On "Take This Longing".

“TAKE THIS LONGING FROM MY TONGUE”

“One of the most beautiful songs in the cosmos is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Take This Longing,’” I announced to the teens this morning, who are still very much in the ‘So Long, Marianne’ trance of their Cohen journey.

Radu watched from a boneless spot on the couch, his eyes absorbing the interplanetary sadness as usual.

“Why is it beautiful?” asked an insouciant teen.

And how else to answer except by noting the perfection of repetition with slight variation, as in:

Oh, take this longing from my tongue
Whatever useless things these hands have done

which returns to the room of longing:

Just take this longing from my tongue
All the lonely things my hands have done

And then there is the shape of the image, the shaping it accomplishes in what is perhaps one of my favorite song lyrics, namely:

Hungry as an archway
Through which the troops have passed
I stand in ruins behind you
With your winter clothes, your broken sandal straps

Since anyone who has walked her sandals to shreds recognizes the longing for them, even as some fellow recalls that moment in which he misses her, what the image evokes is the sadness of losing those sandals, so we can be in two minds at once: his and hers. Both longing for something ruined.

And there is also the distinct pleasure of misapprehended lyrics. For years, I thought the lyric went as follows:

untie for me your high blue gown
like you would do
for one that you loved

Today, when rationalizing my love for this song to the teens, I consulted the lyrics and found “Untie for me your hired blue gown / Like you would do for one that you love.” I missed the kind of dress (in my mind, it was an empire-waisted blue dress, hence the ‘high’) as well as the tense (I took the love as past, Cohen makes it present).

“NOT YET”

In my stacks this past week, I must mention Jeff Allesandrelli’s NOT YET: A Novel About Sex and Shyness (Future Tense Books, 2025), which I devoured in an afternoon, unable to walk away from the text that sent me back to my notes on Cesar Pavese’s heartbreaking notebooks, as well as Ovid, Kierkegaard, Kafka, the usual kindreds. . .

Allesandrelli quotes from The Unquiet Grave (1944), which British literary critic Cyril Connolly wrote under the pen name “Palinarus,” thus immediately eliciting one of my secret meridians. Noting that “a puritan is incomplete because he excludes that half of himself of which he is afraid, and so the deeper he imprisons himself in his fastidiousness,” Connolly adds to the provocation by asking:

“Is it possible to love any human being without being torn limb from limb?” No one was ever made wretched in a brothel; there need be nothing angst-forming about the sexual act. Yet a face seen in the tube can destroy our peace for the rest of the day, and once a mutual attraction develops it is too late; for when sexual emotion increases to passion, then something starts growing which possesses a life of its own and which, easily though it can be destroyed by ignorance and neglect, will die in agony and go on dying after it is dead."

“A face seen in the tube. . .” How many poems and stories begin as a result of just that?

One more quote from A’s book.

“The tragedy of well-meaning people is the tragedy of a little man gathering all the blue he can find by the light of dawn, and then, at dusk, groping about in his collection afraid off picking up red, which may, in any case, turn out to be yellow. Conscience is nothing more than a flair, trying to recognize a color by the feel of it.”

— Cesare Pavese, diary entry for 30th December, 1937

“SKIN WITH . . .”

Jasper Johns, Skin with O'Hara Poem, 1965

And finally, four stunning lines from a poem by Antonella Anedda titled “[Pindar says the poet must guard the apples of the Muses],” as translated by Patrizio Ceccagnoli and Susan Stewart and published in The Paris Review at some point that was not recent:

Clearly, the dragon is irrelevant,
if anything, we need a hen,
the creature that hatches the egg of verses:
white for the void, yellow for the words.

Burning lines.

It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to no longer be obsessed by it.

— Cesar Pavese, 16 October 1938

1

I am sitting on a street curb in New Orleans, drinking coffee and preparing for a panel discussion where my peers will say astonishing, unforgettable things. There is a fake plastic sunflower near my left foot, small enough to have fallen off a hat or a birthday cake. 

The book is open . . .

Artist Manon Bellet selects the most reactive papers for her materials: their volatility is what ensures that they are vulnerable, malleable, capable of expressing relationality.

“There is a direct link to writing, to printed matter, while mere contact with heat blackens the rolls – word monochromes; there is no ink, but the paper is blackened all the same,” Manon Bellet said in an interview. “What I am interested in here is this overturning of meaning, a re-enchantment of the world that is possible and can be built up through serendipitous effects.”

