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THEME AND VARIATIONS: TOWARDS AN EXPLORATIVE POETIC
David W. Pritchard
Adviser: Professor Jonathan Loesberg
Adviser/Second Reader: Professor Linda Voris
Poetry
Spring 2011
University Honors in Literature
College of Arts and Sciences: Literature and Theatre Arts
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Christina Farella, Mary Sweeney, Chris Lucibella, Jacob Billingsley, John Pritchard, Suzanne
Pritchard, Kevin Grijalva, Elizabeth Ennis, Daniel Catt, Javier Rivera, David Keplinger,
Jonathan Loesberg, and Linda Voris: I cannot thank you enough for simultaneously tolerating
and cultivating my ridiculous overtures and wild digressions. You have made this work a real
event, and I am forever indebted to each of you for continuing to push me off cliffs, forcing me
to learn to fly over and over again in new and interesting ways, always keeping me in midair.
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I. PREFATORY CARTOGRAPHY: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
"Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms
that are yet to come." – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
"All discourse is aligned along the several staves of a musical score." – Jacques Lacan
"The obvious analogy is with music." – Lyn Hejinian
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This project is an investigation of form as an expressive dimension in poetry by way of a
formal musical analogy to variations on a theme. In music, "theme" refers to the material units
on which an entire piece is based; I want to extend this definition into literary praxis.1 I have
written poems that stage variations on the linguistic material, rather than ideational or
representational content, of extant poems. These source poems provide not only the material but
the formal basis for my variations, grounding my writing in an intertextual relationship with the
sources that is lexical as well as structural. My poems are not singular responses to arguments
made by other poems, appropriations of their lexicon as a way either to disagree or to agree with
something that has been put forth; rather, I treat writing as a process of thinking about and
through poetry. Each poem serves not as a conduit for describing past experiences or moral
truths but as a formal manifestation of an exploration of questions about the possibilities for
knowledge generated by treating language itself as a material rather than a representational
mediation through which we attain knowledge. I want to use the musical analogy as a way to
foreground both the materiality of language and the importance of form in this project, and
ultimately to allow me to explore an epistemology that is not based on a representational model
of knowledge.
This essay will build the stage on which my poems perform. It will frame, not explain,
the project: a director's note in the program rather than an explication of the script. I want to
make clear the assumptions these poems embody by providing a context for my experiments. I
will situate myself in a particular poetic tradition of experimentation, allowing me to specify
better what I mean by "form" and "materiality" as it relates to extant theories of poetry and
language, as well as to cite specific influences on the poems for this project. I will draw
1
Cf. William Drabkin, "Theme," in Grove Music Online (Oxford University Press, 2007).
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boundaries between this experimentalism and the lyric tradition of sincerity. This does not
necessarily entail a value-judgment, a preference for one over the other as the poetic tradition,
but is an important, if ultimately hazy, distinction, that will allow me to situate my poems in the
camp of the experimental. Making this distinction will also enable me to highlight the
representational epistemology underpinning that particular poetics of sincerity, which then lets
me discuss an alternative model for knowledge, based largely on the writing of Gilles Deleuze.
From here I will turn to the musical analogy of variations on a theme and the formal and material
implications of that analogy for these poems. After sketching out this analogy, I will provide a
brief formal overview of the kinds of variations I have employed in writing poems for this
project, to give a general sense of how I approached the source poems and in what ways I
derived forms from them.
*
The first crucial step in contextualizing my poems is pinpointing the tradition they
inhabit. To do this I must differentiate between two kinds of poetics, a tradition of lyrical selfexpression—aptly described by David Perkins in his book on Wordsworth as "the poetry of
sincerity"—and one of linguistic experimentation—what Marjorie Perloff refers to generally as
"the other tradition" in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, quoting the title of a book of lectures by
John Ashbery. The former category might include such twentieth century American poets as T.
S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, W. S. Merwin, Robert Bly, James Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sylvia
Plath, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, and Robert Lowell; a partial list of experimental poets might
include Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest,
Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout, and Robert Creeley. Tempting as it may be to
let the definition of traditions stand as a simple list of names, I will try to define characteristics of
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these groups that will in general be true for the poets here. I will focus mainly on two issues:
language, how it functions and its goal or purpose in the writing of a poem; and form, how form
factors into the writing of poems and ultimately the relationship of form to content in each
poetic.
In the broadest sense, the difference between the lyric and experimental traditions under
discussion can be inferred from the divergence in critical approaches to their work. In her article
"Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?" Perloff discusses the remarkably distinct ways critics talk about
these two poets. In essence, she says, Stevensians speak metaphysically, using terms like
"imagination, consciousness, being, and self"; Poundians prefer a much more material lexicon of
words such as "particularity, image, technique, [and] structure" for their analyses.2 Stevens is
located firmly in the former camp, writing poems that are frequently read with an emphasis on
what the poet is saying in the poem. On the other hand, critics reading Pound call attention to
how the poems are written, the ways the formal devices work and essentially how the poems are
structured. This is, of course, too large a generalization to carry much further, and it ignores the
incredible amount of crossover between the poetries. There is a great deal of lyricism in
experimental poetry, just as there is much experimenting found in lyrical poetry. This distinction
provides a practical dichotomy for differentiating between lyric and experimental traditions
along the lines that I would like to examine them, that is, in treatments of form as an expressive
dimension.3
2
Marjorie Perloff, "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?," New Literary History 13, no. 3 (1982): 496.
To suggest that the what tradition pays attention only to the content of a poem, while the how tradition is
preoccupied solely with form, is, in my estimation, incorrect. Certainly Bloom et al. discuss how Stevens articulates
what he says, just as Kenner and company talk about what Pound is saying in formally innovative ways. The
difference, I think, is that a Stevensian would posit meaning that transcends or is somehow beyond the words on the
page, that the poem and/or language are means to an end that is partly contained but extends beyond the content of
the poem; whereas a Poundian would describe the poem and language as both means and end, a series of formal
choices whose arrangement and whose relationships to one another constitute the meaning of the poem as something
within the poem itself.
3
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We can clarify and particularize this rough dichotomy by focusing next on the question of
how these two different traditions view the role of language and form in poetry. The what
tradition, as the aforementioned lexical gloss demonstrates, has a certain affinity with
Romanticism; Perloff describes the emphasis on "Romantic visionary humanism" in Stevens by
his critics, suggesting a certain "lyric paradigm" of "organic unity and symbolic structure" that is
taken as a vital component of great poetry.4 Such a paradigm can be traced back to a poet such as
William Wordsworth, whose conception of language as David Perkins discusses it in his
Wordsworth and The Poetry of Sincerity serves as a perfect example of the lyrical approach to
how words work in poetry. A good lyrical poem, according to Perkins, should express a "[rich]
and[…]variegated" reality using nuanced and precise language.5 Words constitute "a system of
forms which produce, channel, and partially censor the consciousness of each individual."6
Language is not the only such system of forms; Perkins cites visual art, science, and music as
examples of others. We encounter problems when we try to recreate a particular experience that
began in one system in a separate, presumably distinct, system. A poet, then, is necessarily at a
disadvantage when trying to express an extralinguistic experience with mere words.
For the lyric poet, "thought[…]can be non-verbal and hence far more subtle, profound,
and comprehensive than the words found to represent it," and "[e]xpression is a process of
fitting—unconsciously and spontaneously, he hopes—language to what we already apprehend."7
Language here serves as a conduit, a mediation as much as it is a medium. The poet's task is to
render, as precisely as he can, a specific experience in words. The words themselves hardly
suffice to convey such nuance as the poet felt or feels, but they serve as a way for the poet to
4
Perloff, "Pound/Stevens," 504.
David Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 85.
6
Ibid., 84.
7
Ibid., 88.
5
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refer to the experience, to gesture to meaning beyond language. The poet uses words to bring a
reader as close as possible to an experience, knowing that he may not absolutely embody or fully
represent that experience, only approximate it as best as possible.
Words—languages—are referential and communicative for the purposes of lyric poetry,
and reference and communication work best when they work quietly and without drawing
attention to themselves, transparent to the semantic content and minimizing emphasis on their
own physical properties. Given that the lyric poet's task is to depict reality, it is the actual object,
not the word, that occupies the poet's attention. As Perkins puts it, "[a] poet's highest verbal skill
manifests itself when we are unconscious of his words, being involved in a living, immediate
experience or act of mind."8 In other words, the finest of poets is the one who most carefully
effaces the materiality of his language to allow us to be absorbed in rather than aware of the
artificial structures of the poem.
Form, like language, serves as a way to conceal or efface the artifice of the poem in this
tradition. Perkins speaks of it as a necessary evil to the lyric poet, something that "puzzles" the
poet's "hope for sincerity": "clearly no act of expression—perhaps no event in consciousness—
can take place except as it flows into form, and yet we have no guarantee that forms
indispensable to us will also correspond to realities."9 Form forces us to winnow out any
extraneous details that aren't absolutely necessary for expressing an experience sincerely. In this
tradition, a poet can gauge the efficacy of his work based on the unobtrusiveness of the words
and their presentation on the page; formal choices aim to diminish the difference between the
reader's response to the word and the thing itself. But these choices are not arbitrary, and the goal
is not to convince a reader that the poet is sincere. Wordsworth—an experimental poet in his
8
9
Ibid.
Ibid., 84.
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own day—was interested in making poetic language more like the language of everyday speech,
insisting that form was not an imposition but a natural outgrowth of poetic inspiration. Thus, a
sonnet is written as a sonnet because, naturally, organically, the experience the poem describes
conduces to the choice of this received verse. Yet it is important to note that Wordsworth's
organic form was not free verse; it was always in received forms, or at the very least metrical.
Nevertheless, the poet touted his work as natural, establishing an important criteria that has
persisted in the consideration of lyric poetry.
Charles Bernstein seizes upon this element of the lyric tradition in his essay "Stray
Straws and Straw Men," describing writing geared toward naturalness as aiming to
"eliminate[…]imposed interferences," saying instead that it "sanctif[ies] something that gets
known as [a work's] honesty, its directness, its authenticity, its artlessness, its sincerity, its
spontaneity, its personal expressiveness; in short, its naturalness."10 Bernstein couches his own
polemical tone and pejorative approach by acknowledging in the title of his essay that he is
employing certain straw men to stage his critique of naturalness as a poetic virtue. However,
almost every word in this snide litany appears as a positive descriptor of a poem or poetry in
Perkins' study of Wordsworth; whatever his intended purpose in doing so, Bernstein has
presented the vocabulary with which one might approach a lyric poem, and provided us with
some general criteria for evaluating poems within that tradition.
Later in his essay, Bernstein writes, "there is no natural look or sound to a poem. Every
element is intended, chosen. That is what makes a thing a poem."11 This statement aptly
characterizes some of the general assumptions a poet might make in this experimental tradition,
as does its deployment in an essay in part directed against a more lyrical, expressive mode of
10
Charles Bernstein, "Stray Straws and Straw Men," in Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles, CA: Sun
& Moon Press, 1986), 41.
11
Ibid., 49.
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writing. Essays and statements of poetics from some poets in this experimental tradition at times
become hostile or dismissive of lyrical, "expressivist" poetry, seeing it as an embodiment of "an
ideology of no ideology" that lends itself to the frustrating popular reception of poetry as "nice
but irrelevant."12
When we consider the tradition of experimental writing in America in the 20th and 21st
centuries, a tradition influenced by the French avant-garde, as well as by the experiments of
Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams, we find a broad scope of different
kinds of writing, from the New York School to Black Mountain to the Language Poets. What is
clear, however, is that all of these groups of writers have a vastly different conception of
language use than a Wordsworthian lyricist might. Where the lyrical poet takes aim at the
signified, the experimental writer focuses instead on the signifier, the material sign, of language.
In this tradition, a poet generally emphasizes rather than effaces her medium—and in the context
of the experimental tradition, the poetics of how, "medium" means "material" more than it does
"mediation." Language does not only refer to things outside itself; it is, one could say, a thing.
That isn't to say there isn't a referential dimension in language, but that reference is necessarily
more complex than a signifier-signified correspondence. As Bernstein puts it, "'reference' is not a
one-on-one relation to an 'object' but a perceptual dimension[…]refus[ing] the build up of image
track/projection."13 In this sort of experimental poetry, words refer and relate to other words, and
not necessarily indexically. Polysemy and ambiguity are paramount; the difficulty of direct
communication and expression become central to the experiments in this tradition, questions to
be explored in writing rather than impediments to overcome.
12
Ron Silliman, et al., "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto," Social Text 19/20, no. Fall
1988 (1988): 264.
13
Bernstein, "Semblance," 34.
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Materiality, for these poets, cannot be emphasized enough. Language is not organic and it
is not a direct conduit or descriptive tool to depict reality. The poem does not describe an
experience, nor is it merely an experience itself; the poet aims not for an imitation or intimation
of something that has already happened (mimesis), but for the happenings themselves. As Lyn
Hejinian puts it, "[p]oetry[…]takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing
experience."14 The experience in poetry is not directly related to the signified world; it is an
experience that calls attention to its own constructedness, the how inextricable from whatever
what the poem may assert. To experience experience, one must grasp the remove, the gap
between perception and language, between language and the world. It is in the context of this gap
that Hejinian articulates the status of language as material:
Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy
with other objects—balls and rivers. Children objectify language when they render it
their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles[…]They discover that words are not equal to
the world, that a blur of displacement[…]exists in the relation between things (events,
ideas, objects) and the words for them—a displacement producing a gap.15
"When is a door not a door? When it's ajar." This is not simply an amusing pun, but a perfect
demonstration of the word as object that anticipates my discussions of form and epistemology.
The door, referentially speaking, is still a door when opened slightly; however, to say "the door
is ajar" is to undermine the rules of grammar and of the sign, making an adjective (ajar) into a
noun (a jar) for the sake of profitable ambiguity. The way this statement is said determines its
particular meaning, a meaning generated not by specificity (as one would expect from a phrase in
a lyrical poem) but by indeterminacy. In other words, experimental poetry tells us to "mind the
gap" between word and world precisely because that rift is the site in which poems make
meanings.
14
Lyn Hejinian, "Introduction," in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 3.
Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure," in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2000), 48.
15
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The materiality of language and its lack of simple referential transparency make form
even more vital in writing. But it is not quite as easy to match form and content as it is for the
lyric poet; the experimental poet uses form to call attention to the poem as a made thing, as
artificial, as art object. This tradition of heightened artifice draws on the writings of the Russian
Formalists, in particular those of Viktor Shklovsky, whose "Art as Technique" helps articulate
how I think about poetic form in the context of experimental poetry. Shklovsky writes that "the
technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty
and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must
be prolonged."16 Form helps attain the defamiliarization of an object by imposing an extension of
the perceptive process on the viewer of a work of art. Shklovsky's essay suggests a theory of art
in which the form, not the content, takes precedence, and where no discussion of meaning can
take place without discussing the way in which an artwork is artificial. "Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important."17
My discussion of Russian Formalism in the context of experimental poetry is not
tangential or arbitrary: poets such as Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein cite Shklovsky
explicitly in their discussions of form, and the principle of "defamiliarization" can be found in
many critical treatments of experimental writing, by the poets or by other critics. But it must be
stressed that for an experimental poet, making the stone stony (to use Shklovsky's phrase) does
not go far enough in describing the function of form. There is another dimension, one that
necessarily opposes itself to the organic unity and closure of form in lyric poetry, wherein the
expressive capabilities of form are enhanced by its radical openness. The concept of "open form"
16
Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Marion J. Reis Lee T.
Lemon (University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 12.
17
Ibid.
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is central to Hejinian's essay "The Rejection of Closure." In the poet's preface to the essay in her
collection The Language of Inquiry, she defines what she intends to reject:
I can offer several [examples of a "closed text"]. The coercive, epiphanic mode in some
contemporary lyric poetry can serve as a negative model, with its smug pretension to
universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth. And detective fiction
can serve as a positive model, presenting an ultimately stable, calm and calming (and
fundamentally unepiphanic) vision of the world. In either case, however pleasurable its
effects, closure is a fiction, one of the amenities that falsehood and fantasy provide.18
Hejinian establishes what form does not do so she may begin to give examples of how it works.
For her, a form like the sonnet would not be open; it presupposes a certain logical, argumentative
progression that constitutes, in its fourteen lines, a complete expression, one geared toward some
sort of revelation or conclusion. The pretense, of course, is a matter of interpretation, but a
sonnet like James Wright's "Saint Judas" hinges on the "turn" that fulfills the expectations of the
sonnet's volta. The moral statement of the ending of this poem is a logical conclusion to the
poem's narrative and intellectual arc. In short, the poem closes with epiphany and revelation, the
form serving to provide a single direction for the reader to experience the poem, a logical order
that has a definite beginning and end.
On the other hand, open form "gives the impression that [the work] begins and ends
arbitrarily and not because there is a necessary point of origin or terminus, a first or last
moment.[…]One has simply stopped because one has run out of units or minutes, and not
because a conclusion has been reached nor 'everything' said."19 Whereas the Wright sonnet
mentioned above constitutes an excellent instance of a closed text, we might say that Ted
Berrigan's book of cut-up sonnets exemplifies open form. The governing constraints are the
flagrant defiance of the sonnet form—Berrigan's poems are fourteen lines long but lack meter,
narrative, or any sort of logical coherence that we would identify in a sonnet (so the sonnet is
18
19
Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure," 41.
Ibid., 47.
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present only as a specter, rather than as a specific form that fulfills the demands of tradition and
teaches us explicitly how to read the poems)—and the technique of collage, the arrangement of
appropriated fragments (some written by Berrigan, others taken from different "found" sources).
This "cut-up" method further underscores materiality, for Berrigan treats words, lines, and
phrases as things to be moved around and arranged rather than as signs to gesture toward a
particular experience. The Sonnets is a book organized around a formal principle, an arbitrary
assemblage of seventy-seven fourteen-line assemblages.
In order to explain this kind of radically disjunctive experiment, Charles Bernstein argues
that designating formal and structural decisions as "arbitrary" does not strip them of intention. A
writer in this tradition uses structure as a means of approaching the world. "It is by and through
structurings that the world gets revealed[…]But there is no given (set of) structures(s) for all
cases; they must always be generated ((re)discovered) anew."20 The arbitrary decisions of which
Hejinian spoke precede the writing. Writing is written as writing (not imitation of speech) in a
particular, chosen form. Bernstein later explains that poetry beginning with a "constructive
principle" (his term for the arbitrary constraints Hejinian describes) is
a poetry that does not assume a measure but finds it, articulates it. In this context, a value
in constructive work is that it lays the measure bare to the ear and eye, so that we can
hear and see the structuring and how it creates (conditions) meaning by its structuring. So
[it] actively displays how meaning in the world comes to be.21
In this kind of writing, form designates the constraints used to generate the work, not the vessel
into which content is poured. Language is not treated as meaningless; rather, it is assumed to be
endlessly meaning-full, a source of infinite permutations and arrangements, thus an infinite array
of meanings. A poet in the tradition of Wordsworth would locate the meaning or meanings of a
poem in what is being said, as an extension of the content presented in a unified and balanced
20
21
Bernstein, "Thought's Measure," 73.
