and be blind to the building, to hearken for the key-creaks and be deaf to the diapason, to judge the landscape by a nocturnal exploration with a flash-lantern. In other words, to carry on the old game of sampling the poem or drama by quoting the worst line or worst passage only, in ignorance or not of Coleridge’s proof that a versification of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry; of reading meanings into a book that its author never dreamt of writing there. I might go on interminably. [N.B. Here, Hardy alludes to Coleridge's remarks in the Biographia Literaria: "In short, whatever specific import we attach to the word, Poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be, all poetry."]

But I do not now think any such temporary obstructions to be the cause of the hazard, for these negligences and ignorances, though they may have stifled a few true poets in the run of generations, disperse like stricken leaves before the wind of next week, and are no more heard of again in the region of letters than their writers themselves. No: we may be convinced that something of the deeper sort mentioned must be the cause.

In any event poetry, pure literature in general, religion—I include religion because poetry and religion touch each other, or rather modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same thing—these, I say, the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and “the truth that shall make you free,” men’s minds appear, as above noted, to be moving backwards rather than on.

The Book of Common Prayer, as used in the Anglican Church

I speak, of course, somewhat sweepingly, and should except many isolated minds; also the minds of men in certain worthy but small bodies of various denominations, and perhaps in the homely quarter where advance might have been the very least expected a few years back—the English Church—if one reads it rightly as showing evidence of “removing those things that are shaken,” in accordance with the wise Epistolary recommendation to the Hebrews. For since the historic and once august hierarchy of Rome some generation ago lost its chance of being the religion of the future by doing otherwise, and throwing over the little band of neo-Catholics who were making a struggle for

Arthur Schopenhauer in 1818 (painting by Ludwig Sigismund Ruhl)

continuity by applying the principle of evolution to their own faith, joining hands with modern science, and outflanking the hesitating English instinct towards liturgical reform (a flank march which I at the time quite expected to witness, with the gathering of many millions of waiting agnostics into its fold); since then, one may ask, what other purely English establishment than the Church, of sufficient dignity and footing, and with such strength of old association, such architectural spell, is left in this country to keep the shreds of morality together? It may be a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and complete rationality, which must come, unless also the world is to perish, by means of the interfusing effect of poetry – “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression of science,” as it was defined by an English poet who was quite orthodox in his ideas. But if it be true, as Comte argued, that advance is never in a straight line, but in a looped orbit, we may, in the aforesaid ominous moving backward, be doing it pour mieux sauter, drawing back for a spring. I repeat that I forlornly hope so, notwithstanding the supercilious regard of hope by Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and other philosophers down to Einstein who have my respect.  But one dares not prophesy. Physical, chronological, and other contingencies keep me in these days from critical studies and literary circles

Where once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art

(if one may quote Tennyson in this century of free verse). Hence I cannot know how things are going so well as I used to know them, and the aforesaid limitations must quite prevent my knowing hence-forward.

I have to thank the editors and owners of The Times, Fortnightly, Mercury, and other periodicals in which a few of the poems have appeared for kindly assenting to their being reclaimed for collected publication.

T. H. February 1922.

but not The Pound Ezra. (That’s a Pound-like joke: when my sister & I were college roommates, she kept misreading the bookspine. It’s the kind of misprision that comes from knowing more rather than knowing less. It’s the kind of joke that’s tolerable in Pound, elsewhere, not so much.) No, this from A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers. I’ve something to say about the book,  but for now I’ll excerpt a part, relevant to a common theme in the scholarship, vestigial Imagism in the Cantos:

To an exhaustion that was beginning to be perceived in standard English, Modernism early in the twentieth century brought two remedies that at first seem diametrically opposed. One was recourse to the Saxon hoard of strong verbs; the other was this Celtic habit of vivid static images.

“Celtic habit” in this case seems not as much linguistic anthropology as marketing ploy, a cousin to the “PQ (Peasant Quality)” required of Abbey Theater dramaturgy. But irrespective of questions of authenticity, there’s something interesting about the poetics of it.