Whether it be paper curling up or slowly disintegrating upon contact with fire, or just a draught causing the translucent pages of a wordless book to quiver under a lamp, there is one thing common to all of Manon Bellet’s work: she keeps the artist’s gesture in the background,” wrote Julie Enkell Julliard, likening Bellet’s work to what Marcel Duchamp called the “infrathin . . . the artistic cultivation of the intangible and invisible to ‘produce intensities through subtractions’.”  


2

William Blake drew “Head of a Damned Soul” 1789 as an illustration for Dante's Inferno. Although based on a drawing by Henry Fuseli, Blake's focus is on a single detail of Fuseli's larger drawing, namely, the agonized face of the damned soul.

There is no color in Blake’s work, and yet there is a sense of fire around the man's head, where fire, itself, also evokes falling. These two ways of death— fire and falling— are not directly conceivable as connected, apart from the horror they inspire, the material of nightmares.

I find myself thinking about burning lines, and what happens when we let a line scorch a bit along the edges.


3

In New Orleans, I am transfixed by Bellet’s cyanotype series, Sous sur face (2012-2013). Using transparent plastic bags, she transposed the ordinary into the ethereal. Plastic bags are cheap, gratuitous, not built to last but created for disposability: their texture is almost tissue-thin and light enough to be carried into tree limbs by wind. They are the one-night-stands of bag-relationality.

Developed in the 1840’s, cyanotype is a printing process that relies on exposure to sunlight to ‘develop’ the image. First, paper is coated in a light-sensitive solution (often Prussian blue) and allowed to dry in darkness. Then, the object that the artist wants to “print” or reproduce is laid atop the paper, which is then exposed to sunlight. The sunlight creates an imprint on the paper which appears as a pale shadow or silhouette on the Prussian blue surface of the paper. 

Bellet’s images in Sous sur face are so soft and sheer that one can mistake them for dropped lingerie. In her hands, the synthetic plastic takes an organic form that is malleable, tender, touched by light, in her own words, “less a thing than the trace of a movement.”

I watch the pages flutter in the wind.

Later, I discover a comment by Bellet on her video work, Vestige. A comment about paper and wind. “There is a slight breeze to generate the movement of the pages, and their transparent quality is enough to bring out the geometrical shapes,” Bellet said, “but the book is not a narrative; we gaze at the void and become aware of how words wear out and time passes... It is as if the forms emerging from haphazard folding were there to structure our imaginations and that of the emptiness of the screen.”

Haphazard folding . . . why have I never stared at this word, “haphazard", until now? The happenstance of hazard. The just-so-happens hazard. But in French, “hasarde” is closer to something like surrealism’s ‘chance’ or happenstance.

4

Then I watch the light move across the plastic lingerie.

Sunlight is fleeting, always carved in relation to time. (It flees duration and fleeces instants.)

Sunlight speaks to the physical object by building a shadow around it.

“Allegories are in the realm of thought what ruins are in the realm of things.”

— Walter Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” Origin of the German Trauerspiel

“Surrealism toppled the images of antiquity from their Platonic heaven. In Max Ernst's work they roam about like phantoms among the late 19th century middle class, for which art, neutralized in the form of a cultural heritage, had in fact become a ghost.”

– Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt

The wisps, the loose parts of my hair–the rifts I don't see until I snap the photo.

The unpredictable and unplanned and ungroomed and me reaching towards the composition. 

We are always reading the walls . . . and trying to make sense of the room we are in.

Even when the walls are absent, we know they exist, and we live in relation to that knowledge. There will be walls. And boxes. And rooms. And expectations.

But the book is open . . . the line races the fire to its conclusion.

Michael Hardt, ceremonials, procedurals.

Magician of insecurity, the poet has nothing but adopted satisfactions. Ash always unfinished.

— Rene Char

There’s a passage in Michael Hardt’s Documenta No. 68, “The Procedures of Love,” that has stayed in my mind recently for the way he expounds the “mechanical.” Italics are mine:

To love someone, then, has a kind of mechanical character, in that your multiplicities and my multiplicities are able to form compositions that are always both below and above the level of the individual: the fragile curves of your lips with the calluses of my hands, the sea scents of your breath with the earth tones of my skin, your airy dreams of nomadic flight and my terrestrial domestic habits. Similarity is not the basis of agreement here, but neither are opposites a principle of attraction. We can never know in advance what multiplicities will agree and together form beautiful, lasting relationships. The procedure of love is to explore and experiment with possible compositions among the multiplicities in each of us.”