Ibid., 75-6.
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structure; experimental poets would see meaning as something other than this, emphasizing the
form of the poem and approaching the question of meaning from the additional standpoint of
how the poem is structured, compounding referential clarity with deliberate indeterminacy. In
short, the lyrical tradition typically conceives of form as the answer to a question, something
assumed and unassuming in the presentation of a poem; the experimental tradition treats form as
the way in which meaning is generated rather than the conduit through which meaning is
reached, a way of asking questions ceaselessly through the process of writing, questions whose
answers are less important than the possibilities they suggest.22
The poems I have written are located in this experimental tradition. The musical analogy,
as will become clear, involves the treatment of language as a material rather than as a simply
referential medium, and my poems are formally constructed in relation to the source texts instead
of as a response to the content, the what of the poems. I have written so extensively about these
different traditions because they are fundamentally different, and not just methodologically so;
there is a decided rejection, in the experimental tradition, of the epistemology implicit in the lyric
tradition here described. In the next section of this essay I will summarize the representational
model of knowledge assumed in the lyrical tradition and offer an alternative approach to
knowledge that is immanent, relational and fundamentally concerned with difference and
disjunction rather than unity and sameness, where the question of representation becomes
complicated and necessitates an alternative approach to knowledge and thought. This will
22
I address the objections to the potential overly simplified nature of this split in note 2, but an example of the
different considerations of form can be found in the two sonnets previously discussed. In Wright's "Saint Judas," the
statement of moral dubiety is summarized and solidified in the volta of the sonnet. The form is an extension of the
content, the poem's existence as a sonnet accounted for before the question of meaning is even considered. In
Berrigan's sonnets, discussion of the form constitutes consideration of meaning. The content of these poems is
difficult or impossible to paraphrase; to think about meaning one must contend with how Berrigan uses words,
language, images, tropes.
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underscore the epistemological concerns and implications of this project and serve to crystallize
further my discussion of open form and the materiality of language.
*
Before outlining the epistemology guiding my poems, I will give a sketch of the
representational model to which I am offering an alternative as exemplified in Perkins'
discussions of Wordsworth and the above articulations of separate traditions. This brief overview
will allow me to situate my discussion primarily in the context of poetry and the aforementioned
poetic traditions. What follows should be understood as first and foremost an elucidation of my
own philosophical concerns rather than an argument designed primarily to persuade the reader.
This epistemology has informed my poetry for this project, and an understanding of it is
necessary in order to help read the poems I have written in terms of their formal experiments,
language use, and the ways in which each variation relates to its source poem, among many other
things. I write to provide context for my poems more so than to make a comprehensive argument
against representation, a trajectory I would explore gladly had I world enough and time, but
which I must set aside now in favor of framing my poetic endeavors.
The notion that the purpose of language is to refer—that words can have corresponding
signifieds—already suggests a particular epistemological disposition for the lyrical tradition of
poetry. Perkins explains in a reading of Wordsworth that "a written poem[…is]something itself
inert and valueless, however precious the spirit it may contain.[…A] poem does not embody the
intuition it suggests."23 The poem as it appears on the page contains no knowledge and is on its
own worthless; what is valuable is its ability to refer beyond itself, to be able to describe the real
world and to suggest, through these descriptions, a meaning or set of meanings related to the
overall symbolic structure of the poem. And indeed knowledge—also described as "Truth,"
23
Perkins, Wordsworth, 106.
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"insight," and "experience" in various discussions of poems in this mode—is founded on
representation. "To know" and "to think" function as transitive verbs; neither, in this
epistemology, is likely to appear without an object to think or know of or about. Similarly, the
words on the page cannot be what they depict any more than a painting can be a chair or a house.
The project of the lyric poet is mimetic; he begins with an object or experience in the external
world, reflects or meditates on it, and comes to a conclusion of some sort, usually in the form of
an insight or revelation afforded him by the experience or his particular perception of the object.
Language is a means to an end. The words themselves, the material signs, are unimportant as
things, serving as intermediaries to connect experience and knowledge to the outside world in a
one-to-one referential structure: they are the material that points to the immaterial, the signifier
allowing us to approach the signified.
But this epistemology is inadequate for an experimental poet who conceives of language
as a material whose referential capacity is largely recursive. The alternative is not to throw out
reference entirely and start from scratch; rather, as Claire Colebrook points out in her article
"Questioning Representation," it is more an issue of "liberat[ing] thought from representation"
than it is of complete disavowal. This liberation, she continues, "would be to render thought
ungrounded. No longer an act of mimesis or recognition, thought would have to be responsible
for its own event."24 Representation is not eliminated, but detached, removed from any necessary
relationship it may have with knowledge. As we shall see, the question of reference is not
abandoned or thrown out, but reassessed in a manner that opens up new dimensions beyond that
of mere representation, of representation as re-presentation, and allows for the coexistence of
seemingly contradictory models for thought.
24
Claire Colebrook, "Questioning Representation," SubStance 29, no. 2 (2000): 48.
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How do we approach the question of knowledge without a representational grounding?
How does language factor into the equation? To answer this question and provide a basis for the
experiments in my poems, I turn to Gilles Deleuze, who proposes a radical epistemology that
leaves behind both "height" and "depth" as indicators of going beyond and focuses on the
surface. Deleuze constructs a relational rather than representational model for knowledge,
presenting a framework where difference dominates and the constant making of connections, a
ceaseless becoming, supplants a static ontology.
This non-representational epistemology has its roots in Deleuze's theory of sense.
Deleuze's inquiry implicitly confounds mimesis because, he tells us, "sense is a nonexisting
entity, and, in fact, maintains very special relations with nonsense."25 The paradox here—that we
can compose a theory, a logic, of something that doesn't exist—is essential not only to the rest of
the book but to describing a theory of knowledge that doesn't rely on mimesis. Elsewhere,
Deleuze—writing with Félix Guattari—characterizes this approach to knowledge as "directly [a
question] of perceptual semiotics," suggesting that we should try "to see things in the middle,
rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or
right to left."26 In other words, we are asked to think not about things but about the relations
between things, and in order to do this we must reconceptualize the relationship between
language use and external states of affairs such that we are able to articulate an epistemology of
becoming and flux rather than of being and fixity.
Deleuze's concept of the event addresses this reconsideration of language. Event, in this
context, does not designate a particular instance with a defined beginning and end but a
25
26
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), xiii.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 23.
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"simultaneity of becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present."27 Deleuze explicates the
phrase "Alice becomes larger" to demonstrate this concept. For him, this proposition does not
mean that Alice moves from "small" to "large," from one point to another, from fixed state to
new fixed state. Instead, Deleuze unpacks the sentence, stating that it means both "Alice
becomes larger than she was" and "Alice becomes smaller than she will be" at the same time
when we consider it relationally, as Deleuze urges us to do. There is a fundamental paradox in
this gloss: how does Alice become smaller when she becomes larger?
Deleuze deliberately leaves the paradox unresolved; it is a key element of his conception
of the event as "infinitely divisible" into past and future. The event is "eternally that which has
just happened and that which is about to happen, but never that which is happening."28 Events
cannot be thought in terms of chronology, as discrete points marking a particular moment in a
specific immediate present. Events are not points on a timeline; in this mode of thought, we find
"two complementary though mutually exclusive fashions" in which time must be grasped: "Only
the present exists in time and gathers together or absorbs the past and future. But only the past
and future inhere in time and divide each present infinitely. These are not three successive
dimensions, but two simultaneous readings of time."29 Time entails a series of interrelated
happenings extending infinitely into the past and infinitely into the future, but which are
necessarily perceived as—not in—a present. That is, the present is always an assemblage rather
than a moment in itself; it is a composite of an infinite extension of relations into the past and an
infinite extension of relations into the future. When we say "Alice becomes larger," we use
language to mark a limit, to circle one particular series of relations. But the continuous formation
of connections and relations exceeds what we have marked off as an event; the event continues to
27
28
29
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 1.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 5.
Pritchard 20
relate to everything—to be constituted by its relations—to every other event that came before it
and everything that will come after it: a perpetual flux of relations, a constant becoming-B of
point A, becoming-A of point B. An event is not a product (a large Alice after "Alice becomes
larger") but a process (the process of becoming-large, which can only be known in relation to
Alice's size in the past, thus becoming-small simultaneously).
The importance of the paradox in this epistemology is key, especially given Deleuze and
Guattari's injunction to try to see things in the middle rather than at fixed end points. Paradoxes
are the sole property of language, and suggest, as does the Alice example, an extension in two
opposing directions at once. To embrace paradox is to embrace contradictions as such and
consider the connections between them, rather than to castigate them as logical fallacies. In order
to consider the role of language, Deleuze provides an account of sign theory that reframes (rather
than destroys) reference, thinking of it in terms of serialization rather than correspondence. In
this paradigm,
"every unique series, whose homogeneous terms are distinguished only according to type
or degree, necessarily subsumes under it two heterogeneous series, each of which is
constituted by terms of the same type or degree, although these terms differ in nature
from those of the other series (they can of course differ also in degree).30
Thus, the Saussurean sign is comprised of two heterogeneous series, the signifier and the
signified, rather than simply being a homogeneous series in itself. "Signifier" and "signified" in
Deleuze retain, generally, the same definitions they have in Saussure: the signifier generally
refers, and the signified is generally that which is referred to. The sign is produced not as a direct
synthesis of these two aspects but as part of the differential relations between the signifying and
signified series, which remain heterogeneous even in the articulation of a "sign" produced as
30
Ibid., 36-7.
Pritchard 21
such.31 Deleuze incorporates these two terms as a way of describing his multi-serial form in
general, telling us that the signifying series is always excessive in a way that points to its own
lack, while the signified series, conversely, gestures toward its own excess by the fundamental
lack within the series. "By means of this excess and this lack, the series refer to each other in
eternal disequilibrium and in perpetual displacement."32 The paradox that arises from this
simultaneous excess and this lack is precisely what allows the series to communicate with one
another. It "guarantees[…]the convergence of the two series which it traverses, but precisely on
the condition that it makes them endlessly diverge."33 The series never meet, but communicate
through the interstices formed by this paradox. It is between them, in that differential space, that
meanings can emerge and sense can be discussed.
An example of this serialization can be found in the Zen kōan tradition, wherein Zen
masters use this kind of paradoxical convergence and divergence between series to subvert
thinking in terms of simple mimetic reference. In the Wumenguan, the first kōan reads, "A monk
asked Zhaozhou, 'Does even a dog have Buddha-nature? Zhaozhou said, 'No.'"34 Of course,
Buddhist scripture tells us that all things have Buddha-nature, which means that either Zhaozhou
is wrong or the scripture is wrong. The situation is a paradox, where scripture and master make
two opposing claims about Buddha-nature. Master Wumen's commentary, however, suggests
how we should read this paradoxical situation. He writes, "When you suddenly break
through[,][…]it is as though you have obtained a great warrior's sword: meeting Buddhas, you
kill the Buddhas; meeting Zen masters, you kill the masters."35 To come to a logical conclusion,
thus resolving the pull in two directions at once initiated by this kōan, would be to miss the point
31
Cf. Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 48.
33
Ibid., 40.
34
Unlocking the Zen Koan, trans. Thomas Cleary (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1997), 1.
35
Ibid., 2.
32
Pritchard 22
of the kōan entirely. If the master is wrong, then the scripture's authority has been reified; if the
scripture is wrong, then the master's authority has been reified. To choose one or the other would
undermine Buddhist philosophy. The only recourse to this situation is to focus not on fixed or
denoted states but instead on the endless process of movement in the interstice between these
two divergent series of scripture and kōan. The two series converge in that they both support and
espouse the teachings of the Buddha; they diverge by virtue of their conflicting denotations. The
result is an indeterminacy located between the kōan and the scripture that calls for constant
engagement and consideration, a(n re)assessment at all points in these series that never finally
pronounces one or the other assertion about the Buddha-nature of dogs to be the most "correct"
and therefore the one to be taken over the other as the truth. This paradox is vital for the success
of the kōans, and as well for understanding my particular non-representational model for
knowledge. The kōans articulate what Deleuze calls the disjunctive synthesis, generating a host
of possible (even impossible!) meanings without preferential treatment toward any one. It is the
ongoing process of relations rather than the particular fixed states of being which concerns me
here, and which underpins my writing for this project.
Reference, necessarily, takes on a new role, one that has direct implications for the poems
I have written. To reject a representational epistemology does not mean to insist that there is no
possibility for external reference (what Deleuze calls denotation) in language; rather,
representation becomes one among several functions.36 "Reference" can be said to take on the
role of a multi-serial series. The signifying series, always in excess, is that of the material
signifier, the kind of reference described by Charles Bernstein as associative, word-to-word
36
In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze lays out a conception of the proposition so he may locate "sense" in relation to
language use. I have decided against a lengthy discussion of these concepts because I feel that, while useful, they are
not absolutely necessary, and indeed would derail the very project of this essay, which is a critical supplement to the
poems I have written. To write a Deleuzean theory of language is a book-length task, so for now I must bracket it
and move forward.
Pritchard 23
rather than word-to-object, a free play of signifiers; the signified series, the series which lacks, is
the indexical function of language, the ability for a word to refer to a thing in a representational
capacity. The paradox that establishes their differential space is that very disjunction between the
indexical and the material, the possibility for reference calling attention to its frustration. We can
see this in a poem like "How Much Longer Will I Be Able To Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher," by
John Ashbery:
In pilgrim times he wounded me
Since then I only lie
My bed of light is a furnace choking me
With hell (and sometimes I hear salt water dripping).37
This excerpt can be discussed in terms of its representational qualities—each line taken as a
poetic image with a particular signified being represented or described, the stanza overall as
pointing to something—but in excess of that we find Ashbery's deployment of the material,
signifying series, something better understood in relation to that which it exceeds. The rhythmic
structure of the first two lines alludes to traditional lyrical metrics, to be found anywhere from
William Wordsworth to Emily Dickinson, and the third line repeats the end word of the first line,
thus establishing an expectation for some kind of rhyme. Even as it does this it breaks the
rhythmic pattern by giving an eleven-syllable, non-metrical line. It also breaks the syntactic
pattern, with the end of its proposition on the next line ("With hell"). Then, the final statement
about salt water provides yet another instance of the signifying excess, as it completes the formal
disruption of the established pattern and emphasizes the materiality of the language in the stanza.
Without the capability to refer to or describe outside things, the material elements of this stanza
would not work; it is because indexical linguistic reference is possible that we can apprehend its
frustration and inadequacy, and that this moment from Ashbery succeeds at all.
37
John Ashbery, Collected Poems 1956-1987, ed. Joe Brainard and Mark Ford (New York: Library of America,
2008), 56.
Pritchard 24
In this epistemological approach, we see reference happening not as mere representation,
but in a simultaneously-generated series of relations. There is not an easy correspondence
between the referent and the referee. It is similar to the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna's
concept of "dependent co-arising," which renders causality not a simple matter of cause and
effect—or reference not a matter of referent and referee—because of the constant interrelations
on every level of everything to everything else that make it impossible to determine an absolute,
a priori cause, or a definite, a posteriori effect. We cannot differentiate the referent from the
referee without it itself becoming the referee of the former referee, now the referent. Such
relations are conditioned ad absurdum; we may situate knowledge and meaning in this model not
as singular points but as infinitely divisible series of relations and connections made apparent
through the peculiar machinations of language.
In this model, possibility takes precedence when discussing knowledge. Deleuze uses the
term disjunctive synthesis for this impartial system in which distinctions are made (as in the
discussion of "Alice becomes larger") but where directional preference is not assigned (it entails
both "larger than she was" and "smaller than she will be," asking us not to choose one over the
other but to understand that both occur simultaneously). Possibility matters more so than
correspondence to a certain state of affairs; whether something is true or false is less important
than the very condition for its possibility at all, as well as the ways it relates to every other
possibility. As Deleuze and Guattari state in A Thousand Plateaus, "the fabric of the rhizome
[their metaphor for this epistemological approach] is the conjunction, 'and…and…and…'" They
oppose this to "to be," as it would be used by representational mode for thought.38
38
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25.
Pritchard 25
In short, as Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "it is more important that a proposition be
interesting than that it be true."39 Simple representation is not enough in this epistemology;
instead, we must look between things to find the ways they relate to one another and the myriad
possibilities for connection and relation that this betweenness demonstrates.
*
Having laid out the philosophical underpinnings of my project, I now return to the
musical analogy that serves as the organizing principle and framing device for my inquiries and
experiments. A certain amount of definitional work is required in order to frame clearly the
analogy and give it a vocabulary. I will then address the conceptual dimension of the project,
describing briefly the process by which I have structured my poems in relation to their sources.
The term theme serves as the point from which to begin articulating the analogy. The
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry states that a poem's "theme" is its "doctrinal content," the
recurring elements and underlying principles or main ideas that unify the poem. In this particular
sense, "theme" emerges through and is discussed in relation to interpretation of the poems; it is
bound up with the meaning or meanings of a given poem. This close association of "theme" and
meaning suggests that "theme" in poetry deals specifically with ideas that may be paraphrased
according to a particular representational epistemology. Indeed, "doctrinal content" and
"representational content" seem to function as more or less interchangeable terms. I want to work
with "theme" in a different sense, using a slightly modified definition from the Grove
Encyclopedia of Music, which states that a theme is "the musical material on which part or all of
a work is based, usually having a recognizable melody and sometimes perceivable as a
complete…expression in itself."40 By changing "musical material" to "linguistic material," I hope
39
40
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (London: Free Press, 1979), 295.
Drabkin, "Theme."
Pritchard 26
to start clarifying the dimensions of this project. I want to work primarily with language as a
material, seeking a degree of separation from the strictly referential dimension that mimics that
of music, an art form unique in its degree of abstraction. This is not to say the poems won't have
any referentiality at all; the sources and the variations will constantly relate to one another, and
indeed it will be necessary for the purposes of my experiments to present the source texts
alongside the variations in order to frame properly my writing; however, before I discuss my
own work, I will provide a brief overview of the musical analogy and give a brief gloss of the
precedent in poetry for such an analogy as I am using here.
In music, the form of variations on a theme manifests itself as a material exploration of
an extant source. For example, Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini uses Nicolo
Paganini's 24th caprice for violin as the basis for a series of variations that reframe, restage, and
refigure the original material from Paganini, creating a piece that is different from and yet in
conversation with the source. These poems, then, take up the actual linguistic material and use
that to stage their variations. This is not to say the ideas of the poems do not matter; rather, these
ideas will emerge as a result of the machinations of the language with which the poem is
composed as it converses with, modifies, and explores its source in the process of varying, of
performing on the stage of variation.
Variation form is broadly divided into two categories: strophic and ostinato variations.
The former of these describes variations that are discrete, paratactic, and serial; there is no
necessary continuity from variation to variation, and each comprises a section of the whole work.