To describe this “Celtic habit,” Kenner brings in Maire Cruise O’Brien:

Irish syntax concentrates on the expression of states rather than actions; its verbal system is highly aspective, with the subject of the sentence as the focus of the utterance and all occurrences relating back thereto. It shows a marked predilection for the substantival cast of sentence, i.e., a sentence where the noun carries the main burden of content.

Kenner’s example of the thing in prose is Lady Gregory’s apology for her great book, Cuchulain of Muirthemne:

I have told the whole story in plain and simple words, in the same way my old nurse Mary Sheridan used to be telling stories from the Irish long ago, and I a child at Roxborough.

The relevant bits are the two juxtaposed beings: the maid in the state of telling stories and Lady Gregory in the twin states of childhood & at-Roxborough-hood.

Kenner claims the contradiction between the demand, informed in part by Ernest Fenollosa, for vigorous verbs & the requirement, in this “Irish” aspective writing, for the copula gets resolved in Yeats’s masterly use of syntax, especially in his expert joining of syntax to stanza. As example, “The Fish” is provided:

Although you hinde in the ebb and flow

Of the pale tide when the moon is set,

The people of coming days will know

About the casting out of my net,

And how you have leaped times out of mind

Over the little silver cords,

And think that you were hard and unkind,

And blame you with many bitter words.

This sentence=poem provides the following lesson, according to Kenner: “The effect of such a sentence, with its ‘Irish’ layering of ‘and’ clauses, is to make not just one clause but the whole poem aspective, held in place for the looking.” (Note how the above quotation from Gregory would also be an example of “and”-clause layering.)

Which brings me to my point: this idea of aspective layering would seem to apply to The Pisan Cantos.

Now such a claim might fall under the Dept. of No Shit Sherlock. Nothing could be more obvious than these Cantos’ paratatic construction. But the Kenner formulation seems to highlight an important feature, that the poem proceeds by laying distinct images/thoughts/verbal tags one against the other. These Cantos are a lapidary mosaic, a setting-in-together of myriad well-worked bits.

For example, Canto 77, lines 203-222 (Hyphens represent stanza breaks. I haven’t recreated any indentations. If I ever figure out CSS I might be able to do poems right):

“If you had any f….n’ brain you’d be dangerous”

remarks Romano Ramona

to a by him designated c.s. in the scabies ward

the army vocabulary contains almost 48 words

one verb and participle one substantive υλη

one adjective and one phrase sexless that is

used as a sort of pronoun

from a watchman’s club to a vamp or fair lady

–

And Margherita’s voice was clear as the notes of a clavichord

tending her rabbit hutch

O Margaret of the seven griefs

who has entered the lotus”

–

Trade, trade, trade..” sang Lanier

and they say the gold her grandmother carried under her skirts for Jeff Davis

drowned her when she slipped from the landing boat;

doom of Atreus

–

(O Mercury god of thieves, you caduceus

is now used by the american army

as witness this packing case)

These 4 stanzas are starkly juxtaposed. No bit follows from the previous. Each element is coincidental: they are all true at the same time.

Which is not to say that there aren’t inferential connections in the poem. There’s all the economic stuff, “how the hell can we get any architecture when we order our columns by the gross”?

Still there is something appealing about this lapidary construction. It seems comparable to Benjamin’s constellations of fact in the Arcades Project. It has an austerity amenable to lyrical splendor through the refusal of narrative armatures. It’s a kind of realism, a technique for presenting the things themselves and nothing else.

Again, this is more Dept. of Sherlock, but what might be interesting is the difference between this aspective layering and an alternative construction technique for these Cantos, associative co-ordination. Given the dominant nostalgia of PC, given how much of the poems are catalogs of memories, one would expect many free associative connections between imagery. And there are sections with much of it, such as Canto 74, lines 247-278 (See above comment about CSS):

but in Tangier I saw from dead straw ignition

From a snake bite

fire came to the straw

from the fakir blowing

foul straw and an arm-long snake

that bit the tongue of the fakir making small holes

and from the blood of the holes

came fire when he stuffed the straw into his mouth

dirty straw that he took from the roadway

first smoke then the dull flame

that wd/ have been in the time of Rais Uli

when I rode out to Elson’s

near the villa of Perdicaris

or four years before that

elemental the thought the souls of children, if any,

but had rented a shelter for travelers

by foot from Siria, some of them

nor is it for nothing that the chrysalids mate in the air color di luce

green splendour and as the sun thru plae fingers

Lordly men are to earth o’ergiven

these the companions:

Fordie that wrote of giants

and William who dreamed of nobility

and Jim the comedian singing:

“Blarrney castle me darlin’

you’re nothing now but a StOWne”

and Plarr talking of mathematics

or Jepson lover of jade

Maurie who wrote historical novels

and Newbolt who looked twice bathed

are to earth o’ergiven.