This procedural description of love builds upon the writing of Jean Genet, particularly the various ceremonial structures in his writings where relationships are explored and developed.

“In a poem, ordinary words are shifted around in such a way that their usual meaning is enriched by another: the poetic import,” Genet wrote The Miracle of the Rose. “Each of the things, each of the objects that recur to my mind composed a poem.” And the poem takes it meanings from the place where it is enacted, as Genet notes, in the prison “at Mettray, each object was a sign that meant grief.”

Hardt draws directly on Genet’s love “ceremonials” as a possibility for creating livable political institutions bound in —and by— love. So “love is a kind of ritual by which we continually return to those people and things with whom our multiplicities create expansive relations,” he writes:  

But this return is not mere repetition. Think of the way we have sex with a familiar lover: I touch you there, then you touch me here, then we do this, and so on until we are done. It is a ritual, a series of habits, but if it were mere repetition the magic would fail. Each return, each encounter, in a ceremonial carries with it the power and mystery of the event. That’s what makes it live. Love conceived of as a ceremonial is thus an institution in the sense that it allows you to return to, prolong, and link together in sequence the encounters you desire.

Or, to quote Genet again: “I refer everything to my system, in which things have an internal signification, and even when I read a novel, the facts without being distorted, lose the meaning which has been given them by the author and which they have for you, and take on another so as to enter smoothly the otherworldly universe in which I live.”

In a sense, Hardt imagines the part Hegel and Marx couldn't (or didn’t) amply theorize, namely, the relationality of the event. In this sense, the unlivability of revolutionary events shouldn't “lead us to close the revolutionary process in the fixed structures of a constituted power, even one aimed at providing 'public happiness' as Condorcet and his revolutionary comrades intended.” Hardt concludes that “love compositions and love ceremonials” are strategies for finding love and making it political and livable.

On his deathbed, he said of a vase of flowers that they were like him: simultaneously alive and dead.

— Guy Davenport on Franz Kafka

Eros and pop culture: the borderlines.

“…as happened for me with Vinteuil’s sonata—it’s the least remarkable parts we notice first. […] Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not start out by giving us the best they have.”

— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom (tr. Charlotte Mandell)

for Jael, who asked me a question about music, poetry, and eros that I could not answer without sprawling a bit

THE “BEST OF ME” . . .

At the beginning of “Borderline,” Madonna is hanging out, loitering on the street with some guys while the instrumental intro shapes the beat. Then, randomly, she begins dancing with one of them. From 0:14 to 0:20, we watch this awkward dance. Everything that follows begins in that four-second flirtation with the possibility of tandem motion.

To break down those four seconds: the He and the She move around each other, almost as if they are sniffing each other out, introducing their rhythms … And yes, it is cheesy. It is tacky as hell, both visually and figuratively, this depiction of two strangers trying to match each other’s movements, to meet in that motion.

Despite the short duration, something could begin in this asynchronous encounter, and the could appears in this fragmentation and distance. The movements of an Other that provides the frame for what is to come.

The vocals begin by articulating a problem: Something in the way you love me won't let me be. The first word, “something,” suggests that part of the problem is finding words for the thing. The limits of language are given to us at the outset. And then there is also that side-by-side rhyme of “me” and “be,” a positioning that calls to mind the abandoned dance steps. I find my ear drawn to the simplicity of the pronouns, where an intonation that stresses the me, the you, and the be draw closer to the imagining of a we.

I don't want to be your prisoner
So baby, won't you set me free?

Notice how the statement closes in another the monosyllabic, side-by-side rhyme with “set me free” (as with earlier “let me be”)? I think the rhyme works against the implications of being freed by love, because, of course, the prison is the desire itself. The prison is the prism of possibility, which is why the next two lines work magic:

Stop playing with my heart
Finish what you start

Heart/start: an end-rhyme. The side-by-side rhymes abandoned for the material. And one can already sense the disaster, where to “stop playing” is to abandon the game, and to “finish,” here, would indicate an end to exactly what Madonna (or the speaker) is pursuing. The whole song is filled with lyrics that play on the game itself, asking for an end to the game while begging the game to continue:

Baby, let it show
Honey, don't you fool around 

Who is the “fool” in this fooling-around? How to evade the circle evoked by this word, “around,” in the idiomatic context where fooling-around also insinuates itself back into that opening dance and its gyrations? 

The fool “hooks up with” the foolishness of those four seconds, in figuration.