Bach's Goldberg Variations and Beethoven's 33 Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli serve as
excellent examples of the strophic form. Ostinato, on the other hand, refers to variations taking
place continuously, as part of an uninterrupted piece. The variations are strung together with
Pritchard 27
some sort of connective tissue that makes the piece more immediately recognizable as an
autonomous piece of music with a perceivable beginning and end, as opposed to the more
disjunctive and self-contained format of the strophic. Liszt's Totentanz (variations on the
traditional Dies Irae) and Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini are composed in
ostinato variation form. These broad concepts serve as the basis of my experiments; I have used
them to articulate the forms and constructive principles for the poems in this project. I do not
wish to suggest, however, that there is not an actual literary basis for this formal endeavor. I now
will describe a few different extant examples of this practice in poetry before discussing some of
my own formal choices and the process of source selection.
Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams," a poem I credit
with inspiring the entire project, demonstrates a perfect example of a set of strophic variations.
Koch provides four three-line variations (each its own discrete, numbered section) of Williams'
well-known "This is Just to Say," maintaining the same length as his source (twelve lines) while
at the same time recontextualizing the rhetorical and material elements of Williams' poem to
create a new piece. Koch takes language from the original poem to create different scenarios
from the original kitchen caper, each of which can be read in relation to the other three of Koch's
sections and in conversation with the sources. Koch's poem, much like "How Much Longer Will
I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher," uses language's capacity for representation against
itself to highlight the materiality of the source. The Williams poem serves a communicative,
referential function; the speaker, there, has taken the plums from the icebox, and apologizes,
however speciously, for doing so, admitting that he enjoyed eating them even if it meant
inconveniencing the addressee of the poem. Each of Koch's four variations is a vignette much
like Williams' poem in terms of content, but they grow in absurdity to the point where the
Pritchard 28
language of apology—an important part of Williams poem, which puts "Forgive me" on its own
line—becomes suspect. Here are the third and fourth of these variations:
3.
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4.
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!41
Each of these uses words from Williams to create a similar situation, but the referential
particulars force us to reflect on the material by virtue of their exaggeration. Section three doesn't
even ask for apology; in order to read it as a variation on that sort of language, we must presume
that the second two lines, describing the man and the wind and leaving out the variant or text of
"forgive me," imply a pleas for forgiveness. The last variation makes explicit the material of the
apology when stripped of its referent, or at least of its denotative verity. The apology is for an act
done deliberately, one that was purely selfish and violent (breaking a leg) for the purpose of
getting closer to someone. This use of the apology calls attention to this particular element of
selfishness, and to the speciousness or even blatant falseness of the proposition. By invoking the
source and remaining in constant engagement with it on a material level, Koch's "Variations"
create a space between the two poems, a network of possibilities and connections that opens a
new interpretive dimension related not to what the poems represent (neither plum-eating nor
imprudent donation of money) but to the material with which these infelicities are articulated.
Frank O'Hara provides an excellent demonstration of ostinato variations; his "Variations
on Pasternak's 'Mein Liebchen, Was Willst Du Noch Mehr?'" is written as one continuous poem
41
Kenneth Koch, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (New York: Knopf, 2005), 135.
Pritchard 29
wherein the key elements of Pasternak's pastoral love lyric are interpolated, reframed, and
reexamined at a high speed almost antithetical to the source text. O'Hara uses the central tropes
from his source to cast doubt on the veracity of the source's claims, flirting with a kind of one-toone response to representational content that would constitute a different endeavor from the one I
am undertaking. However, the variations poem masterfully avoids moral or didactic overture and
establishes a connection between the pastoral quietude of the source and its own anxious
urbanity. Here is the beginning of the Pasternak poem:
Arrows scramble down the wall.
Time crawls like a cockroach.
Wait, why toss the plates,
beat the alarm, smash the glasses!
O'Hara begins similarly, using walls, time, and movement in a vastly different context:
Walls, except that they stretch through China
like a Way, are melancholy fingers in the snow
of years
time moves, but is not moving in its strange grimace
the captive fights the distances within a flower of wire
and seldom wins a look from the dull tin receptacle he decorates42
The variation interpolates discursively the material from Pasternak, spreading it out and making
formal the described movements in the source. O'Hara's poem enacts the scrambling, crawling,
tossing, and smashing from the original "Mein Liebchen"; he has removed periods and sentenceending punctuation, and his lines are generally twice as long as Pasternak's. This first stanza also
brings in other elements of the Pasternak poem, such as "flowers," "years," and "receptacles"—
all of which appear in vastly different contexts in the original poem. One of the most
fundamental successes of O'Hara's poem is the way he works against the imagism of his source.
For instance, in Pasternak the moon is a "spruce-bound[…]stove" in the small, isolated cabin
42
Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California,
1995), 339.
Pritchard 30
where the speaker and his lover are sequestered away from the world. In O'Hara, the moon is not
bound but free, even binding, as it presides over everything:
[…]miraculous appearance, I had forgotten
that things could be beautiful in the 20th Century under the moon43
The moon, later presented to us as "drifting and trudging," provides another point of entry in
considering the formal machinations of O'Hara's variations. Where Pasternak relies largely on
descriptive images in his poem, O'Hara works with a kind of open-ended association, allowing
him to institute a trace of the pastoral from Pasternak in his own urban landscape:
the country is the city without houses, the city
merely a kissed country, a hamster
a juxtaposition to which O'Hara toward the end of the poem:
now the rain comes
and your face, like a child's soul, is parting its lids
pouring down the brown plaster faces over doors and windows
over the casual elegancies of the last century and the poor
over the lintels and the sniffs and the occasional hay fever
to where nothing
appears to be watering the city trees
though they live, live on, as we do44
Pasternak's images are scrambled in the variations, bounced off one another disjunctively rather
than allowed to accrue and afford the reader with a specific description of a place. Though
O'Hara reconstitutes the pastoral content of his source, he ultimately avoids making his poem a
direct commentary on Pasternak's content, and the rest of his variation doesn't hinge on these
particular occurrences; however, O'Hara problematizes the simple distinction between the two
poems and love as it is depicted in each poem, asking a question he proceeds not to answer. This
lack of resolution, as well as the complication of what could have been a binary stratification
between the city and the country, highlights, albeit in a different way from Koch's poem, an edge
43
44
Ibid.
Ibid., 339.
Pritchard 31
where disjunction highlights the productive potential for difference and its constant vacillations
and modulations. "Events are like crystals," says Deleuze, "they become and grow only out of
the edges, or on the edge."45 It would certainly not be far off to characterize O'Hara's poem—and
the poems in this project—as events, thriving on the possibility in the space between the source
and the variation.
A poem like John Ashbery's "Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme by Ella
Wheeler Wilcox" falls into a strange middle ground with regard to the musical analogy. Ashbery
straddles the strophic and ostinato, and focuses his poem more explicitly on textuality than the
other two poems discussed. He opens his poem with a direct statement of the theme, something
common in musical variations pieces.46 The first four lines serve as this statement:
"For the pleasures of the many
May be ofttimes traced to one
As the hand that plants an acorn
Shelters armies from the sun."47
From here, he moves on to explore his source, first in a section of free verse, next in a series of
exaggerated rhyming couplets, and finally in a lengthy passage of prose poetry. The lack of
deliberate division of these three formal incursions into numbered sections, as in Koch's poem,
announces that Ashbery has not gone the way of the strophic variation; however, the title of his
poem promises not just variation, but calypso and fugue as well, giving us reason to believe that
each of these three perceivable "movements" is in fact its own kind of variation. This blurred line
allows Ashbery to pose similar questions about form in his poem as in the other two poems
discussed, but affords an additional dimension of uncertainty, the kind of formal variation itself
being brought to bear as part of the poem's investigation.
45
Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 9.
"The outlines of the theme with which the composer begins are often lost sight of in each separate variation."
Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music (New York: New American Library, 2009), 131.
47
Ashbery, Collected Poems 1956-1987. Quotations are Ashbery's.
46
Pritchard 32
In the first of these passages, Ashbery offers droll and discursive free verse, meditating
on the material from Wilcox's theme by recasting it in new contexts. The tree and its shelter are
prominent fixations of this first section, which ends with the words from the source being used
not only in a new context, but one that more or less aims to destroy the suppositions and
assertions of the old context:
For later in the vast gloom of cities, only there you learn
How the ideas were good only because they had to die,
Leaving you alone and skinless, a drawing by Vesalius.
This is what was meant, and toward which everything directs:
That the tree should shrivel in 120-degree heat, the acorns
Lie around on the worn earth like eyeballs, and the lead soldiers shrug and slink off.48
The quaintness of the theme becomes ominous, even grotesque, as Ashbery moves it into a space
of death and abandonment. He turns the language against its former context, demonstrating the
limitations and weaknesses of the simplicity of sentiment in Wilcox, the contingency of such a
convenient and neat little box of a philosophical assertion. Next, Ashbery switches to a set of
outlandish rhyming couplets (with a few interspersed tercets), of which the following are but a
few examples:
So my youth was spent, underneath the trees
I always moved around with perfect ease
I voyaged to Paris at the age of ten
And met many prominent literary men
Gazing at the Alps was quite a sight
I felt the tears flow forth with all their might
A climb to the Acropolis meant a lot to me
I had read the Greek philosophers you see49
The poet seizes on Wilcox's proclivity for the simple, sing-song rhyme, and has a good laugh at
it. He continues with the same type of exaggerated rhyme scheme throughout this section;
48
49
Ibid.
Ibid.
Pritchard 33
however, he uses it to provide a model for Wilcox's own sentimentality and to highlight the
difficulties and contradictions therein. At the end of the rhyming section, Ashbery writes that we
should "trust in the dream that will never come true/'Cause that is the scheme that is best for
you/And the gleam that is most suitable too." He suggests, using the formal constraint of his
theme's rhyme scheme, that sentimentality of this kind is itself but a dream, something that we
grow out of and move beyond, and that necessarily must come to an end.
How fitting, then, that he moves immediately to his prose section, which could be read as
the "fugue" mentioned in the title. Here, Ashbery's formal variations have certain fugal
components; he repeats lines from the first two sections in different contexts, and reframes
completely the idea of shelter or shade from his theme in another context entirely antithetical to
its original:
Finally he decided to take a turn past the old grade school he'd attended as a kid. It was a
rambling structure of yellow brick, now gone in seediness and shabbiness which the lateafternoon shadows mercifully softened. The gravel playground in front was choked with
weeds. Large trees and shrubbery would do no harm flanking the main entrance. Time
farted.50
Here we see shade as obscuring rather than protective, allowing for Ashbery to cast aspersions
on his source's doctrinal claims through a material recontextualization. But through his joking
Ashbery doesn't simply opine about or deride the source. He moves into a very troubling
reflection on the limits of that kind of sentimentality and the difficulties of actually moving
beyond it. Ashbery uses the source to investigate its own philosophical claims, taking the
material (and, in the case of his rhyming couplets, even the form) and moving through it
improvisatorily as O'Hara does with Pasternak's poem. Even so, the poem suggests sectional
divisions that O'Hara does not, allowing us to read it both as strophic and ostinato in the context
of this musical analogy. Ashbery demonstrates a flexibility in these two broad categories that
50
Ibid.
Pritchard 34
allows for greater freedom of formal conceptualization within each and between the two, which
means that each poem can in a sense describe and define its own relationship to its source and to
the musical analogy through its treatment of these different kinds of variations.
These readings, though by no means exhaustive, demonstrate some helpful ways to
construe literary variations vis-à-vis a musical analogy. I have gone into enough detail, I hope, to
suggest ways in which one could approach my own poems, which operate under similar material
constraints as the poems here. A section in my variation on Padgett's "Metaphor of the Morning"
reads:
The sores of making toys!
the coils of fading meat!
the spades of trying on four!
the jowls of working mothers!
the souls of wading feet!
the morning between coffees!
the window of the dawn!
the aubade of the allegory!
the crusts of phosphorus!
the spinoff we enjoyed!
the dollhouse, murky others!
the ploy of making more!
the joys of metaphor!
I take Padgett's own refrain, "Ah, the joys of metaphor," and create eleven other lines linked
metonymically by their materiality. The capacity to refer paradoxically provides us with
statements that do not seem very joyful, as Padgett's line has it; thus, we are turned back to the
material to consider various other associative, non-denotative ways in which the poem can be
said to refer. This opens up myriad interstices, in which we can explore the connections between
this section and the rest of the variation poem, or those between the source and this section, or
between the source and the variation on the whole, or between the different lines, and so forth.
*
Pritchard 35
I will now briefly turn to some of my concerns with my writing that have influenced my
approach to this formal exploration. First, an explanation of "exploration" as a guiding concept
seems necessary, as I see exploration to be central to the philosophical, theoretical thrust of my
writing. It involves a lack of knowledge concerning what will be discovered in the course of an
endeavor. Given the epistemology I have described at length, the process of writing for me
ceases to concern itself with something that has happened—an end result or desired epiphany, a
moral overture, a resolution—and focuses instead on being the happening itself, making
connections and allowing things to remain different instead of trying to synthesize increasingly
towards a unified whole in the context of a poem.
The idea of exploration aligns itself with Lyn Hejinian's conception of poetry as being the
"language of inquiry"—a phrase she uses as the title of her book of essays on poetry and poetics.
Inquiry is key. These poems do not seek to expose some hidden meaning through a response or
dismantling of the structure of the source, but rather seek a conversation, a correspondence with
the present material to allow new tensions, dynamics, and relationships to emerge. The ongoing
process implied by a term like "exploration" (as opposed to what? "excavation," perhaps) seems
perfectly suited to these poems and to the idea of inquiry. It is worth pausing on this
exploration/excavation opposition to tease out the stakes of such a distinction. With
"exploration," the critical process is indeed that: a process, a creative investigation without preexisting knowledge wherein possibility becomes the governing principle and discovery is
inherent in that process rather than a single instant, a one-and-done unconcealing or epiphany.
"Excavation" suggests those kinds of epiphanies; the very nature of the term presumes that there
is something there which must be uncovered (rather than discovered).
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The formal concern of my project, then, manifests itself as the way in which I would
differentiate "exploration" from simply wandering aimlessly. I began each poem by considering
where in the broad conceptual map outlined above I would locate the particular variation
formally, and then what I wanted to discover in writing it. For instance, my variation on Ron
Padgett's "The Metaphor of Morning" took up the poem's central concern with metaphor and the
ability for figurative language to proliferate ad infinitum by taking his figurations for "morning"
and imposing a new kind of artifice, that of narrative. I personified the temporal metaphors—that
is, morning became a character, and I introduced afternoon as one as well—to modulate and
extend the source's tropology as a material investigation of the proliferation of metaphor. I
modulate and extend Padgett's original questions about figurative language by compounding the
anxiety of the potential proliferation of metaphoric language, and using the material play to
suggest certain things that may not be so joyful or playful, even as I am delighting in the constant
generation of new figurations. Ultimately, I defer the problem of the "blank metaphor" from
Padgett's poem by working associatively and metonymically, leaping from metaphor to metaphor
in a way that suggests an excess in the signifying series—my poem—and a lack in the signified
series—Padgett's poem—due to their irresolvable non-convergence as two simultaneous
heterogeneous series.
My poems' forms were usually amalgams of the ostinato and the strophic; with some
poems—such as my variations on Padgett's "The Metaphor of Morning"—I created distinct
strophes but wrote each one in a loose, more improvisatory and ostinato fashion. Other poems—
such as my variations on Stevens' "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon"—are more strictly ostinato,
avoiding the explicit delineation into different sections and instead focusing on the linguistic
material and its repetition as a source for the generation of connections and meanings. Finally, I
Pritchard 37
constrained myself in terms of length in certain variations—such as my "Variations on Eliot's
'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'"—by keeping the end words of each of my lines the same as
the end words of the lines in the source poem. Ultimately this seemed to me an ostinato
endeavor, reinterpreting the discursive improvisations in the context of a doubly set framework
providing a constraint both for where each line had to end and for where the poem itself had to
end. In this sense it was the most difficult and most profitable kind of variation to write—I found
myself pushed to make each line in itself a complete poem, a new experiment, a new chance for
discovery and connection through the material machinations of the words themselves. There are,
of course, innumerable minutiae differentiating each variation from the next, but these are, in the
most general possible terms, the kinds of forms to expect when reading these poems.
I feel it is also important to remark upon my sources. It is of note that a large portion of
my project takes so called "expressivist" or lyrical poetry, at least poems in that certain tradition,
as its sources. The reasoning for this is threefold. First, I do not dislike lyrical poetry. Each poem
I have chosen to write variations on is a poem I am in some sense fond of, or that interests me in
some way. One kind of poetry isn't necessarily better than the other, so in the interest of
inclusivity, I have drawn many of my sources from the lyric tradition. Second, as with O'Hara's
variations on Pasternak, I sometimes found myself disagreeing with the doctrinal or
representational "themes" of the poem. By using the material to comment on and displace the
doctrinal, I tried to do what Koch did, opening up new dimensions of inquiry on the source poem
while at the same time not simply writing a poem in response. Finally, I was inspired by Gilles
Deleuze's approach to philosophy, his ability to use Spinoza or Leibniz to generate new and
fascinating concepts otherwise unheard of outside of his particular readings of their work. Of
course, Deleuze is not the only thinker heavily engaged in this sort of creative rereading, but his
Pritchard 38
method in particular is what led me to use a poem so firmly entrenched in a certain tradition as
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" to explore ways of thinking and knowing radically different from those
put forth in the poem.
At this point I have said far more than I could possibly want to say, so I turn to Frank
O'Hara for a benediction. In "Personism," he writes, "Everything is in the poems."51 Here I have
done my best to make that as true as possible.
Works Cited
51
O'Hara, Collected Poems, 498.
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Ashbery, John. Collected Poems 1956-1987. Edited by Joe Brainard and Mark Ford. New York:
Library of America, 2008.
Bernstein, Charles. "Semblance." In Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Los Angeles, CA: Sun
& Moon Press, 1986.
———. "Stray Straws and Straw Men." In Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Los Angeles,
CA: Sun & Moon Press, 1986.
———. "Thought's Measure." In Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984. Los Angeles, CA: Sun &
Moon Press, 1986.
Colebrook, Claire. "Questioning Representation." SubStance 29, no. 2 (2000): 47-67.
Copland, Aaron. What to Listen for in Music. New York: New American Library, 2009.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. "Différance." In Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982.
Drabkin, William. "Theme." In Grove Music Online: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hejinian, Lyn. "Introduction." In The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2000.
———. My Life. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2002.
Hejinian, Lyn. "The Rejection of Closure." In The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2000.
Koch, Kenneth. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious." In Écrits. New York: W. W.
Norton, 2005.
O'Hara, Frank. The Collected Poems of Frank O'hara. Edited by Donald Allen. Berkeley:
University of California, 1995.
Perkins, David. Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1964.
Perloff, Marjorie. "Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?" New Literary History 13, no. 3 (1982): 485514.
Shklovsky, Viktor. "Art as Technique." In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, edited by
Marion J. Reis Lee T. Lemon, 3-24: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
Silliman, Ron, et al. "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto." Social Text
19/20, no. Fall 1988 (1988).