Beginning with an extended (by PC standards) narrative about a snake charmer Pound had seen in Gibralter 37 years previously, and ending with a litany of fallen comrades, this passage is one big “that was in the time.” But there are not that many such passages in the poems, or as many as one might expect.

However, there is a sense that the whole poem has a “that was in the time” quality to it, & each of the lapidary bits is some bit of memory, whether or not its clearly connected to the bit before or the bit afterward.

But the present moment too has its turn in the poem and with great effect and that is the various sense impressions of life in prison. For example, counting the birds on the wires. Here too Sieburth’s idea of the importance of the black voices brought into the poem.

What seems most true is the the Pisan Cantos are never any one thing.

One way to read: first, read a Canto straight through, w/out any notes; second, read the notes, flipping back at the relevant lines in the poem.

The thing is, both of these experiences are aesthetic. I enjoy reading notes. They’re quick & monadic (they don’t form a narrative, so you can break off at any time). I think it goes back to the first book reading I ever did, which was the photo captions in the Ballantine Second World War books.

It also goes back to the first time I read the Wasteland, at the urging of a professor. Hated every word of it, except for the one note about Shackleton in the Antarctic hallucinating an extra member to his party.

Sieburth’s notes are remarkably thorough, yet still there are some references go unremarked. Given how personal Pound could get, it would seem some will never get tracked down. These opaque markers can glow with unknowable significance. Like fetishes! & I do like fetishes, though I have prescribed for myself Walter Benn Michaels’s Shape of the Signifier. I’m sure after that medicine I’ll be thinking better.

In the Department of Opaque Markers, we have those books that await the Sieburth treatment, such as some other sections of the Cantos, or Zukofsky’s A (though it would be nice to get the book itself back in print). But that’s an odd kind of text, one that stands ever-pregnant w/anticipated exegesis.

One way of thinking better would be to stop writing the kind of poems that call for such note-making. In the minutiae department, one man’s mountain is everyone else’s molehill.

As printed in the first edition of "Tender Buttons" (1914)

A RED STAMP.

If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.

First, I will re-punctuate the text to indicate how I hear this prose-poem read. I don’t do so to impose any particular meaning on it, which would be demonstrably hard to do in any case. I do it simply because if I am to read the thing aloud—say, in a classroom setting—I have to decide what to do with my voice. Making you decide what to do with your voice is one of the things Tender Buttons is somehow “about” anyhow. So:

“A RED STAMP. If lilies are lily white; if they exhaust noise and distance, and even dust; if they, dusty, will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace; if they do this—and it is not necessary, it is not at all necessary—if they do this, they need a catalogue.”

Well obviously, right? Lilies do need a catalogue if they are to “dirt” a surface. I know I would need a catalogue, in the Oxford English Dictionary’s sense 1.a. of the word, if I set about, using lilies, to “dirt a surface with no extreme grace”: “A list, register, or complete enumeration.” Otherwise I’d not have the least idea how to “dirt a surface” with “lilies” that had (as we are told) “exhausted noise, distance, and even dust.” To “exhaust” dust means, if anything, to use it up completely; or to tire it out (as a transitive verb), if we are to suppose “dust” capable of feeling, well, anything. And then there was the automotive sense of “dirtying” the air, and also “surfaces” lacking “extreme grace,” which was available already to Stein in 1914; but not with lilies, of course: with internal combustion engines. As often in Tender Buttons, lexical meanings work against the “grammatical” or “logical” forms so otherwise comfortably available to the voice. “Lilies” do not belong to that category of things that can “exhaust” anything, nor do “noise” and “distance” and “dust” belong to the category of things that might be “exhausted,” whether by lilies or by anything else. And nothing can “dirt” a surface. That is, “dirt” as a verb has not operated in English since the early 19th century, when Cardinal Newman spoke, in 1833, of “sitting down on the ashes which are so dry as not to dirt.” I’ve half a mind to say that Stein is taking (or overtaking) the kind of license with grammar Shakespeare often did, making verbs of nouns, nouns of verbs, and so on. Or maybe she’d just got up from reading her Newman: I can see how she might have fun with “ashes which are so dry as not to dirt.”