Madonna is building on the romantic trope that stages desire as a crossing of class and social boundaries. This, too, is at play in the song. And the video depicts it by alternating back and forth between scenes with the wealthy, glamorous photographer (in black and white) and the street-dancing guy (in color). Elegance vs. messiness. Artifice vs. authenticity. Status vs. friskiness. Of course none of these dichotomies are stable, and part of the fun lies in comparing the varying sort of artifice in the performance of street-guy and fancy-man.

Performing one’s self vs. being one’s self: another romantic opposition that is (too) easily resolved in the juxtaposition of images. While her relationship with the photographer takes place within rooms, where the pleasure involves making an art of the bounded space.

The reasonable speaker intervenes:

Just try to understand
I’ve given all I can
'Cause you got the best of me.

That third is brilliant in its multiple readings. “You got the best of me,” as in, you won, you beat me at the game, and maybe one only realizes the game is being played when faced with having lost it. Maybe that’s part of this strange synergy. 

“You got the best of me,” as in, I gave you the best part of myself, or you managed to get it somehow, and so this dance is one that feels like a losing of one’s best self, a shadow or a possibility.

“You got the best of me,” as in, now I am forced to reconcile the boundaries of my selfhood, that line “of me” which wants to be dissolved in the “You.” But—

Something in your eyes is making such a fool of me.

Clearly her sense of me is at risk in this encounter where the gaze of the other becomes a mirror. And so, to continue with this stanza:

When you hold me in your arms
You love me 'til I just can't see

— and seeing allows me to be rather be defined by the act of seeing the “self” in that bounded pronoun, me. That is the erotic pact: to be simultaneously present and absent, freed from subjectivity and convention, a freedom that becomes its own chain. 

In the stills above, fancy-man puts a hat on her; she rips it off and rejects it. Then she goes to look for street-guy and tries to get his attention. He rejects her for a different game, namely, pool. When she stands in the doorway as he lines up a shot, he looks up at her and then back at the pool table.

Nevertheless, all of this begins with (and returns to) those brief gyrations at the beginning, in that encounter with strangeness that elicits interest. Everything revolves around the glitches and barriers. Ecstasy unbounds us. This is how eros moves, on the page, in the room, on the street corner, in the meadow, anywhere humans wander or breath.

“Borderline” ends with that pressure against the “me,” in that repetition — Keep pushing me, Keep pushing me, Keep pushing my love. And then, because Madonna wants to show she can play the game, she ends with that C’mon baby.


TO “GET INTO” . . .

Madonna also mobilizes this relationship between rhythm, embodiment, and ecstasy in “Get Into the Groove.”

The structure is similar. Ignoring the plot of the film and focusing on the images in the video, the romantic dichotomy of wild boy vs. groomed boy, with all the usual connotations, appears. As in “Borderline,” it’s her move: she dares the man to meet her in the might be, in that unknown possibility.

If we read the video without drawing on the plot of Desperately Seeking Susan, then we have a series of images, of stills, if you will:

The playing cards indicate that the speaker knows she is playing a game, and it may be a new game, or a variation on an old game. The photo in her hand brings an Other to the table, something particular to this game and its performance. “Desperately Seeking Susan": an ad which she takes as an opportunity. Perhaps she’s trying to meet a different possible self in the act of imitation—which we do in poetry, when we write poems “after” a writer or a different poem that moved us. Although Madonna’s persona is clearly trying to game a pre-existing situation, the fact of the con doesn’t prevent the con from escaping her plans.

Dance, or dancing, feels like a labyrinth in this song. I could over-read it for hours.

Scenes are ruptured by flashes that return us to the dance floor, repeatedly, as if something is being resolved or worked out in that mass of bodies beneath the red lights. There are glances, rejections, rapprochements, dalliances, a constant sense of flux, a grinding sculpture of silhouettes that cannot settle definitively.

And you can dance (beat) For inspiration (breath) Come on (beat) I’m waiting (breath).

So, there is movement within and between sound, as guarded by the beat, or embodied by breath, but there is also a structure of repetition central to the pop song itself. Since several verses are repeated, I won’t talk about a refrain but focus on the pattern of repetitions, which is as follows:

Intro, as quoted in the four phrases above, followed by 12 verses arranged in the following pattern:

A / B / C / D / C / A / E / A / C / E / E variation / A

This command to get in the groove, which occurs in Verse A, names dance as the means of “getting to” a relational knowledge or experience. And there is the gauntlet, scaffolded as an invitation to meet her in the beat:

Step to the beat
Boy what will it be

She enjoins him to “step to” it; to risk entering the music:

Music can be such a revelation
Dancing around you feel the sweet sensation

Notice that word “around” again? Round and round we go, trying to find the ‘groove.” Lyric-wise, we’ve moved from “inspiration” to “revelation,” but what these terms share is a religious or spiritual association. Both words refer to acts that ordinarily relegated to religious epiphany, or the ecstasy of the saints. Using this sacred language immediately introduces the possibility of profanation.