Unlocking the Zen Koan. Translated by Thomas Cleary. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1997.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. London: Free Press, 1979.
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II. THEME AND VARIATIONS: POEMS
January 2011-April 2011
Pritchard 41
VARIATIONS ON PADGETT'S "METAPHOR OF THE MORNING"
1.
The morning is licking its lips and
rubbing you with a white towel.
But what if the morning were descending from
the sky, brightly splashing you with water?
But what if Apollo stopped paying attention
and drove straight into the window display of the department store?
But what if the car didn't have any oil,
and the morning just smoked in the driveway?
Ah, the joys of metaphor!
2.
The towel hasn't been washed for three weeks.
The gunk under your fingernails is showing.
Meanwhile, the morning uses your nicest razor
to shave, ruining the blade, filling the sink with blood.
Blood on the mirror! a gray swirl announces
that the morning is a terrible roommate.
Ah, the joys of metaphor!
3.
But what if the phone rings and the old hag
you met in the hospital when you spontaneously burst
into cysts pleads for you to reconsider your
living arrangement. After all,
afternoon is far less intrusive and always respects
the property of those with whom she shares a space.
You think about this and wipe drool off your face
that was left on the receiver. By whom? certainly not
morning! it's lunchtime! perhaps the hag has some kind of
impediment, her vision clouded like the lampshade in your living room
is covered with stink bugs and dust. She might
smoke too many cigarettes in bed. You eat a sandwich.
Ah, the joys of metaphor!
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4.
Delphi is closed for renovations.
Tiresias doesn't answer his phone.
You're on your third cup of tea today.
That cloud becomes a Doric column.
You should probably dust the place.
Who's going to do the dishes, then?
Ah, the joys of imitation!
I think I'll take a break and shave.
5.
The afternoon waits patiently
at the door for you to answer after
knocking twice. Evening blows
yellow smoke on the windows from
the porch. You know you couldn't
room with a smoker. The day
and suddenly you become anxious,
wish for a cocktail or a slice
of pie, both at the same time
a symbol! a caddy for the gold
rush. The apples in the dish
on the counter all bruised and
not even the red kind you like. They're
playing in the fields you mow
on the weekends during winter
months or when the towels are
at the laundromat. Trying to listen
in the living room full of blood and
the joys of metaphor!
6.
Has anybody checked to see if he's really dead?
did he just shave in between the solstice and your monthly brunch?
who decided to assign genders to our metaphors?
whatever happened to simply being charming?
the clock on the wall, it has a large fount of pus.
Suppurate! when you stand outside with Dionysus for a spell.
7.
Times of day carry
revolvers riding on
the bus with white
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towels floundering into
corners while you make
the soufflé trying hard
to make it just so with
the shavings of
chocolate added on
last just for good
measure and then
suddenly the gray blank
withdrawing like a
Buddha or one of
the vestigial virgins
dancing in front of the
hearth but the plane
is boarding at seven so
get in the taxi and here
you go! you're leaving
Greece but taking with
you the exact pleasures
I have talked to you
about this entire time
with these times standing
in the wings making
corrections as I go along
8.
The sores of making toys!
the coils of fading meat!
the spades of trying on four!
the jowls of working mothers!
the souls of wading feet!
the morning between coffees!
the window of the dawn!
the aubade of the allegory!
the crusts of phosphorus!
the spinoff we enjoyed!
the dollhouse, murky others!
the ploy of making more!
the joys of metaphor!
9.
The delightful storyteller through your window
recounts all of his escapades, including
the reasons for the dirt all over his shoes.
When will you understand, a purple dress means
a barmaid after dark, a brown coat or a nice new
Pritchard 44
mythology! and then went down to the ship
the dresser for the latest dinner theatre troupe.
Cumbersome, yes, but not a lot of clocks
can actually keep themselves from being at parties
in June, swarming the Acropolis and standing
close to the heiresses who decided to go shopping
when they saw and heard about the sales!
10.
Is that an engine or an exploding lawnmower
drifting down the coast with a child in the back seat?
You just can't stand there; you move here.
The throttled swirl of clouds, it would appear,
purchased your hotel room with a dollop
of sincerity, the most frustrating kind of eviction
coming into being divine deceitfully, stooping
down and taking a page from the book of the sky
who already has reservations about the reading you're doing
for pleasure. Who has time for wooing
when everywhere there are idylls pointing to the question
does it scare you? sensationally gray and totally detached,
the joys of metaphor!
11.
The contiguity between Greek gods and dirty living rooms.
The site of paradise. You roll the dice. A parasite
investigates the strange happenings in this so-called
metaphor. You call it an image. You have been arrested
for libel and are currently chained to a wall somewhere near
where you can hear a lute offering little consolation.
You never liked twanging anyway, not in respect to human love.
Only the joys of metaphor will give you a phone call and a bagel
the morning after you cut yourself shaving, a wen!
when it turned into a serious condition requiring removal you walked
past the cumbersome tones of that sweater, your most recent
from afternoon's closet filled with antiques and stolen from evening
a pocket-watch, some matches.
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12.
Joy and pus in the same poem.
You loved the idea of spilling
over onto another blanket statement
of intention which somehow disrupts
the flow. "Simile, I want never to be
a metaphor." The time of day
is just being difficult. Pushing buttons.
You'll never be mentally sober
if you keep working covered
in drool. You don't know how to fill
out the metaphor. You should call
your accountant. Artemis comes
over for dinner on Tuesdays, an
unfair situating of place and space
between two slightly more primal
time zones. That is, here is a bow
and an arrow and what are we doing
about the lease? it's up in a month!
the morning is like a lease expiring
at the least convenient time, in the middle
of a game of tennis with morning,
afternoon and evening—a doubles match
but dusk and serendipity feel left out.
Did you line up all of your favorite meals
to coincide with the days of the week,
so no one feels left out? a structural unity
in keeping with the imposition of
freedom on the idea of a particular language,
the universe keeps smelling you from
underneath a plate of scrambled eggs.
Pritchard 46
VARIATIONS ON "ODE TO THE WEST WIND"
I.
I wonder if I could get away with being
like a leaf, entirely facetious, dead,
crawling between depictions of human frailty, fleeing
the circus because I can't stand elephants. Red
used to be my favorite color. Now it's orange, though I keep a copy of I and Thou
lying around just in case, the sheets on my bed
nicely arranged, a thrumming burgundy that helps me when I'm low
on topics for conversation. I don't mind talking about my bed sheets until
something more exciting happens like a blow
to the temple eliminates dreams in a room that smells like a landfill
because I accidentally let all the air
out of the mattress on the floor. "We ought to drive up to Capitol Hill
and let them know about this pollution, it's everywhere!"
I shout but no one's there to hear.
II.
And just like a hill to be the site of so much commotion!
well, it's Sunday. They usually collect the trash on Tuesdays. Meanwhile, keep the garbage in the
shed.
I wonder if they're going to dump it in the ocean.
That would certainly upset me. I don't want to spread
decay any more than I want oral surgery, but sometimes a surge
of agony originating in my tooth explodes inside my head
and I just can't help but scream all the way to the dentist. Currently, he's on the verge
of fixing all these orthodontic problems. Now if only my height
didn't prevent me from playing the piano! is it symbolic of a thunderstorm? the dirge,
reminiscent of the night
Tchaikovsky had a glass of water that metamorphosed into his sepulcher,
seems significant. It might
just be the atmosphere
in here, but I can hardly hear
III.
you! in the middle of a conversation about dreams
we blew out the candles and lay
Pritchard 47
like diamonds in the streams
near the harbor. I held myself at bay,
hoping you would explain to me the towers
if I simply waited long enough. The next day
I bought you a fine assortment of flowers,
which you immediately threw away, shouting "thou
still unravished bride of quietness!" thus betraying your subtle powers
of discernment in a sudden flourish. Below,
the shirts and sleeves of a certain forest were no worse for wear,
even though we both know
exactly which set of voices I'm talking about. The gray ones, I fear,
have grown too soft for us to hear!
IV.
We agree, then, that "Exit, pursued by a bear"
is the finest stage direction in all of theatre? "Of thee
I think often" I said, not wanting very much to share
you since I'm always the one making sacrifices. Why can't we be free!
wherever the uncontrollable friezes even
out the pavement, I will be
standing in the middle of the street. Heaven
knows what time you got home last night! Did you speed
past the place where I had striven
to adequately describe continental philosophy? We need
a new set of terms, perhaps a new body of water to serve as our constraint, for like a cloud
these poems are out of control. They bleed
syntax into the sewers. When she bowed,
her knuckles turned purple. I think this has something to do with how proud
V.
everyone is.
I wish I had a tree of my own
to sing to, though I would leave the harmonies
to you; I've never had a very good ear, and my tone
is all wrong. How fierce
would you like me to be? is it time for dinner? We should sit next to each other one
Pritchard 48
night and see what happens. It's not like we're a universe
full of constant differentiation. Birth
is the only thing we have in common, unless you want to talk about verse
forms, in which case I'll gladly debate the finer points of the pantoum. Meanwhile, the hearth
burns like the middle of the summer: both our skin smoldering and mankind
a concept you never want to discuss with me. All the lip balm on earth
couldn't protect me from the wind!
You go to the store; I'll stay behind.
Pritchard 49
VARIATIONS ON STEVENS' "TEA AT THE PALAZ OF HOON"
Not dressed, I hurried downstairs.
The day was already half-finished and I hadn't even walked
to the beach to ascertain exactly what direction was
faced. In a purple nightgown I must look foolish, but without a mirror
I wouldn't know. I have a lot of difficulty with the difference
between toaster ovens and hymns. All this buzzing
and three alarms I'd slept through! or was it distance?
hardly a place to think about the tide, but what's wrong with the kitchen? It's in my left elbow.
After all, I was an abstract painting at the same time. There must have been a lot of magnets
last night because I can't even tell what time it is. The clock
points eighteen different ways, or I do. How like a bay window the truly strange;
I had no mail that came not from myself. I was raining out of my mind:
There's something in my beard which isn't there!
the golden liquid gold by virtue of the glass
I inherited from my grandmother, who often put orange juice before me
on her itinerary, perhaps trying to tempt me.
Come to think of it, I only knew her face based on the sound of her voice,
which squeaked and filled my dress socks with sand
so I could watch reruns of sitcoms on public access channels in the nice parts of Tulsa.
There are no "nice parts" of Tulsa. There was never a boat and
that beer was just a mix of ginger ale and seltzer water properly calculated to deceive you at the
exact moment you opened a book of poems
from which came the unlikely verdict that everything was lonely in the air.
Did I agree with you and just not care?
How likely was it that I secretly invented calculus?
Was gravity a serious problem?
Did French and English suddenly encompass all possible perspectival modulations?
Or was the process gradual, like apprehending fire trucks properly?
What kind of person admits to liking Shostakovich better than Bach?
What happens if you leave the tea bag in too long?
And if so, can you describe yourself in one sentence?
During the interrogation, was I wrong
to answer with quotations from Whitman?
I still haven't solved the problem of sensation, but don't explain the already-depressed theories
about how cumbersome, how formal:
I don't even own a tuxedo, we can't very well wear the same dress, not less because it's
seasonally appropriate dress up as a rhapsode
where is my beaded belt! responds the drool to the mist.
All this I call a landscape. By itself
not a particularly interesting series of stillnesses
so thankfully the ocean rumbled, requiring no more than a pinky
finger or some margarine. Emerging
Pritchard 50
like a building the timpanist suggested I become opera,
the only recourse to the desertion of the architect. The painter begged me to pose.
Without a doubt we began dancing in the colorful absence
I filled; as caterer, conductor, and color palette to the stars
that were merely my asterisks, I had to answer simply: yes or no?
The question coming simply from myself
which brings us back to Whitman and you rolling your eyes
as I read the names and descriptions of the various kinds of fine teas:
cinnamon and plum, tea of conviviality; tangerine orange, tea of the mind; vanilla almond, tea of
distended reciprocation; ginger rose, official tea of the foreign legion; and then you asked
how much of this I was making up. Of course I felt guilty
so I went for a stroll through my right knee and thought a lot about where
in my cavernous psyche I would be able to find the loneliest possible air
somewhere more to the west, or with fangs and a pedigree.
What is the difference between tea and ointment and why do we have to consider them in the
same sentence?
I sprinkled my indifference onto a doting bullfrog, exiting the pond
in solitude, with wings, a royal loon, with clarity, but then again a certain sonic impasse
reminds me of the difficulty I've always had with being sentimental and
why I have tried hard to remain impressionistic as possible. As if Claude Monet
would want to sweep the front steps or grab an ironic drink at the cinema. An orchestra:
The vest declares, in purple, "I'm distended!"
the lantern may throw fits about your brawls.
The only despair, not dressed, cause, I—bookshelf.
What caused the joints, bent, tinkling in the year?
What heard the gyms that fuzzed, derided fears?
What was the fee whose pride wept thoroughly?
Doubting my finds, emboldened points meant "reign
and thy jeers fade." The bowling hymen? Absurd!
"Eye" was itself the compassionate seed.
"Try" was the word I wish I walked with, and I sawed
your bird or felt shame. Knots but form myself;
sand where I wound my shelves for Judy—and orange.
A meditation on pathos has no place in a drawing with nonlinear perspective.
And anyway there are just dozens of quondam ephebes.
Do you like the sound of that? it's not too unctuous, but there's just enough nauseating
distance between syllables to pad highways with intentional
longing. Or was it difference?
I bide the varying times in appropriate ways,
casting different shadows depending on the days
I'm available for treatment and the cereal I eat for breakfast.
I wonder what's symbolic about the
rhythm. Where is the limit of on the one hand knowledge and the other
impenetrable difficulty? If I made a series of handouts while toasting
Pritchard 51
including a glossary of the most aggravating and evasive techniques in her slide show,
offering maybe a paragraph of explanatory information—
would that suffice to dissipate the claims that I have been stealing cookies from the night
watchman?
And still no sense of direction.
Electromagnets remain unwelcome in orientations of any kind;
I have a great deal of difficulty asserting my autonomy
when the ocean and I can't agree on which direction you came from
and what hotel you said you were staying at. The lantern
spelling bilge incorrectly made us worry about our weight. A filter of some kind
to improve the value of the air; perhaps I'll think of something
on the way to the grocery store. I'll take the scenic route to the right toe
as long as I don't get in trouble for leading a kind of double life
redoubled at the site of articulation. A strange and psychical dance yellowing
the fronds. You frowned upon this, I remember fondly—a reservation
at eight for the three of us but Hoon calls at the last second about an art exhibition
so now more strange than before. This veal piccata should be veal
marsala! so we have a garden hose for once, and royalty addressing the concerns of unknown
empiricist regimes in Florida, Oklahoma, Tennessee, nirvana, during the summer and made with
real
onions come the expectations of a generation of cocoons. But I don't know what to do
with those tossed salads and scrambled eggs; they're calling again
with a telephone I myself originated. It's so unfair!
I don't understand the logic he left the dining room
draped in.
We could just climb in your car and take a trip to my amygdalae.
We could just grab a hymnal and brush up on our fugues.
We could just right justify the whole explication.
We could just never live with ourselves if we didn't try the salmon.
We could just as well stop.
And so went the lecture series, uneventful as ointment and colorless without me.
Our readings of Kant suggest varying degrees of interest
in the transcendental realm of aesthetics, but did he say anything about my paper?
The likelihood of being right is as frustratingly diffident as the likelihood of being
she remarked. Feeling lost myself, I
walk over the bridge to work for the next six years.
I formally withdraw my resignation from the rigid finality of the paperback book
on the evening when I first discovered I no longer fit into my first purple shirt.
The shock was enough to ruin even the most exquisite of ornamentation,
a filibuster coddling only the slightest glow
beneath entire histories with the strangest titles, each
alluding less than obliquely to the bizarre presence of print culture
at the annual gala of masked jesters.
Pritchard 52
I wanted various entities to collide all at the same time
to make the air less lonely, but unfortunately I wasn't specific enough
so now I'm stuck in fields, sprinkling with cows and stars and swans.
A judicious spring cleaning later and we are back to the same place from which we set out,
the "lyric impulse" causing you to abandon my initial promise
about giving you helpful direction. The entire problem as I see it
and thus as it is relates to a curiously early preoccupation with Heidegger,
a fascination neither of us know what to do with
or without guidance it still seems strange. Everydayness makes us question
French methods of philosophical inquiry; I stand out on the quay and tentatively poke
at exorbitant preoccupations with classical allusions. Meanwhile,
the wallpaper seems a tad embryonic; I specifically asked for a different approach.
I specifically approached a different question to ask.
I found myself torn between absolute modernity and the urge
to write letters to the waitress. Is it really so strange? Does fondness translate into
a desire to stop littering in rural areas? Everything is emanating
directly from me and I don't like it. There's a centrism in there somewhere
I'm rather ashamed to explore. Symbolism aside, I really do prefer Degas to many other sculptors
from France. Rodin has a certain ubiquity but he also had Rilke.
My uncle's glasses covered up the sex
he was always having which made me incredibly uncomfortable
so I refused to look, refused to acknowledge what I can only assume were
assignations in the foyer. There's a reason I don't let anyone rent my vertebrae
anymore. Even hard up for cash I can't imagine being bound to clean
up after outbursts. An opusculum of sorts: I've been painting and it shows
no signs of stopping. The world is very different now
from when I first began my piano lessons. The snow
was a lot thicker then, and I would have never left this building without a belt or a pair of boots.
The tinctures I concocted don't make the pursuit of an absolutely flat surface
any easier, nor is loneliness ever exempted when I make the list.
I do the shopping, after all. It's the least I can do. If only I could get my bearings
I would return, triumphant, on the backs of mastodons with a samurai sword raised high
to reflect the gold from the wishing well
into the chilled champagne. I feel so hoodwinked
plucking out the remaining metaphors for adorning the walls as though I were some sort of
expert on the subject of decoration.
Maybe I'll host another party to navigate the strait between mind and ear and self and
strangeness.
Have we any ideas of what to order?
Pritchard 53
VARIATIONS ON STEVENS' "THE SNOW MAN"
Wanderlust: I'm minding the water
which is frozen and bows like a tree
in January, when it's been incredibly cold thanks
to the position of Jupiter, say some, and others hold
the opinion that with a little sprucing up this living room
would be a great place for a party, but only when the sun
is shining in a particularly thoughtless fashion and the leaves
cast a strange shadow which is reminiscent of a fugue
which is actually a prelude to another episode of dailiness
which introduces both misery and landscape in a room
with a shag carpet which continues to collect dust no matter how much I blow on it;
of course, there are always terrible pop songs, sounds
he could barely differentiate from the background, himself standing
in the foreground with nothing worth doing, doing nothing.
That's not right. Throw the whole thing away and start over!
The question was not about toccatas and it was certainly not to be confused with an illusory
person
standing somewhere or other like a jigsaw puzzle, loudly dancing.