Picasso's portrait of Stein

But what of that “red stamp”? I suppose it cannot be a postage stamp. The OED—not that Stein has any respect for such an institution, because after all, it is institutional;—the OED offers up only these alternatives for the word as a noun: a kind of dance; a “stamp” of the foot/feet, whether in a dance or not; a stagnant pool of water; and then of course that battery of senses that runs from fencing, dicing, to a place where horses stand, and then on to definition 5. a.: “An instrument for making impressions, marks, or imprints, on other bodies; a stamping-tool, an engraved block or die for impressing a mark, figure, design or the like, upon a softer material”; and ultimately to the more familiar meanings the word takes in the contexts of printing, official seals, and postage. Which among these meanings demands most importunately the attention of the reader? Well, printing, obviously, and also  making impressions on “softer” material (bodies, say?)—especially impressions somehow “red.” We can say this, taking into account the title of the book: to “stamp” a thing is to touch it, whether the thing be floral or not. But the tact of the stamp carries us immediately into the flowers, doesn’t it? Into the lilies (again, forgive me Ms. Stein, the OED): “Any plant (or its flower) of the genus Lilium (family Liliaceæ) of bulbous herbs bearing at the top of a tall slender stem large showy flowers of white, reddish, or purplish colour, often marked with dark spots on the inside; esp. (without qualification) L. candidum, the White or Madonna Lily (cf. b), which grows wild in some Eastern countries, and has from early times been cultivated in gardens; it is a type of whiteness or purity.” Or, by figurative extension: “3. fig. a. Applied to persons or things of exceptional whiteness, fairness, or purity; e.g. a fair lady; the white of a beautiful complexion.” Which then naturally ushers us into the second figurative extension, again having to do with gender: “3. fig. b. Used as a term of abuse, esp. of a man to imply lack of masculinity.” Gender, genre: matters of due concern to Stein, we may say without controversy, in Tender Buttons. Exactly what is this book anyway? Poetry? Prose? Écriture féminine avant la lettre? A hoax? All four things together?

By Georgia O'Keeffe

White lilies one must simply suppose to be “lily white.” There’s a nice tautology in that, or in any case a fuzzy logic. As for myself, living as I do in bustling central Kyoto, 6,000 miles from where I was born, I reckon I’d pick up a vase of “lily-white” lilies that could “exhaust noise and distance and even dust,” if I could only find them somewhere outside of the pages of Tender Buttons. In any case, flowers are the sexual organs of plants (domestic and otherwise), and sometimes they even bear “a red stamp,” as in the adjacent quasi-erotic painting by Georgia O’Keeffe.

But what the prose-poems in Tender Buttons chiefly do is this: derange our sense of semantics, syntax, logic and grammar, while, for the most part, remaining  completely readable, thoroughly available to the voice—indeed, delightfully so, especially in part one of the book, “Objects.”

Notice how in “A Red Stamp” we find an if/then structure five times deployed (implicitly), with a neat parenthetical emphasis which clarifies or qualifies nothing, contrary to the proper function of parentheses (“and it is not necessary, it is not at all necessary”). In short, the logical structures are all in their proper places. But nothing else is. There is no necessity at all about the matter, in fact. Lily-white lilies may dirt a surface that has “no extreme grace” (as against mere “grace”), and they may “exhaust noise and distance and even dust.” Then again they may not. These Steinian lily-white lilies are neither here nor there.