Step to it, see what happens: a rhyming word hovers in the background. Call it “temptation”:

We might be lovers if the rhythm’s right
I hope this feeling never ends tonight

The end-rhymes continue building momentum forward, creating musicality, linking sound to sound in those long vowels.

The refrain turns again to the particular knowledge mentioned at the beginning of the song, that “getting to” know (Gonna get to know you in a special way) that is unique, set apart from the ordinary (This doesn't happen to me every day), as the end-rhymes propel us forward, creating order within the saying—-

Don't try to hide it love wears no disguise
I see the fire burning in your eyes

— but end-rhymes also provide a space for slippage, where words lose meaning and become closer to sheer sound. And humans respond to both: the meaning and the sound. Our ears and our minds process these stimuli at the same time.

While screenshotting, I noticed the slightly Lynchian flavor that lingers on the cusp of materiality, in that space between fade-ins and fade-outs, when things are shifting from one frame to another. Maybe there is a way in which this very slippage, this motion between, maps onto Madonna’s character, who shifts between roles and selves as smoothly as she does hair colors.

In these multiple dances with an Other, it is her own strangeness that is being courted or played upon. Here, recognition occurs in the dance, or the matching of the beat: what she recognizes in the Other is a possible self, a dance, a trick, a con, an opportunity. But there is another kind of recognition that meanders through this video, and I turn to it now.


TO “MOVE IN TIME” . . .

It is true that skipped over the recognitions of the self-similar in this video. And I’d like to try and think about this type of recognition without abandoning the music where the lyrics left off. Maybe both can be laid side by side? Hell, it’s worth a try.

Leaving the movie plot aside, looking only the images in the video, there is a fellow who returns without introduction. Madonna’s character is always delighted to see him: she abandons her roles and performances in his presence. This fellow is the man who meets her where she is, so to speak, in her aloneness. Our knowledge of him is limited to the relief (or maybe happiness) on her face when she sees him.

In my evasions of the self-similar counterpart, I also neglected to mention Verse E, which occurs twice, and also happens to be the only verse that gets repeated in a variation.

One might even venture to say that the unmentioned Verse E sits at the edge of the song’s dissolution, which is preceded by the turn of that headlong repetition loosely named as an “E variation.”

I give you Verse E:

Live out your fantasy here with me
Just let the music set you free
Touch my body, and move in time
Now I know you're mine

The stakes are explicit, despite their uncertainty: live in the now, in this here, with me, in this fantasy where the music gives us a moment to imagine each other. Touch my body—- and move in time — where time is both the motion in tandem as well as the temporality of Now. Here. This. A mutual recognition accompanied by knowledge: you are mine for the duration, where “mine” could mean anything. Or nothing.

Yet there is a difference in this type of recognition between strangers, a recognition that lacks the temporality claimed by self-similar recognitions. The repetition is that of the game, itself, not the actual selves implicated in desiring each other.

I don’t know if that means the games are different, or self-similar eros occurs without the scaffolding of a game. Games have rules, after all, and we play them to learn the rules or test ourselves within them.

But what do we know about love and eros? Recognition, rhythm, repetition: a recipe.

I leave you with the “E variation,” that shimmering texture of repetition that alters the valence of what is repeated*:

Now I know you're mine,
now I know you're mine
Now I know you're mine,
now I know you're mine

* Whether in sonnet form or in scenario, variations, by nature, are endless.

"The disordered and passionate application" of the non sequitur image.

A handful of sights and sounds during my five nights in NYC, in no particular order, sans any revelation apart from the joy of hearing other poets and admiring their work.

“Like diamond rain”

alive this springtime
is the birdsong
that like a sweeping mesh has captured me
like diamond rain I can’t
hear it enough said the tulip

— Alicia Ostriker, “Song” (like my daimon, rain)

“The vice known as Surrealism consists of the disordered and passionate application of the stupefying image.” (Louis Aragon, Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism)

Savored . . . Cadence. Noona Noodles. Danubias. Çka ka Qëllue. Bowery Poetry.


“The sung-so”

“What is a poem but the management of silence and babble?” asks Dean Young.