To be frank you've gotten it all wrong: the clumsiness of impersonality
the devilish forests of theoretical formality
the disparate notions of place and the constitutive nature of love affairs with the really real
the consequential desire to present everything in a litany of exceptions
the decision to counteract nearby vexations
the task of cleaning out the attic nearly too somber to bear
the fairgrounds an impetus for a sudden internal change
the paraphraseable French poems necessarily examples of boredom in the nineteenth century
all this much is out of the question when you are standing in a bathtub or just on a camping trip.
It is being in love which provides us with the palatable décor,
analogous movements and fourfold categorical denials
when I feel immediately cold as I stare at the remaining snow. The bed sheets are
blue. The summer is a belle undressing herself. But there will be time again
to return to this idea and in detail as we progress.
At the construction site, she tugged
on a girder and the entire thing toppled as if a great sigh
from a Greek mythological figure had prevailed in some way.
All the books were lain across the table to determine which, if any,
had caused her catatonic state, her obsessions with the radio perhaps
responsible for her inability to focus on a single point in time and space without wishing she
were instead
the absolutely modern cutting edge of a scimitar or a jaguar. The bullets
that the foreman brought for show and tell,
calloused and old, unlikeable, drenched in a certain
Pritchard 54
musky denotative stammer no doubt acquired like a sprig of mint
or childish insecurities, all of which make perfect sense
and require the reframing, refocusing of
the lens so the photograph is a pleasant addition to the things I put on my desk.
Intrusions aside,
there's a lot going on which needs revision; the pond is too close to the electrical outlets,
dogs are getting sick at mere mention of undressing, the shift mainly
brokered in terms of who wants which days when and where off
how one could ascertain the dimensions, I don't
know! it's an unfair question to ask, anyway, one in which a sandwich
forces its way to the foreground of one's consciousness
like a bird moving from post to post not paying attention
to the tollbooths in between. Here, sit down and put on this silver hat, everything
will move in various directions but you won't get a concussion.
That's the proposition, anyway. It is of little significance whether I am someone else.
She is. That is, not there. It's a sunny day
as is usually the case. I'm beholden to a set of strictures again.
Or was it cause? Landing on the wind we regard
as a minor inconvenience, the outline of the proposed tree manifests itself nicely.
I secretly wish the subject were a bush.
Details, details, details, details, details
make a fine poem indeed. And there is drama,
of course, a couplet or two for heroism
as needed, precision where rhythms are concerned,
and the brief notes I took during the lecture
and then transcribed twice to make sure
I would always be able to refer back to something
else, never "original" or "copied" but somehow "moving."
This is what we call effacement, a panorama
of high tragedy. I have nothing
wrong with my ears and yet all this comes across garbled,
it doesn't glitter at all, it's crusty if anything
were ever to be described as like a carpet it would
certainly be shagginess and our impressions of the seasons.
But doesn't that create a simple, boring gap
between the there and the not really there? as if there were
and thus could be not itself, a distant concern
for the listener, who should be focusing on the snow.
It's not the same, you know.
He tried to wind up misery and separated most of the text
from its original argument; he didn't need a window
to see there wasn't anything outside
except when he blinked, an hourly tradition,
and as a pebble laughing in the sun
Pritchard 55
we kept mostly quiet so we could hear the foliage growing.
She leaves and takes her watercolors—the mattress falls on itself,
insisting on the removal of a timeless Christmas tree. But it greens
the room and I like the bell! don't be so mean, just be
cognizant of the weight of reflection and the composition of the furniture
when deciding where to situate that mirror.
If I am skeptical of the geometry of blue and green, consider it merely a brief and bony
dissent. We are enshrined always by the locales in which we stage our demonstrations:
the loftier the presentation, the angrier one must consider oneself
in order to justify one's taking part in what one might call a radical display.
We began our adventure in the interstices of dew and frost.
Now we have the sound of scabs to show for it, a comment on how we relate to everything else,
an insistent stronghold for the dispossessed in a kind of forest I won't bother describing
because it doesn't exist. But now that you mention it, I suppose we're stuck here regardless.
That's what the last few told us, leaving the rest to her to figure out. It's cold, though.
And that's the problem. No matter how many branches he collects,
the thought of ice itself, the thought of landing in
had an indefatigable prescience one could not forget. He decides
to make mint juleps for the remainder, pines after dark.
William Carlos Williams announces
One winter
to boughs
of snow
and time
to ice
the glitter
of think
of wind
in leaves
which land
full wind
that place
for snow
and beholds
nothing is
without so much as a hint regarding what time it is
or where she left her car during their hike. Maybe that's
part of the mystique, the wanderer's eye, sex
in and around an image which is itself an empty frame
with its head cut off. Salvageably, movements take their time
off into the distance to blowing cisterns of any misery
at all. The specifics don't particularly help in the visualization
Pritchard 56
so he leaves them on the corner and returns again after he has a careful sense of identity
embedded in her chest. And then there is one's
reason or another for coming to work on a Saturday. All because he took
a look out the window! It's very cold and framing becomes
difficultly him.
Pritchard 57
VARIATIONS ON "ODE ON A GRECIAN URN"
to Jacob Billingsley
1
Though still hung-over, ravaged and a little wide-eyed, I manage quietness
this time
climbing from the bathtub into the forest. How do I express
my indomitable frustration with the arrangement of the flowers? surely not through rhyme!
with fringes of leaves on the table in the shape
of an envelope—no, it's from Jacob! why can't we have both
envelopes and leaves? men and idols? I'd like to idolize Jacob awhile. Arcady
would be a fun place to go if we knew where it was. Even without religion I'm not loth
to listen to Mack and Chris discuss God and Freud. Maybe that's the duality we need to escape
the terrifying stillness before the event, so uncharismatic, lacking in ecstasy!
2
I heard Horowitz play Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto; he played the unheardof cadenza, but that's all I can tell you: I'm no expert on
pianism or the scores of all the music that I love. I just love it. How have you endeared,
I mean endured, my company for so long? It can't be the tone
of my voice when I'm always typing, the ditties I sing without moving my lips when you can't
leave
the room for all the snow and debris piled at your door. Is it the way we bare
ourselves in the cheap metaphorical sense, asking for the kiss
of symbolism to rescue us from being miniscule and tired? Maybe that's the goal. I grieve
a lot of the time when you're not around; when I haven't heard from you. Is it too bold to state
that I derive bliss
from the fact of your existence? I guess it's only fair
3
to let Liz know; I'd hardly feel comfortable jumping on a branch until it had shed
all its excess robustness. That's not even candid. Sometimes we bid one another adieu
without even saying so, but that's OK. I can't plod perpetually into the night unwearied
any longer. I'm too old for this. Corey's in crises and all I can think about is seduction and how I
could make it new
without myself having to learn the tuba. Are we in love? can we be in love without being in love
seems a question I will defer answering forever, leaving it still to be enjoyed
when we are sorrowful and warm. Can I figure out how to sound forever young
and happy? Above
all, do we need to speak softly or is that just the kind of cloyed
reaction to our situation you want to avoid? O Jacob, your tongue
4
must sacrifice
itself again and again until it turns green and a priest
gives himself up as the one who passionately painted the skies
Pritchard 58
that strange color. He was dressed
in the same pants I put on when I was trying to shore
up a little devotion in the strict sense. A citadel
is a bad place for a bar, this much I have learned from experience. We mourn
everything, it seems, but when we're walking through a town which has already been burned
down, am I evermore
to ask that same question? May I tell
you how much I love your poems? no, not that one, but we'll return
5
to it in a little while. I've been standing in the attic. Fair enough; the brede
at Christmas was like having a marble instead of an eye, at least one of them. Overwrought
this poem! and everything. Ah nuts. Would that I could weed
out the shit and make a real nice gesture of the whole ordeal. The thought
of telling you something directly makes me cringe and laugh. Maybe I should write a pastoral
lyric series about how dramatic we are! What a waste,
colder than declaring O woe
is friendship, let's just lash one another to the margins and go for a run. How say'st
thou anything? I like to think everything is beautiful all
the time, you know.
Pritchard 59
VARIATIONS ON ZAPRUDER'S "LETTER TO A LOVER"
for Elizabeth Ennis
1.
Today I am going to pick you up an airport.
My heart feels like a split-rail fence near a Civil War battlefield.
My heart is wily, direct as a melting surge protector or a song.
I am trying to avoid sitting in the sunshine. Going south
is not something I look forward to. Then don't do it.
I look forward to looking cross. It is not you,
you are in the living room trying to reconfigure the boxes,
you are clearing the table of all the food I forgot to put back
in the kitchen. I wonder if you have tired of our fake fir?
I wonder if your awareness of my tendency to repeat myself goes unremarked out of kindness?
I remember when I kissed you you hadn't slept,
I gave you my black jacket, not unlike the socks or the coffee.
They say it's difficult to play a good rendition of the Waldstein sonata.
So let us behave truly, to avoid deflation!
Let us no longer walk where the boughs swing at heads on the sidewalk, all five of them!
Hurry! it's plain to me you would never use a bag with rhinestones on it
to carry magazines, a cosmos of excitement, practically an arsenal!
I am waiting for you to love me, to give you a fair sendoff.
2.
I look forward, see a hummingbird
held prisoner by the terrifying songs
chained to the furniture with numbers
in the sunshine beige and mediocre
a kind of gold surplus punctuated with
difficulty, bows generally circumvented without reference
accountants clamoring for each other off
planes and making plans with rhinestones
leading to the kitchen pouring contents
into glasses calling form along the
interstate comprised of magazines and General
Robert E. Lee saluting, defecting
Pritchard 60
to allude to a dress you
don't own anymore in Washington because
left in circles new caffeinated variety
arsenic or you you thought would
ponder pores and list the sky
as a certain causal remonstrance of
moving stars to the left of
unlike making backs packed with showing
full of check ups and the
sensation of people figuring things out
only reason to write poetry everything
else just stuck inside a bag
conceding to the fractions embodying fury
differentiation or a polite wavering slides
gently down the ladder, unlikely but
they say no longer tyranny other
other problems present themselves in order
of importance, wires and mouths today
downfall is not you, is full
wanton picket fence of the cavernous
desire to make anecdotes out of
wreckage, events, sentiments, all these built
downtown to sing a lonely tune
at the bottom the moving stares
3.
We can avoid all this because you prefer trains
to fields and, conceivably, sunshine. Perhaps you enjoy them
in conjunction, trains and sunshine, trains and fields and sunshine
wired together in what could only be conceived of
by an actuary or a dictator or a powerful fist
covered in fur clutching an arsenal of telephones. How would a telephone
debilitate a love affair? Here I catch myself almost writing "our" as though time
Pritchard 61
or somehow a leash described adequately the rack of magazines
standing in for affection while it ducks out for a cup of coffee in the afternoon.
Hurry up, waiting in a dress that hardly fits
has never been my milieu of choice. If I had choice
it would not be blue. It would be a leg muscle
the approximate size of an opera by Verdi. I look forward
to explaining this image to you, debating over whether or not
this constitutes an image or if I'm merely remarking
territory around not you but still important.
What would that be? A leash, a rhinestone or two, water and sky
having loud conversation I can barely remember. Something about stars.
4.
They say it's difficult to put a hummingbird on a leash.
They say the airport is run by calves.
They say the telephone's ringing, they're lying, it was
a text message for someone else, I don't take kindly
to strange interjections. They say that's OK.
They say two or three showrooms' worth of antique duvets should be enough.
They say pouring coffee on a stranger signifies love.
They say the human heart, who knows to what perversions it may not turn when its taste is
guided by aesthetics.
They wonder why the number two in the drawing is also blue, not unlike
but fairly difficult to imagine in my current context.
They say context determines they.
They say it's dangerous to be without center.
They say this is a poem begun in the kitchen on the day
you took an interest in magazines, I admit that since then
I have not read one without writing down interesting sentences to show you.
They do not go on to explain those sentences.
They say waking up at four in the morning inheres in a painterly skill set.
They say a set would be impressive but not to an accountant.
I wonder if they have written five pages by hand in the theatre, my finest artistic achievement
finished as I waited on the sidewalk for you there.
They say I remember my own shirts better than yours.
They suggest I not overstay my welcome and get on the bus.
They specified the particular shade of gray, the first fitted shirt
I ever owned, it went with a brown sweater you only discovered
in the restaurant where I kept moving away from the door.
They say I should pick up today.
Pritchard 62
They say mediocre songs make the best crème brûlée.
They still haven't described context. The best nocturnes
involve a flood of sentiment aimed directly. I wonder who will gauge
the difference between a letter and a song?
5.
Left, hurt, ailing, others
will object to this particular approach.
"Phonocentrism is a kind of malice"
saith the calf in the supermarket from the floor
dressed in rhinestones, leaning on the magazines
ready to open fire. I look forward to Alice
in Wonderland becoming your new favorite book,
surpassing The Tao of Pooh and Huis Clos which
only really make it on the list because of airport
security and the boundedness of you
you thought didn't actually exist and were right.
Frame the inquiry differently: let us be no longer
and that is the point! a tyranny of essence,
macabre, ringing in a bag composed by contents.
I wonder if the sonnet form is appropriate for narrative?
I wonder if the bag would be better suited to my poem?
I remember stealing the delineated difference
of spaces like a French philosopher, viz. a fence
I climbed over to stand on the bridge in the woods
like a hummingbird in traction might not be partial to
the direction of these songs. I am
because I am telling you about it.
6.
Chaosmos is a fine word that goes undefined in The Farmer's Almanac
my heart feels like a pastoral hymn combined with slick production values
the lyrics are difficult to understand, hence surrealism
I wonder if you would appreciate references to the primordial fire?
I am writing to you always, a little more interesting than a telephone call
who will hang up first? that is the question contra Hamlet
my throat is sore
my fur is not a classical allusion
I have eaten breakfast in my room alone
I have rapped in a box office in a blue shirt
today I am going to call that an image
I wonder if you will approach this with pink measuring tape?
I wonder if you will appreciate my arsenal of references?
Pritchard 63
I wonder if I am Walt Whitman?
now I am asking answerable questions like a hummingbird in a vest on the couch
an air mattress with a red sheet on it where you poured out the contents
I spilled coffee grounds on the way to look at stars
7.
I am filling out the form
from a magazine I found
on the stairs to the bus
stop. Absurd designs, a
nod to celebrity I missed too
weeks ago. I wonder, you
ask about the color of my
favorite painting and then
they say something difficult
to understand. We must
rewind. The clouds are, interpretation, moving. O tyrant
of fine manikins, I ask
for a cappuccino. You see
the beast by the sea. Perhaps
I spelt it wrong. We are spilt
and weak. The foam split
over the edge and pooled at
the foot of the cup on the
dish, behavior I would expect
from a hummingbird or a film
actor but never a former actuary
of empty remarks. The fur
there I get from a telephone, more
sentiments emerge. An estuary
beyond, sunshine looks beige
in a backpack. An event wired
money to a child, meaning purple
as always in the gray between
the water plus the sky has been
acting on the stage of
late. The livestock have
hair like soft rabbits. I will be
waiting for you with powerful mediocrity.
8.
My heart feels like a felt-tip pen in a work shirt.
I look forward to a train an hour late.
Pritchard 64
We are stuck in a taxi cab, typically. The door
is open, the stairs are falling all over themselves,
a panoply of strangeness and I am renting a car to do my taxes with
you at some point. Agreed? dress all that was so blue, like
swimming or falling, humming like power or a tablecloth
behind the barricade in the city after Christmas. I wonder
if you are an aficionado of coffeemakers? I wonder if I am made
of coffeemakers, or beans, or too direct a connection? They say
"hold on, you have to fill out these forms for the insurance"
and I think of a movie I think we watched in August. The stars
no longer funny, I think Robert De Niro is less interesting
than a sitcom anymore. Hurry to conclude the lunch content
orange peels on the edge of a garbage can sounding a lot like
that time we spent reading from the same book in the morning before
a poem like this would be in rather bad form. Taste? I'm mentioning
a movie again. There's an air conditioner inside his jacket,
so we spell a lot of words wrong and call it corroboration instead of difficulty.
Applesauce and peanut butter for breakfast, diamonds extending
only on the edges. There is something epistemological here, I just haven't
articulated it yet. Kindness? plainness? a series of oddities across a surface.
9.
Today at the airport
My heart is a song
is what Robert Creeley might say but I cannot.
Why am I averse to simplicity? I look forward to you in the kitchen
by the coffeemaker where I failed to kiss you. How does one
fail to kiss? I wonder if you reconsidered
my prospects as a singer of letters? and if I turned everything
into haiku, would there be coolness, a certain harmony of gray address?
Perhaps not Creeley, maybe Yeats. Basho? A stack of names
not one mention of the blue telephone or the lawn chair sitting
in the corner of the room. They say it's difficult to say
so I don't. I fell out of bed first, I remember you paused and I worried
in the wrong key. I should have tuned myself more carefully.
Awareness and syntax and framing devices aside, a napkin in the sun
halves the travel time of sentiments. I wonder if you like discursive anecdotes?
We are no longer accountable for movement or celebrity, only astronomical imagery
I don't know how to arrange. If so, will we have a discussion of names
without the threat of rifles in the distance truncating thoughts or becoming mad
and gold? I fell down the stairs into your backpack like a precious stone
or a fake one. Am I stony? You said you used to. Your hair
reminds me of Guillaume Apollinaire with a particular slant, that of a certain light.
I look forward to billboards on the road to the ailing bay.
Pritchard 65
VARIATIONS ON "A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA"
for Evan Culbertson
What thoughts do I have of you tonight, Allen Ginsberg? I walked down the platform in a
hurricane with a headache and a shrubbery under my arm. I ate too much and I don't like
imagery, in the train bathroom, o what would you think of my enumerations? What poets and
what philosophers! Ashbery in the comic books, Derrida at the loom, Eliot in the café car,
Kierkegaard in the luggage rack—and you, Gilles Deleuze, what were you doing in the mirror?
Allen Ginsberg, you were on the phone with Walt Whitman, suggesting recipes and stroking
your beard. I heard you answer questions: Add pasta to water! Beside the basil in the cabinet!
The oven should be at 450! I idled washing my hands to hear what you were saying; in my
imagination Kafka was listening to me in the Mediterranean. You got off the train in France
alone but on the phone and I followed you, possessed with thoughts of Roland Barthes in the
streetlamplight, never doubting the accuracy of Howard's translations. Where am I going, Walt
Whitman? Le Métro no longer runs at this hour.
When I think of all the things I've been thinking of I feel insane. I have no automobile! There
isn't even a deck of cards, to play solitaire in the moon while I wait for you to ferry over. Too
many trees to allow for the exact shade of meaning, and Sylvia Plath is adjusting a lamp in the
window. I know you've got a class to teach in the morning on The Odyssey, but we were
promised jetpacks by the tires screeching through the Elysian fields. O Allen Ginsberg, standing
in the middle of empty Parisian street with no ticket back to Massachusetts, what would you say
to Heidegger? Would you wait in the station for a picture of a tree? I will tell Evan I saw you and
read to him from Wallace Stevens. Evan, where are you? Allen Ginsberg is not wearing any
clothes. Should I take another picture, though I'm sick of that particular mode.