But one thing is for sure: if lily-white lilies do these things, they most certainly need a “catalogue.” Which, be it remembered, is what “Objects” (sort of ) constitutes: a catalogue of boxes, cloaks, pieces of coffee, carafes; of umbrellas “mounted,” “Mildred’s” and otherwise; of hats, pianos, and seltzer bottles; of red hats and blue coats, of plates and purses; and, of course, a “perfectly unprecedented arrangement” between silly-lily “old ladies.”

N.B. For a link to a fine reading of Tender Buttons at Librivox (done by Cori Samuel), click here. For a down-loadable facsimile of the first edition (1914) of the book, click here. For other discussions of the book within this blog—in which the meaning of its title, among other things, is treated—click here. “Silly-lily,” by the way, is a meme, or turn of phrase, ambient enough to have found its way all the way over to the title of a cut on a record by “Bunkface,” a four-piece Malaysian rock band from Klang, Selangor, formed in 2005—as a quick Google informs me.

We wondered why year-long experiments had become de rigeur in non-fiction writing and publishing… and Aristotle has the answer. (Always go back to first principles!) Narratives, the great philosopher suggests in his “Poetics”, the earliest surviving work of literary theory, work best if they’re arranged around some pre-existing unit of time : sunrise to sunset, January to December. Such stories satisfy our in-built need for symmetry, for repetition, for order amidst the chaos.

Michael Morse & I are reading the Sieburth edition of the Pisan Cantos. I’m going to try to put down some of my thoughts, and maybe some of the dialogue with Michael. Try to be quick about it. Make the reader feel good, like a young blog should.

Sieburth tells the story, Pound’s years in Italy, the radio broadcasts, the arrest, the prison, the writing, the exit to the US, with a coda for incarceration in St. Elizabeth’s & publication & the Bollingen Prize, smartly: he’s got good details & some verve. It’s a nice contrast to the version that’s in my head, Hugh Kenner’s hagiographic Pound Era. Mostly Sieburth allows Pound to be responsible for some of his trouble. By toning down the tragic, Sieburth opens up the possibility for the comic. & as much as I admire Pound, there’s plenty of comic potential in his life story.

For example, I’ve always been partial to one part of the story, something not in Sieburth’s intro, something that happens long after all the Pisan stuff: after he gets out of St. Elizabeth’s, and after his great photo op, giving the fascist salute on the boat, throwing out some red meat for the boys in the press, his first stop is Schloss Brunnenburg, home to his long-suffering daughter & her aristo husband. The way Kenner tells the story, it’s a miserable spell, during which Mary for about the first time in her life has a chance to spend some quality time with her dad, but then all these wackos show up, her dad’s friends—poetic sycophants, escaped fascists, fellow former mental patients. It could make a great play, kind of like a realist, big cast version of End Game, & a dark dank broken down medieval castle for a set. All of Pound’s pretensions come home to roost & the nest gets stinky. There’s an arc to that story.

There’s an arc to Sieburth’s version of the Pisa story, one that doesn’t get played up in the Kenner. Both versions give us the capture in Rapallo by the partisans, with Pound picking up the eucalyptus pip on the way out (& I’m fond of that pip. I too collect fetish objects, if too many. I’ve got this box of rocks. I used to know where each came from). & both gives us good details on his time at the DTC, the weeks in the cage & the weeks in the infirmary. Sieburth emphasizes the racial dimension, something that has a sharp presence in the poems. The Detention Training Center was the only segregated unit in that theater of operations, and Sieburth believes that the contact with the black voices, their inclusion in the poem, is the crucial element in the Pisan Cantos.

But it’s the time between the two events that fascinates me. Pound isn’t taken directly to Pisa. His first stop is at a military intelligence facility in Genoa, where some sympathetic officers give him the good cop treatment & Pound sings like a bird, for the benefit of J. Edgar Hoover’s files. It’s a glorious manic phase for Ezra, lifting him up to make for a better depressive crash in the cage. Pound is at his delusional best (& whether or not he was insane, he was grandiosely delusional), firing off letters left & right, telling everyone how all he had to do was have a quick chat with Truman (& even Stalin) & he’d get everything fixed, & by everything he didn’t mean his case, he meant the world.

This delusion was filled out with economic theories…(to be continued! We’ve got to be quick or else we won’t be at all).