Where is Alain Badiou at? The strange situation allows us a glimpse into Spain across the
incredible horizon deserving beautiful description. Allen Ginsberg, childless, lonely old
refrigerator on the bank of the Seine. How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine
sepulchre? Will you sign this affidavit about Evan? He is here with me eating a banana. (I shiver
a little and think about my aversion to bananas and feel nauseous.) I dropped the cheddar cheese
on the floor; you devoured it. A wild photograph less precise than a series of puns is all I have
left of you, Allen Ginsberg. I don't want to be left with Bertrand Russell in a taxicab. I don't want
to be alone.
Mayakovsky in the Tower of Pisa! Or he is the tower as you climb it at the top of Mallarmé's
voice, Allen Ginsberg. Walt Whitman stands over Tibet. What aspirins and what unconsciouses!
Conversations with Ariosto! Allen Ginsberg you have been fined two dollars and twenty-seven
cents for swimming in the black waters of Lethe. Charon quit smoking for his husband. I
wondered in and out of Germany thanks to a young Nagarjuna. You must make change for the
corridors of cashiers. Walt Whitman, why are you calling my name? Asks Evan in the poem you
wrote on the train. Allen Ginsberg, we walked and will be cold in the morning; you closed the
doors in our hermeneutic crop circle of Angels, love, Master Wumen, Bruno Latour.
Shopping avocados were poking boys. Pork-following detective, o solitary delicacy! In
supermarket trees we'll both be lonely. Past what you disappear. For headache: enumerations of
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the moon. Families in the grocery. James Tate with the absurd feeling lights Lorca with a stack
of poking cans. Never passing the shade, voting driveways like the houses. Who killed the
beard? Amiri Baraka reading a saxophone at night! The open form lain out in Freud, sealed in
my imaginary boat. Allen Ginsberg, where are you?
This is a soothing novel dedicated to you. The meats and eyes add fatigue to hunger; for images,
I chose from the periodic table neon. A dressing gown would be suitable fodder for a dedicatory
verse by Jacques Lacan. Walt Whitman, are you an open corridor? Allen Ginsberg, are you old?
Do the spiders in the trees make overtures toward Elizabeth Bishop? Artaud chokes. Open the
meats and the waters disappear! Night shades, trees shade, add past blue to our silent Lethe. (I
touch your Odysseus and dream of Stanislavski playing the role). Igor Stravinsky strumming the
Angels with a can. Fancy tasting frozen hours are our dreams.
Pritchard 67
VARIATIONS ON ARNOLD'S "DOVER BEACH"
We are here as on a plane
and on a plane. I propose a strain of careful indifference
to lead the way toward the restaurant tonight. Additionally,
we can skip the tumult of classical allusions and the pitfalls of
impassioned addresses by merely hearing echoes as in
a French restaurant on the marina, seated by the window
when the sun gleams off the water and suddenly dinner is ruined.
I see they've clams tonight. But they stop serving lunch at noon. It's unfair
but how could we have known when they don't offer menus in braille? From the long line
I refuse to step without good reason. I'm hungry and I'm tired of flinging pebbles
at the marching band. The water is turgid, then, but the air is sweet
at night. This is why we sleep in different beds, why we have built different eternities
according to different notions of the role played by a given individual.
Overall I do not disagree with you. I like to watch the tides go out more so than I like to watch
them come in.
A vast allegory once splayed itself before me
and I almost gave in to the promises of deliberate obscurity
saved only by the alarms clamoring beyond the greenish window.
This all on Thursday. Thankfully, we can begin again.
Of human misery, we only hear
when it may be conveniently compared to oceans
meant to represent faith and separation, coextensive
enterprises that fail to suggest the undifferentiated flux I associate with oceans.
But I am being selfish; a land of dreams has more to offer
than simply a series of existential questions with answers on the backs
of our necks. Were you listening to me when I suggested
the window as a viable meeting place? The flour, blanched beyond recognition,
made for an excellent gift. And so I ceased to like the sonnet form.
I remained fond of its practitioners, though, however grating they may become
knowing always there's an element of the less grating there.
Can we talk about Kierkegaard? To take you dancing brings me joy
but—and were I industrious I would duplicate the dash, long as the circumference of the earth—
I wish I were dead when I tell all these jokes at parties. I hope
that's a reasonable gloss of such anxiety. "1967" by Thomas Hardy too
a fair estimation of that school of thought. I have told you before
I want to call a book The Phenomenology of Worms.
Virgil probably had that idea already.
So you and I, let us go then!
And lie naked on the shingles like pebbles clamoring for intimacy
watching the battle on the plane below and placing bets
or comparing our lot unfavorably to what it would be
if we could recline in similar fashion on the shores of Italy
Pritchard 68
where we would find no cliffs but the water would less imitate a wheeze
than it does here, from where I must now go on to describe the breeze
if I wish to hold your attention.
It's the damnedest thing: you come to the window when I call, but now we gleam and wax
similarly to the moon
and I feel I am in a great girdle, or I may very well be one, for you make similar faces.
Between the two of us, I'd hardly mind an actual girdle; laying on a roof with no clothes on
can be painful, as I have learned, and though I love you so
it cannot shield me from the bumps, or cuts. Even in sex, you insist I protect you!
From the Sea of Faith
climbs a water nymph, demanding to see me. I suppose I've left a few details out
being in the habit as I am of ceaselessly establishing connections, constantly creating new planes,
never slowing down to explain, always a gleam and then gone.
Aristophanes long ago described it in The Frogs, and it brought into the world
a strange ebb and flow and lack of distinction between the gods and other people,
which should have been liberating but now I merely assume you are an egotist because you can
walk around the lake and might as well be dead.
You insist I don't listen enough,
But the window-moment should have been an indication of something!
What I'm not sure of. That wasn't the question?
Let us again begin:
You insist that I throw like a girl.
This offends not only me but a great deal of your friends, who, when I told them
what you said, decided to push you into the ocean. Don't look at me!
I'm not exactly good at reading situations like this, though I wouldn't say I was bad
at it, either. It's a happy medium, but all the lamps are on the wrong tables, the tablecloths don't
match the silverware, etc.
and when I ask if I would be able to read
to you from the latest translation
of my work into English, you sighed and turned into a photograph of the sea
with all the trimmings. I have half a mind
to storm out of here with a child on my shoulder! That threat, like
a cold northern distance, had all the turgid ebb and flow I feel when I am out on
the town with Oedipus Rex. It's sad
that I spent such time with him, but I suppose it doesn't bother you so long as the beds
are made, the rooms not too messily wrought, the perfumes
all in order and the sweet fragrances I insist I bought
for you haven't been used. In my defense, this poem is addressed
to you! But seriously, I shouldn't have to resort
to such petty declarations of intent when you just want me to tell you you look pretty.
Once again I'm forced to leave the room
for thoughtless interference with your psyche. A bit
later I came back only to see you will have moved my things
out into the hallway. I'm a little upset; this is
Pritchard 69
overkill, really, especially while
my car is in the shop. I left the bourbon in the trunk, so now I can't drink
by myself and pretend I'm being youthful and indifferent to the world! But last year
you would have joined me. Now it seems all there is
left to do bores you. Come
on, we should stop our bickering and sing in the French, les chansons d'amour!
I would have written "sincerely" at the end but by the time I finished you had already left
for the bay. Today is a terrible day for sailing. What if the cliffs decide to smash your boat?
They do that on occasion; they're not the kindest rock formations I've ever met,
but these days you simply take what you can get when it comes to geology. It's unpredictable,
you know! but thankfully I can always discern a stable love affair when I run my finger
through the city and this various dream of living lands beautiful and new in my lap.
A full tide of separate anxieties dispenses itself toward the referential dimension of
and I don't agree. Why not? Is this a matter of the weather? Blood and armies are only there
figuratively. I don't feel any better. Maybe we shouldn't go to dinner. But we have reservations!
I brought you flowers. You are swept, alarmed by the clashes at night that don't do much to help
the pain of standing in the bus stop without an umbrella, or for that matter the beaches are
covered in tiny little rocks that scrape your feet like a bad recording of Beethoven. I am
trying not to be terrible esoteric or bland, but am always already blanched. What can you absorb
if I'm standing on my head and the window is closed so you can't hear my dramatic monologue?
I asked Anthony Hecht who didn't really care either way. Ah, love, look to the clams
to find metaphors for love affairs, Buddhism, and the undifferentiated flux of endless becoming!
I simply can't get that particular association to go away, so I retreated and decided to coin
"certitude" as an apt descriptor of the opposite of the darkling layers of ambiguity, the constant
drawing of lines, not poetic, not useful, from line to line to line to line to line
and I refuse to pick one. O just do it. Can I? Which do you want to choose? Hence, no sincerity.
The waves draw back, and fling,
but it's only your mind drawing back
and flinging. You grow tired of my
Zen castigations. I have half a mind
to refer back to Nagarjuna, who
likely would object to the very subject
of this poem. Right? Or is it
the ocean? Is there something symbolic
about what I am writing? Now
I am confused, and I can't very well
go back to the allegory with my tail
between my teeth, claiming I have
evolved as a result of the failed
experiments herein. Am I not
blind to causality? Here the lexicon
grows difficult to navigate, which is
why the very question of the moon
and the sea and the thought of peace
Pritchard 70
and help for pain appeals to me on
a plain, though never on a plane
of myriad planes always connecting to
other planes. I forgot about seatbelts
and rock climbing. Is that the eternal
note of sadness? If you would just
come to the window, my sweet, the night
air could transform your salty disposition
and we may become as gods
indistinguishable from soccer. You are thinking, in a frustratingly predictable way,
abut the never-disclosed nocturne with a kiss, splayed
like shingles in a dithyramb, ebb, flow, concrescence can be fallacious, etc. etc. etc.
The knights outside continue to fight
even after you have stopped paying attention to me. It's a lot like the Pink Panther,
the ocean, all these constant transgressions and simultaneous
shifts back and forth and inbetween rather than on top of. You're right
to suspect I am making this up on the spot: I have never particularly known
how to plead for love using the way it impacts the sea as leverage. Pathetic
and childish, this plea for eternal non-sadness in a single place. I'm standing still
already in different places. Useless, these pronouns! They're just like furniture
for Michael to trip on and fall on instead of sitting down. Not that I'm not
not not clumsy—and stuttering out of love it doesn't work like a sentence.
The Aegean is the number one reason for marital disputes; let us move away to the hills and
fields of beautiful Guadalajara, for I have heard from poems of its imaginative wealth.
That being said I hardly want this to serve as a kind of instruction manual.
I'm not equipped to dole out the kind of pointers one would expect
from a "guide" or "manual." Has the allusion been sufficiently stretched
out? Dinner certainly ruined itself once the subject was tabled
for study, sliced in half and less appetizing than mussels.
Pritchard 71
VARIATIONS ON "THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK"
See here, credits: mere repost is fussy
and personal change makes torn vassals Monday.
Question: a flammable star, incensed? Pee, you Scots!
Mad percussion gave me the quest of fondue,
none torn of evil Vulcan, see? Old door, ill vale,
Sense tremors, a din of famous tea respondents.
Just between you and I,
I like to stare awhile at the sky
in the evenings before I sit down at my table
to write. Sometimes I look down impatiently at the streets
when my mutterings retreat
and I start to feel the way the hallways in cheap hotels
smell, or after a dinner of lobster. I steal the shells
and steal down to the streets, where I try to avoid the usual argument
over whether or not the lobster-shell business is lucrative as it used to be. My intent
is not to lead you anywhere half-deserted. Let me ask you a question…
No! don't you dare ask me about it!
What? I'm already late for our visit.
What should I make of schemes that come and go
like memory, or Renaissance art, like Michelangelo?
Fog and smoke and mist above a prairie or frontier. What do these have to do with the windowpanes
I shattered when I sneezed, the very same window-panes
I rubbed my nose against the corners of in the evening
after dinner as a child? I never licked the windows because I didn't want my tongue to get stuck
the way Frisbees get stuck in drains
on the cold glass. I can't stand the way the conversation drifts back to chimneys
whenever she walks into the room, as if it's an easy leap
from Russian literature to the terrace, and from there to chimneys. But that night
he promised he'd help me slip softly back to areas of my expertise before we fell asleep.
I hope we don't run out of time
that the liquor store across the street
isn't closed; I can't see because there's cardboard where the window-panes
should be. We always already have time
to make masks and wear them unendingly wherever we choose to meet
for cocktails or to discuss the latest homicides in the paper. We create
"time" as it suits us, or tuxedoes, depending on what hands
and from which watch they watch. There's leftover food on your plate;
more for you to eat later, yet this somehow reflects badly on me
still reeling from the time you criticized my lack of indecisions
Pritchard 72
as if my perspective on revisions
in poems somehow rendered me a terrible writer, more so than putting bourbon in my tea.
But these evaluations don't go
on forever, just like Michelangelo
eventually died. What time
is it always already? I wonder if I should dare
leave this soiree, risk walking out and, on the bottom stair,
realizing some incredible remark I could have uttered! So I run my fingers through my hair
(this shirt makes me look particularly thin)
put on my jacket, hoping no one will notice I cut my chin
shaving, or that I used a pin
(honestly, purple is a good color for me, I feel so very thin!)
to pop the zit on my forehead. Do I dare
include that in a poem? Does the universe
care? Give me a minute to make some coffee; by the time
I get back I'll have figured it out. Well, I made a decision, decided the reverse
by the time I sat back down. I know this all
sounds a bit preposterous, just like the time of day I write best doesn't matter as much as how I
spend my afternoons
which I am not going to tell you. I sometimes eat macaroni with spoons,
is that pertinent information? I diet; I fall
down stairs and bruise both knees; I eavesdrop on conversations in the other room.
Guillaume Apollinaire, I presume?
I have read Illuminations already, so all
I can say is I can't fix itself. I can't think of a phrase
interesting enough to write next. Let me formulate one. As a gun without a firing pin
one must have trouble hitting targets on the wall,
even ones that sprawl themselves out as if to say, "shoot me, dammit!" Now I begin
to regret this poem and the ridiculous ways
I have gone about writing it. Existentialism, I presume?
I wrap my arms around my self and think, "all
this is suffering" but it doesn't help. I have to bare
(maybe I should wash my hair)
or bear something in a poem, right? It isn't fair! The only times I worry how I dress
are when I hope I can convince someone to digress
with me in the least literal fashion, so that I might relieve her of her shawl
and then…I don't know. Sex, I presume.
But how do I begin?
.....
Pritchard 73
How do you say, "I formulated something brilliant but left it in one of the side streets
of Paris!" in French? I wonder if the hermit crab selling pipes
collected sleeves a few summers ago. There are so many windows
to attend to! A priest sells bear claws,
a gypsy bargains for conches from seas
.....
too far east for me to reach today. All the hands on all the clocks peacefully
disagree. Each points fingers
at the next, arranging a network of confusion within which malingers
—or I suppose within which I malinger. Beside me
self preoccupied with buffets and a chef who ices
cakes by drawing shapes, I remark, "I'm in a crisis.
I need help, come on." And then I prayed
but he didn't, busy as he was with her elsewhere (somewhere in the alleys). This platter
of hors d'oeuvres doesn't particularly matter
when you're worried about who you actually love, and meanwhile the Maitre D' will snicker
when I don't know how to behave in so nice an establishment. I'm not so much afraid
as I am nervous, because after all
I'm the one who has to get up onstage, right? And what if the tea
is cold, or gone, when I return? The urinals discuss you and me,
it's strange but we should be flattered while
it lasts. I can't smile
when I'm absolutely excited; I look like a jackal of some sort, a ball
rolling out the door to land under a bush and become the subject of a song about the universe.
One question,
though: if Sylvia Plath were to stumble through the chimney, upset because her dad is dead,
would we be too insensitive to bake for her? That's not what I meant at all,
to mythologize the way she put her head
in the oven was not what I meant at all!
Seriously, it's not my intent at all
to mock poets who've died. All
I wanted to do was offer pastries to someone while
she recovered from the shock of death and wandering the streets
alone. I never read her novels. Is there more tea? I've never seen a skirt touch the floor
which says more
about me, I guess, than my psyche. I don't know what you mean!
We use a horsehair brush to clean the screen
on which eventually we will watch movies for a while
longer, but it's cold in the theatre so I'd need a shawl
to last beyond the previews. The only lights say
"EXIT" as per federal law. Or state? All
Pritchard 74
the signs are green, but that doesn't justify at all
.....
my sudden leap to clever, referential invective: frailty, thy name is————it would be
perhaps unkind to finish the thought, to let such personal attacks lord over everything we do
from here until the climax on the beach. There's only a stanza or two
left; no need for specters other than what we've got here. One tool
I find I use
more often than the rest, though I am less meticulous
with rhyme than geometric proofs would, upon reading my poems, suggest I be. I'm filled with
sentences, but each one is more obtuse
than the last, owing in part to my ridiculous
love of prolixity. Don't be such a fool;
the whole self-deprecating obscurantist thing grows old…
Go find out where that ball rolled.
Should I wear a hat? Do I want raspberry or peach
iced tea? I heard the tenors singing on the beach
about mermaids, which is weird, but to each
their own, I suppose. The sea
is calm tonight. I shouldn't have worn this brown
sweater. If you go for a swim, don't drown!
Pritchard 75
VARIATIONS ON "TO HIS COY MISTRESS"
I am talking about endless circularity of time!
Even then, we'd have to punish the crime
of perching atop a sign pointing toward the Middle Way,
itself a crime (the sign)—there's not enough time in a day
to describe solutions for all these problems. A side
note: if precious stones avail themselves to you, my tide
of euphoria so grossly expressed itself that I would
never be elected to public office again, not after the flood
of complaints received. Even given all that, I refuse
to make explicit my feelings about the Jews—
the issue's irrelevant! I want to grow
from the center outward, connecting both margins in a slow
process, taking about one hundred years minimum. Praise
is in order, for those bold enough to gaze
beyond the fabric and provide constructive criticism to every breast
in attendance, or person. All the rest
rescind behind the part
where I realize nothing at all can stop the breaking of my heart.
I said I wouldn't cry, not as a head of state
or even a mime, but at this rate
I guess I have neither choice nor chance. I hear
terrible gossip in the form of a helicopter. Near
my house she build a trembling copse where I lie
regretting the time I said, "eternity
is more important than physical intimacy!" I've found
I often rely on platitudes as this, that I sound
utterly ridiculous, when I try
to approach the question of virginity
from an ironic distance. Now there's dust
on my shoes and I still lust.
Just generally, I lust. Why not come over to my place
and have a drink? Perhaps we will embrace
and laugh at the dreadful hue
I recently painted the front porch. With dew
on the grass you'll leave, and what transpires
will be solely between us unless the gardener fires
a gun and now I have to go on safari, January through May,
from Moscow to Tallahassee. I'm bored, you're amorous, our prey
won't mind if we distract it first. Let us devour
mice, to demonstrate our power!
You roll your lips back between your teeth, and all
I desire curdles forth. One ball
Pritchard 76
at a time, the tennis match was won; the strife
and hardship worth it as we face the thorough iron gates of life
that comb through our narratives like the sun
breaks down the cardboard by the bay. I'm going for a run.
You're right that we are capable of marvelous feats of abstention: idling by the Humber, a boy
awaits his bar mitzvah and dreams of the exotic Ganges, never knowing it's not a dinosaur. There
are rubies there, and beautiful women with whom he may now fall in love and conduct illicit
affairs. He ducks beneath a bridge to avoid the chariot with his mother in it. She is frightened
he's been murdered; he's only playing hard-to-get. This all, of course, assuming we had the time
to entertain these claims that thirty thousand eyes have been swallowed by the Flood designated
only by its ominous moniker, not actual physical destruction of buildings, redistricting of
eternity.
Necessarily you set fire to those mourning; do you feel remorse? If so, what color was the fire? I
myself prefer certain virgin hues, balled up strength running too quickly and chapping his lips.
At the tidal basin, we sidle awkwardly along. Complaints of love! Everyone technically has
breasts. He would have muttered a bitter "I told you so" to know his father was having sex with
worms. You deserve this state; I'll hold on to the surrounding territories and we'll have ourselves
a map. We can play marbles on the counter if you put it on the floor. You set everything on fire,
now they are instantly amorous even as I try to languish for a bit. Don't you love languor? Keep
pushing everything aside; if we wait long enough the explosions will be more satisfying than a
cartoon. The gardens will outlast all political affiliations as we gradually come to feast
hedonistically on beauty like hawks, gossiping of sweetness, praying our gaze not be mistook for
a crime in this of all possible worlds, deferral is likely and looked upon with fondness.
Pritchard 77
VARIATIONS ON SIMIC'S "CARRYING ON LIKE A CROW"
1.
Are you authorized to carry on like a crow?
Are you able to explain the laundry line?
What about the one after, the one about the man and the woman
dangling in the model cars? Who gave you
the white cross by the side of the road? Did you
intend to put it in a ditch like an old nightgown?
The shirt should have been an indication that words are enough
to speak. Permission for these trees without leaves
and the widow in the swing by the set of dark clouds.
Have you flapped from tree to tree like beer in the wind? Can you?
2.
Are these trees
able to explain
what wind intends?
Man and woman
on laundry line:
what dark clouds,
ponds of leaves,
model cars rusting
gave you permission
in a ditch.
The white road
set in yard
ask if words
better from tree
carrying a crow?
3.
The authority to carry anything at all
has nothing to do with trees. I can say this with some authority
because I am dangling like beer cans from a laundry line.
I know plenty about dark clouds; it all transfers over
when you've stood at the basin of definitions
and filled ponds. Nightgowns are, I suspect, enough
for the model car salesman in the driveway, asking about
your sister, crowing to the swinging dog, set
in his ways as you are yours. What about my ways? I wear
the man's shirts and sit on wings that flap with intention.
Old permissions ditch the cross. Falling down you wind
up left, leaving right in the middle of an important lecture
Pritchard 78
about images. Or was it inquiries? The difference is spreading,
becomes blurred as you focus largely on the physical
surroundings and make everything look simple and interesting
even as you secretly build to that somewhat surprising
conclusion that even alcohol couldn't subvert. Ask yourself
if your poem was any good, if you should keep up this
charade or surrender to the line of waves outside the door
demanding some kind of symbolic retribution. I would, too.
4.
A concise expression of my disappointment:
you wanted to hide the tire swing by pointing
only to the swing set in the front yard.
Can anyone speak anymore? The ponds
are rusted with intention, lacking a fatal
ironic model in a nightgown, singing quietly
like the wind carrying a driveway
might. Ask yourself to show yourself
the door. William Wordsworth
is the answer to your question, my dear.
You explain the white beer; I am not impressed.
What do you know about widows or the way they dress?
Would you be better off as a laundry line, idling back
and forth like the dictionary, permissive as a last ditch effort
to discover the scientific interest in German Romanticism
preoccupied since the late 1960s with beer, the left
espousing freedom and some other virtues I didn't hear
because I had to leave the symposium earlier
before they announced the men's shirt sizes.
Ask yourself if you'd better crow a little more concisely.
5.
The intentional arrangement of images
is able to explain the sentiment
that trees and laundry lines have in common;
for what is an image if not a photograph
of something important and precious
that is important and precious precisely
due to its lack of importance or preciousness?
6.
If words are enough
I'm in the wrong business.
Making stainless steel benches
Pritchard 79
from rubber so they might
fit somewhere in your schema,
is that OK? Are you authorized
to speak on behalf of the group?
If you think hard for us all,
we'd appreciate you telling us
not leaving our clothes out on the line
next time so when the cars pull in
there isn't a sense of endangerment,
the bareness afforded by underpants
in the wind. I'll bargain with you
for the swing set. The trees are not
negotiable. Put some hot water on.
Who gave you permission to drink
at this hour? It's 5:00 somewhere
I guess; you are able to explain.
7.
I think I will make some tea
delicious and refreshing, like a tree;
Do you object to this plan?
Who is the man
who has left his shirt on the line,
his car in the driveway? I find
his behavior absolutely reprehensible,
your excuses utterly indefensible,
and yet I can't find the sugar in the kitchen.
When metaphysics show up, I'm ditchin'
this framework and pursuing a little
more comfortable a lifestyle, one where spittle
doesn't always end up ruining the drapes,
virgins aren't dissevered by the napes
of necks of sloths recently slain
in the woods by someone who likes to blame
capitalism for his uncouth behavior.
Now I'd love to make this poem into a savior
with fists of beer cans, wind wound tight,
Pritchard 80
but unfortunately I might
skip it and go swing in the yard.
I'm terribly bad at being a bard.
I always worry that words aren't enough,
so I'm crowing about how inadequate the stuff
I have at my disposal is for the purposes I employ it,
which as you can imagine can get annoying
after years of permissive glances. To the desirous looks
I finally myself surrendered. They reminded me of hooks
in my favorite popular tune, something loud
with a pounding, repetitious bass, and lyrics addressed to a cloud.
8.
Having dealt with heroic couplets in a previous seminar,
let us now turn to the act of naming names, pointing fingers,
sitting under trees without leaves and considering yourself
a pond with leaves on the surface of the water that hide
the moral systems you only have permission to dive
towards when no one is looking. Here enters the valuable skill
of pointing out everything you can find through your window
and finally, when we are wondering what the significance of
a ditch may be to your strangely-symmetrical argument, you
slip beneath the surface of the pond and emerge with a white cross
or a rusted model car, never a tire or a boot. Suddenly you need to insinuate
that we are all terribly inadequate. You get a gold star if you do it
in a rhetorical question that involves self-effacement in some way. Take care
not to alienate the reader, however; you must understand, for instance,
that it is my nightgown hanging there, my dog's shirt, and suddenly
the dark clouds give way to something light and fluffy, a pale blue affair
as the backdrop, and you wish you hadn't written a poem organized around a crow.
9.
Carrying on like a cow I crossed the white road
sidebar: who gave you trees without permission?
the widow swings in the set yard
if words are enough, I'm flapping my shirt
crazily in the wind to suggest a lack of confluence
damn, another broken heart
Pritchard 81
modeled after the old driveway
you take your rusty leave with intention
but fail to describe or explain exactly
the direction in which we would find the pond
you always babble on about
or into, neither beer can nor wings could
suggest the movement from man to woman
as deftly as your clouds
10.
Everybody ought to know
where he stands regarding permissions
and authorizations. For instance, what
crow would be allowed to drive a car, and
in what conditions would we understand this
to be acceptable, normal, or at least as daily
as doing laundry? If the crow is also flying,
separate licensing is required. Once I was going
to write a poem about a crow and didn't. That
seems to be the struggle of all lyric poets
staring as is their wont into the vast incommensurable
ditch filled with beer cans—once the proper
forms have been signed, of course—wondering
about the existential calamity and whether or not
it's a bad idea to leave the cross white, or if
the proper steps should be taken to color it in with
crayons and magic markers. I think I am speaking
for everyone when I say that suddenly I want clams
or some other succulent seafood dish to savor
as I languish in my nightgown. If I put on a shirt
I will walk the streets with bloody blows on my head.
Words are surely enough; all I'm making is a menu.
11.
Is there an extra copy of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Does the argument only apply
to one discipline, or can it be said that suddenly we have made a leap that no one can undo, and
now we are pretty much stuck with a new mode that, while it may end up flapping in the breeze
on a laundry line somewhere, has captivated the hearts and minds of trees around the world. The
youthful wind wonders what would best suit his intended expression. "The perfect exergue,"
thinks the schoolteacher. I have a sharp implement and am in the woods. The trees I have
chopped down form a white cross. Here, take this experience of mine and let there be commerce
with it. Clothing is always worth pointing out; later on you may refer back to it using the word
"sartorial" if you are not too concerned with self-reference and interesting sounds. A list of
questions is essentially all I can offer. Will they be designed to send you in a certain direction? It
comes down to an essential question of the difference between poetry and street signs, a
difference I am not yet ready to discuss. Let me finish flapping.
Pritchard 82
12.
Who gave you these trees without words?
Do we have a case against the laundry line?
The white cross, has it stolen our clothes again?
The widow wants to know if leaves are enough
to allegorize the swing set, or if we require more beer
to proceed. I am not in the business of answering
to her. I merely have experiences and carve them into blocks.
Permission to be better off: he intends to water
the garden with the dark cloud as his ostensible hose. Driveway
or birdbath? These are serious questions with grandiose implications.
I am lonely today. I don't want to wear a shirt
or forget the lyrics. But I can't very well sit in the pond. It would be
rude. I will mow the lawn and move the furniture back into the yard
and then I think we will be squared away. If I use a knife
to whittle a little something on the chair, suddenly this carrying on
becomes greatly important. At times like these I wish
I had continued to make snide references to Greek mythology.
13.
Skepticism: A Haiku
Ponds full of fallen leaves?
Old model cars rusting in a driveway?
The swing set in the widow's yard?
14.
Let us now analyze the way each image reclines
upon the frames of the photograph containing it.
There's an old model beer can rusting in that yard,
but we have to avoid it for reasons of concision—
no, call it precision, there's much more to be said
about a well-wrought collection of snappy images
than just a short poem in a certain form. The crow
carries on for pages, each word essentially its own
intended gust of spiritual wind. The clothesline has
no recourse but to represent something as well. Do
we offer lessons at a discount rate? The righteous
indignation frustrates me, too, but I didn't authorize
you to speak. The fundamental question is always
are there enough words?
Pritchard 83
15.
Speak
leaves
explain
do
nightgown
line
clouds
leaves
driveway
permission
ditch
road
yard
enough
off
tree
crow
16.
What can be learned or lost by way of
the ancillary acrostic? Does the prowess
of the model crow speak for itself, or
has it not yet been given the proper authority
to do, well, anything. Not even lunch. If
you are able to explain the fallen cross,
you will become a crow like a preschool
or a rusting yard. Drive away! I have nothing
nice to say. Look at permission
in a ditch! What curls around the edges of
causality, what diamonds and clouds!
Don't push me into a closed system; I'll
always feel guilty if I carry on like that.
17.
In the old model cars on the laundry line without leaves, I think I left my scrapbook and my
typewriter. I intended to do this, to give me time to flap.
Pritchard 84
VARIATIONS ON "WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN'D ASTRONOMER"
When I herded the learned astronomer,
when I figured out proof was proper arrangement a priori of columns,
when I charted the divisions that added to the incommensurability,
when I was sitting the astronomer applauded into a room to lecture lectures.
Soon unaccountable for even the sick and tired
I put down my torch and wandered off, feet above the ground ever slightly
to provide a mystical effect as I from time to time
looked up at the stars, perfect compared to a silent cigarette.
Despite my slight bias against scientism
things seemed to be going pretty well in the lecture-room;
the astronomers all responded reasonably to my claims and
figures demonstrating a ten-foot-tall universe or something
like that, and proof was to be had all around. Everyone eventually
ceded his unaccountable illness to the stenographers I had
invited along for the sake of keeping my diagrams from spilling
turning the appalled into applause. The arithmetic required
became a form of play—I ended up using the ceaseless connectivity
of the rhizome completely differently from how the gardener
had cautioned me to, which made my shoes moist and left me
covered in dirt and perfect stars. Silence, from time to time,
measured, wandered, glided, rose, became
which was the point one might say
but tell that to the lectured. Termination loomed
in the skies where never to return I was looking.
The astronomers calling one another and conspiring against me was bad enough
before I ruined my best conceivable approach to divinity by stepping
on toes and sticking bayonets into the balustrades where I hoped to frame
my audacious truth-claims with rows of supplements. These annoyed my compatriots
if you could call them those after the fire eradicated what was left of the night air
in my chair. In truth, clams belong in this poem too. A trope I have oft reused
to combat the learned, I walk out of the room to imply the interchange has ceased.
Ring a bell, start over again, ten minutes later we face applause.
Registering for classes is a drag
in a factory-themed system. More of a motif
I suppose when you dance into the night like
a piano on the frontier made moist. The perfect
silence is actually part of the concerto designed to follow the
explosive pounding accomplished with
an ax shined expensively
on the shoes of the lecture-room floor.
Pritchard 85
I am tired I am sick I am proof the figures were ranged in columns before me.
Does this offend no one but my childhood? Teleology collapses as we remember the story
backwards for reasons related specifically to unaccountable magic I wandered off
in the days of my effervescence.
Rising and gliding occupy a large portion of our days anymore
I have fallen in love with a herd of learned astronomers.
War aside we have had a decent lecture and I proposed
unaccountably in the mystical moist-night-air
from time to time in a spin
I looked up like a column to the stars, reminded
suddenly of a series
of classical allusions not intended by the particular diction
but which have a certain resonance
with me that makes the thrum
of the unimpeachable tiredness sick to become
utterly devoiced and revolved myself around a set of spheres from a different poem.
I have feelings, too, and my own education has prepared me
not for this motorcade of lecture-halls but a wanderful mystical series
of exploding measurements.
Or is it wonderful? I don't know,
you tell me
about the strangest things. Why walk out of a classroom
when you bloody well know you paid for it? Seems damned irresponsible
to range and applaud
absolute alterity instead of purposive betweennesses.
Should I revolt, my life around you indicating
only my brief stint as a lecture-room
and the imperceptible differences made monumental by the fact I care
more about them than I do the relative moistness of my hair?
The standard critique has nothing to do with either bearded man.
I prefer the foreign one, though both I suppose are in some sense
other. How did I get to talking about my hair? It's what I think
about: the reason, no doubt, that I stormed out in the first place.
When I was shown the proofs I figured we were unaccountable.
Sitting on the floor as the ceiling of my heart undergoes another paint job
I wonder if William Blake wasn't the most cogent of my forebears?
Blustering as always, I diagrams the space in which it fits.
When I chart mystical time the same assumptions permeate.
I wandered off. By myself in perfect silence I began to speak the language of the other.
The proofs and rhymes were renowned for their diffident
accuracy, but there will never be a colorful speech delivered
with such illness before divided, we add to the trends by the river.
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When the astronomer learned the heard I,
when the charts and diagrams, the pen-stroke to divide, adding measure,
when this proof was figured across a range of columns
Doric and otherwise,
The astronomer in the lecture-room applauded the always-changing
unaccountable yet sick and tired, tired and sick,
rising and gliding wondering off the I
mystical moist air at night. From time to time,
perfect silence looking up beholding I among stars connected.
Having abandoned the poem about the filaments to someone less preoccupied with flatness,
I was shown the lecture-hall kept secret for the sake of the astronomer's privacy.
Essentially, if I remember correctly, we rolled dice for several hours before wandering off
into the seats we would claim as our own in the course of the course's unfolding.
Do these things ever run their course? Is there room in the room that you room in
for a chart concerned with smashing glass and wondered moistness? The perfect stars
silence figures. Prove it. I made a column specifically for that reason. Did you? Yes.
Measure them, then, than an intellect mining objects are we greater. Grace
mystical this night. From time to time, look up. We shall be happy
without an intelligentsia sobbing into our laps—much as I enjoy that element of our
constant striving I will sit on the floor with the rest of the shown exhibitions. Change
your mind, come outside, read more books by putting them one on top of the other.
Continuous pagination the only way to be! I am dying, made of denim and proving nothing.
It's not that I reject to any particular aspect of my education;
I simply wish we would read books I am interested in
and dammit if logical positivism should creep its way onto the study guide
for the midterm in perfect silence. I missed the boat by half a day.
For the lecture-room crowd, the berth was incessantly wide
so I changed directions for the sake of a good joke. It didn't work.
I am trying to be ambivalent in as formal a sense as possible;
could it be I have reached the point where I just don't know how?
I wandered off by myself,
gliding in the rising column of air
to the moist lecture-room where
I found myself more truly and more strange
to be not so alone as an orange
smoked by the president. From time to time
I am unsuccessful, but I try to ignore it
best I can. That too was the astronomer's method,
proofs, charts, figures, measures, add and divide
all of this and call me in the morning. So he said.
I didn't do it.
Instead I in perfect silence smoke a cigarette.
Pritchard 87
VARIATIONS ON SOME THEMES BY EZRA POUND
1.
The apparition of lily-of-the-valley
lay beside the eyes of the very learned British Museum.
Petals wet the Normande dawn.
She lay beside the bough in the crowd.
Wet leaves suddenly very beautiful faces.
2.
A study in photography and spectrographic analysis:
everyone on the train is a ghost
beside her. In the dawn the cocotte malfunctions;
we are not regaled with sex but a series of delicious pastries.
Lily-of-the-valley be damned, here are the Norman assistants,
suddenly discovered to be me in the dawn.
The leaves are cool, the faces black, pedaling through
the middle of a background as in a landscape. Who
could have done this, though? Surely the
French painters are more studious than he,
contextless we stagger through the cocoons come to lay beside.
3.
The eyes of the very learned British Museum assistant
warily seduce the gardener. I am lashed
to her breast with the force of apparitions: the black
discovery, beautiful as the pale wet leaves
we traced with a bough in the valley where the lilies used to grow.
Lo, as sudden discoveries coolly insinuate the marvelous
into a nascent photograph. Can we properly grasp the defined
image? Subject and object together make for an interesting
study in the capacious rhetoric of worlds. Normandy
would be a fun place to visit in the summer, don't you think?
I am falling in love with a thinner, more brilliant version
of the crowd facing the door. To pet Scotland in its nascence,
a shining proposition: I need to take the metro to get home
this evening. Let us move into an intimate place, creating
a space for the personal to persist like shards of a new connection
being formed suddenly very beautiful.
4.
The petals as she suddenly. Of Normandy, the
only thing left was a pot of flowers.
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I abuse again the intimacy afforded by slavish attention
the particular details making light so I can read between
speeches. Who is making? What is the difference
between a poem? Imagism hinges on a
serious and resolute declaration, with none of the frills
we are allowed in the more discursive, meditative lyric. It is not
my intention to condemn this kind of verse, but lily-in-the-valley and regular old lily
are damn near interchangeable in the dawn. You just wet the leaves. The British Museum
assistant radiantly concurs;
I shall make a note of it
with my pale foot. What kind of an apparition is this
or that photograph supposed to prove exists? I learned like an astronomer
how to depict the very beautiful in a few simple vibrations. These days
penmanship is no longer an issue, thank god, we have developed rigorously
systems for the presentation of the mystical and profound. So now the problem is the system
by which the system is determined, or how to know if something is
mystical and profound or just an airplane soaring over English terrain and taking pictures
from users of public transportation.
5.
Don't think for one fucking second
you can bring that tree into the subway.
As cool as the pale wet leaves
may seem now, just imagine the faces
of the crowd as they disembark from
the train, suddenly discovering that you lay
with all of their spouses and lovers while they
are off making sure the British Museum
requires assistance in some regard. The question
with which I am left is how
did you get the garden to look so very like deer
we have held in themselves to ourselves
since dawn. The petals wet, the bough
black, she campaigns for the right to decide on the flowers
for the funeral. O and how the French echoes
through the corridors like the tracks we follow
very beautiful and extravagant tornadoes down
to the ship designated to be the apparition
at the apex of this thing we consider
majusculation to be the thing separating us most
from the other tradition we also inhabit,
albeit causally, leaning against the door smoking
Pritchard 89
waiting for a cocotte to arrive
she's late!
Now we enter the important discussion of expression,
the relation of expression to the form it takes.
6.
We will have many important conversations;
as long as none of them involve I they will be productive
to a fault. Gray beside me the renderings for the set
of a procession that will take place between two ferns
and everything else.
Punctually, the dawn appears to haunt each side sensually,
displaying a particular body
to really emphasize the locality of these movements. A museum.
A word. A breath. A
something interrupts: here comes the image wrapped around my head
but wholly other from myself, a dancer in the valley
wet with dawn and black with eyes. From the waist, I bow
deeply across a surface. Discovering
I flatten myself, I like it
that way, I keep it beside me and
interpenetrating wind through a couple of options
that make poems a surprise!
I wandered lonely as a crowd in the pale learned assistant
of the museum's eyes. I awoke coquettish as
ever the petals on my bicycle
become, distract, distort, allude to the seagull and hoof it on out of there.
7.
Suddenly the lily discovered it no longer wanted to be of
the valley. Here was a problem not easily solved
in the frameworks of objectivity, so she invents a new and more cumbersome
variety of tree to hold aloft and dandle beside me in the dawn
unfairly. Yet by pointing to connections you raise a whole new
problem amongst lovers of the crowd; namely, how do these appear
very beautiful outside the metro station, and furthermore
have we made our reservations for November 8?
Great! the fungible pigments of poetry are now at our every whim:
he cascades aloft the crying petals while exercising alone.
Pritchard 90
A brief jaunt to the French coast will lay many of your fears
down as one wets a cool pail with the blood of a mythological character.
Hurry up please, if rhyme
were all we had at our disposal, do you think it would be more or less pictorial than time?
How does one describe a vortex such that it does not offend
any shadows, any faceless appearances left out for lack of silhouette
and finally, the symbolic nature of the tattoo
she gave to it instead of saying I?
8.
Secretly I don't believe that anything is free.
Like an apparition beside me in the dawn
suddenly discovering in the wet black crowd
the pedals on a bough like a French whore. Excuse me,
the cocottes of Normandy have a little more self respect than to spend
very learned assistants as if they were pale and wet, a currency, a gobetween I have learned to depend heavily upon. All this time I've been running
for office fast and this in itself calls attention to how little
I respect the significance of my forebears. Well, I bought the book
exactly what we don't want. The whole point is to create a nexus of meaning
from which the associations pour like valleys into flowers. Is it dismal
or not to assume a cocoon the way very beautiful
formal elements inhere serially? I don't take very kindly
rude isn't the right word for it though, I suppose you could say it's
a brusque yet faithfully macabre sampling of
metaphysical oomph and we're sliding out on a casket. It's dawn.
Are they properly drawn? I can't imagine the vanishing point
I suppose that's the point then. Some points should point,
some points just point and pout. The hazily defined bath make up
part of the same sphere we fingered what was bound to happen with.
The suggestions cool down as I leave for a spell,
perhaps somehow destined to spend the rest of my career on a singularity.
It helps to have a career to spend, like currency, like infelicity on a summer's day
spread wide and forthwith, the condemnation of the symbol in favor
only to serve what was widely denounced as the taste of spare ribs and condescension.
9.
The pail wet leaves
in the morning when I was out
watering things for the
Pritchard 91
cocotte I never loved enough
to very beautifully lay beside
in the valley of apparitions. There's
no man behind the cotton no
petals for a face unless a school play
no more Brits no more museums.
O Lily you are the valley of
crowded sudden discovery.
10.
We strolled leisurely to the corner of the air, conditioned
as we were to pull from our faces every possible association
to make sure things were simple and interesting and above all
beautiful, for a change. It is! The mail interests me from a purely theoretical perspective;
I want to sleep on the boardwalk, pale wet cocotte beneath the sand
to tell me it was far too soon to go,
you never got to see the show,
the valley lilied and appearing in a time of seeming to have seemed
as cool a compliment as I can offer to the connective tissue.
The discussion revolved around control, an issue
fundamental to the practices of the lyric poets. What is the difference
between the lyric and the image? What is the image between
when I am writing and suddenly a wet black bough
grows out of my forehead? Would my face fit
in a station of the metro? We have reservations for
Wladziu and I, strummingly movement seems through the kitchen
to suggest a gesture of restraint. A straining vortex
strange for all its oranges being wrapped in the dawn.
Pritchard 92
VARIATIONS ON A LETTER POEM BY JAMES SCHUYLER
Dear Panda Bear,
I would love to bare thee! This is a bad way to begin
giving as I do to you my utmost confidences which could become annoying
so might we form them into something
to play with in the streets. This is a kind of secret code. Hello,
I heard a guard say. Kenneth, Janice, Katherine, you are like historical oddities
bluer than my own sweat (Leopardi blushes) and incomparable
when I inform you of your determination as
whosies. That is the technical term we use,
the floating signifier for anything interesting but not quite capable
of explicating its givenness in a catalogue or a museum. I haven't got
what we got when we went sailing. I mean sunburn. We've not
left our power to snap the glass toward the house. Sipping
Seagram's ginger ale I wonder about acquiring a suit
—fragrant and may I tell you how I love your poems? If not
what is blinding and beautiful how can we proceed? With a beam of
unexpected springlikeness, July! Not mine to handle
the weekend marches on our position
with a shove toward context screaming like aluminum. Without I
no more horizons. Can we be austere as is
asked of us or should we begin a more furious smoky excursion to Canada
involving a moustache, of course. Let's leave Picasso
to stand guard and let's take on as you and I a series of ideas. You can wash and then sink
yourself. Let's talk about New York for a while. Grand.
Made of metal and Canadian bacon
the acquaintances we parade to open up a domain of the personal…
Sorry, I was working on my poetry
in the new form that will initiate beautiful prose
about it in the margins and elsewhere. It itself can be
the beautiful prose, as long as you are willing to part with it eventually
not immediately, but in a gesture of confidence
they get aluminum and I will admit you're not mine to handle.
The hell with that. I have been aluminum. You run up some beams and snap
while vending toward sundown. It would be nice to slide through
greetings to Kenneth and Janice, their daughter but this is a letter to you.
Hello. We have to try to avoid the pattern that's been avoided,
the avoidance pattern…these are quotations I am interested in sharing
to show that I remember them exactly correctly. I could behave with greater austerity, would that
appeal to you?
You can scream like power breaks.
Long fascinated by majusculation, I dispose of it to imitate "speech"
that is written. What if when I speak I capitalize the first letter of each line? It's plausible.
Have I not been sunburned even in a suit? I think I'm decomposing
Pritchard 93
I can't grow a moustache. I grow old instead. Middle youth
a way of perceiving without admitting we won't get to go to all the beauty spots
and this poem will most likely avoid mention of poodles. Have not the guards enough to consider
with the blue guitar
a recent addition? Someone calls me a stud and I laugh.
I haven't actually read Leopardi.
The Canadian peninsula, lovely for a soiree or holiday
we have got to see the sun go down and make a set of lovely new horizons
we can imitate. The joy of reading in Italy
greatly outweighs the desire to wash my hair. It's unevenly distributed:
the telephone is difficult to hear over the sparkle of months.
The guard should do something about that cast. A catalogue
flattened with the confidence to tell you I love you. I love you!
Grand. My weakened heaven
New York? Or haven?
Beauty is difficult
to blind. Might as well write you. Hello. Toward the House of Seagram we imagine
slowly, with a difficult shuffle in a pool of ideal sweaters.
I got you this topaz. I have enclosed it
to help you quit smoking. We are spanning the gap of
confidence and austerity with aluminum beams in our teeth. We just like it.
My room smells like baby powder. I guess poets have
bluer concerns than the iris of downplayed experience. Did you know there are
aluminum people? Not just buildings, not just paintings,
personalities built molten can scream
except now; the selection process begins!
Some intimations are salacious and warrant hiding
in a closet or an office building
for the sake of all those involved who it would offend to hear me say
your summer clothes emaciate me. We are continually
gutted by desire and snapped by sundown. The western path is
vertical. How's that for an opposition? Power breaks
down as we approach the city from the left. Austere and smoking
in the parking lot I hope not to distress you. I hear from the poets by way of the guards.
Kenneth has been ambling all this time
faster than I can imagine walking when the connectives I use
in fact help me stay on top of things. A vagary! There must be
another subject than the love I bear thee
for a poem in the shape of a personal document. Having disavowed poodles
I can't imagine where to go next for a fragrant, seductive whosie.
I write a line about time. Soon I have a whole page
dedicated to time and now I'm late for lunch, completely skipped breakfast, when to do the
laundry?
Even as you and I we are fraught with such questions, parading as we do through personalities.
Pritchard 94
I wanted to suspend time by opening
a space. Does time stretch across an abyss
of anecdotal appropriation, or does this
simply scream at me from a position of power
"wash the brakes!" (I misheard)
(I think I was reading Berryman at the time, whose sonnets you'd love)
so I'm standing in a sink with aluminum to catalogue
the blindingly glassed surfaces across which I slide
toward limitless contradiction in the Canadian fog.
The downed sun only softens the smoke. It's wide
apropos of what? There are specific limits to extension
wrapped mostly up in having a drink. Far from it! What they got
we haven't got. What they haven't
we haven, as the saying goes. I used a penknife on the
envelope and ruined the last letter, could you send it again?
I'm sweating in a pool of my own type.
Suddenly I imagine a darker sort of monthly correspondence
lining up as it does with a wispy whosie
the kind you can't tell anyone about because we just like it.
Beer was involved. I concede to sitting around concocting things
to debate the relative simplicity of personalization. I am an initiate
when it comes to form. I have tried to write paradise
it ended up as penaolire. I feel vulnerable opening up to you
as I am wont to do when trying to make space. Do I clear off my desk?
I should wear a blue suit and sunbeams. Some burn themselves.
As Tanqueray I come tumbling down the side of
topaz to insist on reframing the relationship between poetry and prose.
Is it a question of reading or one of typeface? An
answer would be much desired in your subsequent communiqués.
I heard the people walk horizontally; I cried
except once, I was attending a parade and couldn't possibly have been emotional
"you were there I was here you were here I was there where are you I miss you"
"when you went I stayed and then I went and we were both lost and then I died"
(O'Hara)
just to give you a sense of how I have been feeling.
Which is the point of poems anyway: to vividly depict
with symbolic truth exactly what goes through my head when I am thinking of a person
who I almost kissed and want to
but to never actually tell you these things. Or anyone. I can tell you,
you and you are different, the grand you of allegorical verity
never the same as the you to whom this letter is addressed. Thank you
for difference. At this point I feel like screaming; how does one
denote that in a letter? I hope you will still think of me
though I cannot grow a moustache. As I've said, it's crippled me in more ways than one
might expect an earnest sentiment to do. Oddly
Pritchard 95
enough, I have yet to mention the connection between Picasso
and the museum. I heard a guard say the poets were just sweating
in the antechambers. In one sense, this is correct, as I often
find myself completely overdressed with too many layers and
then my shirt is ruined, I can't take off the sweater or everyone will
know I am secretly a pool of power
not cast of Canadian metal as I insisted I was to weaken those
who might oppose the sink where I slipped into prose.
I remember you told me I was bad at love
and I unpacked this symbolic statement as a gesture walking for an hour in the snow.
It's too hot. I wonder if the weather holds the key
to intimacy. Before, when it was warm, I was able to wrap myself
in a nice shawl and just go for a walk somewhere without worrying about the vast
inequities of our topaz dispositions. Made of metal and
brown in hue, this is the key to the forging of relations. Not so fast! Hello.
Kenneth is grand, as I have said
to many times before pushing them onto the bridge
not there. Sparkle, or try to, the glass partitions my only hope of seeing.
(The beams snapped like Yeats and I was thinking of you)
(Dante or no Dante, we'd still have love poems)
(Kenneth Koch is talking to conjunctions)
(Even Allen Ginsberg has personal affiliations which he exploits in verse)
(Ezra Pound was the original Personist)
("The Red Wheelbarrow" has nothing to do with Williams' communist leanings)
(We consider form as divagating from Stein and Bishop)
(I would love to have a black belt in Lyn Hejinian)
(Marianne Moore at the summit of conceivable interest)
(these whosies are aluminum placeholders, like William Stafford)
(those who learn by doing have never encountered John Ashbery)
(James Tate on the subject of mourning: "platypus")
(Shall we psychoanalyze Arthur Rimbaud?)
(May I be fragrant enough to please you as a poem by Arnold?)
Thunderbird confidences form hello like grand.
Leopardi, sweat beautiful people.
Weekend sink got aluminum.
Snap place sundown except smoky parade. MoMA, say.
Dear letters so only hello power.
It's I'm and thanks who sunburns yourself.
We, you, the, and going the as while that.
In case you needed further demonstration of the powers of the sonnet
and furthermore the powers of the compact lyric poem.
Pritchard 96
I am including a large body of my own work in this epistle
which should suggest to you that I am extremely interested not
only in your opinions but in the love I bear thee, etc. etc. etc.
I have gone to great pains not to switch to the ampersand
for you. For you I become fragrant as a dead poet without a
moustache. I am crossing the line between the personal and
the sentimental with an abandon not seen since the confident
weekends spent lounging together in blind and beautiful new
Yorkshire terriers' arms. Do dogs have suits? I have been some
burned topaz wash for too long, hence the formal whosies that I use
to carry me along. I should have remained austere
at all times to bring a haven of grand poesy to the table, but for the time
being so finicky I must content myself with aluminum
letters. This is confidential, of course. I am only writing this poem
because I know no one will read it but you
perhaps Picasso if you show it to him the next time you are out for
drinks or just snapping some glass, whatever that means. I heard
a guard say something about museums as he stroked his beard
and watched you in a way that I can only describe as envy welling
from the recesses of my prose. A horizontal sundown sweats
a lot by now and vaguely we hear a torn-down beauty is the most
delicious sort to have with lunch. I am running
around I guess it's part of the poetic "movement" in
whose thrall I am currently ensconced. Hello,
I love you. Won't you tell me your name? I love you
but I don't know how to stop writing…I heard Seagram
say it was grand of us to stand so close to him in the summer,
perhaps it was a matter of distance or persuasion. G'bye.
Pritchard 97
III. APPENDIX: SOURCE POEMS
Presented in the same order as the preceding variations, for ease of reference.
Pritchard 98
METAPHOR OF THE MORNING
by Ron Padgett
The morning is as clean and bright
as a freshly shaved cheek splashed with water
and rubbed with a new white towel.
Ah, the joys of metaphor!
But what if the morning were as dirty as
an old hag with a wen for a head
that is licking its chops and drooling on you?
Ah, the joys of metaphor!
But what if a blank metaphor descended from the sky
and landed lightly in your living room,
a cloudy, shifting swirl of gray tones and smoke?
It would be a Greek god! It would scare you!
*
ODE TO THE WEST WIND
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
II
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Pritchard 99
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
Pritchard 100
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
*
TEA AT THE PALAZ OF HOON
by Wallace Stevens
Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
Pritchard 101
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
*
THE SNOW MAN
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
*
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN
by John Keats
1
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities, or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggles to escape?
Pritchard 102
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
2
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
3
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
4
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
5
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Pritchard 103
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
*
LETTER TO A LOVER
by Matthew Zapruder
Today I am going to pick you up at the beige airport.
My heart feels like a field of calves in the sun.
My heart is wired directly to the power source of mediocre songs.
I am trying to catch a ray of sunshine in my mouth.
I look forward to showing you my new furniture.
I look forward to the telephone ringing, it is not you,
you are in the kitchen trying to figure out the coffeemaker,
you are pouring out the contents of your backpack.
I wonder if you now have golden fur?
I wonder if your arsenal of kind remarks is empty?
I remember when I met you you were wearing a grey dress,
that was also blue, not unlike the water plus the sky.
They say it's difficult to put a leash on a hummingbird.
So let us be no longer the actuary of each other!
Let us bow no longer our heads to the tyranny of numbers!
Hurry off the plane, with your rhinestone covered bag
full of magazines that check up on the downfall of the stars.
I will be waiting for you at the bottom of the moving stairs.
*
A SUPERMARKET IN CALIFORNIA
by Allen Ginsberg
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
Pritchard 104
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close
in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
*
DOVER BEACH
by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
Pritchard 105
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
*
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
by T. S. Eliot
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Pritchard 106
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
Pritchard 107
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.....
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
.....
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep… tired… or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
Pritchard 108
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
.....
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Pritchard 109
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
*
TO HIS COY MISTRESS
by Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on they forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
Pritchard 110
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turned to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
*
WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN'D ASTRONOMER
by Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I was sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the
lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
*
Some Poems by Ezra Pound
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
petals on a wet, black bough.
Pritchard 111
ALBA
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
PAGANI'S, NOVEMBER 8
Suddenly discovering in the eyes of the very beautiful
Normande cocotte
The eyes of the very learned British Museum assistant.
*
LETTER POEM TO KENNETH KOCH
by James Schuyler
Dear Thunderbird,
Letters should be confidential but I've no confidences
so might as well write you a poem in the new form
only the initiate can tell from prose. Hello.
Hello Kenneth. Hello Janice. Hello Katherine. So you can scream like
power brakes. I hear from the Moustache by way of Jane. Grand.
It's "fragrant May" (Leopardi)
(I'm typing in a pool of my own sweat)
and New York is blindingly beautiful
thanks to the aluminum people
who are not cast of Canadian metal—they have weekend
sunburns and suits bluer than heaven you can wash in the sink
yourself, even as you and I. What they got
we haven't got is a lot of aluminum.
You run up some beams and snap
the aluminum whosies into place
and glass—sparkle! toward sundown
going east you have to walk horizontal. Except
the House of Seagram, austere and smoky
as a molten topaz. And now for personalities on parade,
while vending Picasso catalogues at MoMA
—that haven of have-not poets, I heard a guard say…