[Later, Young says that if the tragedy of every poem is that nothing changes or is healed, the hope is that “being finds its shape in the sung-so.”]

So I sent her back an empty box
A big mistake, sent back an empty box

— Morphine

“The absence of a thing is not merely that, it is not simply a partial lack, it is a disruption of everything else, it is a new state which one cannot foresee in the old.” (Marcel Proust)

Half in the shadows, half in the husky moonlight
And half insane just a sound

— Morphine


“The Great Game”

“It is not to belittle Surrealist activity — as it has unfolded from 1924 to the present day — to consider it as a game, in fact as The Great Game, whose prizes in the eyes of those who played and lived it, can be calculated in promises of freedom, love, revolution, and in anything else that intransigent desire can aspire to.” (Phillipe Audouin)

His body is a golden string / That your body is hanging from (Leonard Cohen, “The Master Song”)

“Everything is covered in blood related to sound” (Pascal Quignard)

Pascal Quignard organized the International Festival of Baroque Opera and Theatre at Versailles in the early 1990s. However, in 1994, Quignard suddenly renounced all his musical activities. No more music, he declared. He was finished. What followed was the publication of a book, The Hatred of Music, on the power of music and what history reveals about the dangers it poses. These ten treatises about the danger in listening aim “to convey to what point music can become an object of hatred to someone who once adored it beyond measure.”

Quignard's beef is actually with the omnipresence of sound, a sonic super-profusion that has metastasized into a force of death more than of life. “Rhythm holds man and attaches him like a skin on a drum,” he wrote. Q mines a pet peeve of Glenn Gould’s when he concludes that “concert halls are inveterate caves whose god is time.” Ultimately, it is an irresistible book about how we hear, and how what we hear can destroy it.


“Individual —- but not personal”

In The Pleasure of the Text, quoting Nietzsche on interpretation as an exercise of the will-to-power, Roland Barthes wrote:

Then perhaps the subject returns, not as illusion, but as fiction. A certain pleasure is derived from a way of imagining oneself as individual, of inventing a final, rarest fiction: the fictive identity. This fiction is no longer the illusion of a unity; on the contrary, it is the theater of society in which we stage our plural: our pleasure is individual—but not personal.

Denis Donoghue’s reply to Barthes has been on my mind lately. Thus do I leave it here, with an acknowledgement that Levinas’ theories have also been complicated by the present:

I wouldn't mind inventing myself in this way, creating a fiction and calling it for the moment me. It may be that we lose very little by thinking of a self in literature as a grammatical subject, textual rather than ontological; though it would seem odd to refer to Leopold Bloom or Falstaff Isabel Archer as grammatical subjects. It would impede conversation if that were the only way we were permitted to speak of them. Besides, as a reader of Levinas, I would feel squeamish about thinking of other people—even imagined people—as fictive or notional: it's a habit I wouldn't like to take up.

Speaking of habits, what follows is a smattering of the books that brought joy to my time in NYC, with links provided . . . in case your stacks are dwindling.

And mean to ask an angel      why we can see

Everything but Earth     from Heaven

But I don’t ask     I don’t think I could stand to not

Be answered     but I don’t think I could stand the answer  

— Shane McCrae, “From Life”

Never RIP, Pinka.

This is merely to acknowledge the spectral presence of our dog, Pinka, whose spirit accompanies us on ghoulish shenanigans every October 31st, and whose life and untimely death are the subject of a poem titled “Two Years After Our Dog, Pinka, Got Hit by a Car on Halloween and Died Before Our Eyes as the Kids Howled in Ghost Costumes on the Front Lawn,” first published in Salamander and now collected in My Heresies.

Even in this photograph, Pinka was protesting the imbecility of the humans who did not take her everywhere with them, who could not, for example, bring her along on errands to the dentist, the county courthouse, the Friends of the Library bookstore, the thrift store, etc. etc. To be loved by Pinka was to be hounded by affection and attention. Even now, I am haunted by her habit of sitting on my feet when I used the restroom. May Pinka’s spectre continue to open the back door of the house at midnight so that she might sneak out and bark at squirrels, as she did tonight, valiantly.

/

An unfortunate case of insomnia.

My flight leaves in 5 hours, which doesn’t explain why I’m awake, obsessing over a missing notebook. More than a decade ago, the Krakow notebook was stolen during a sojourn in New York City. “The memory of that notebook, or what it held, is useless – it serves no purpose – offers no way into life,” a therapy book would warn. “Bury it.”

But there is no way to bury an absent corpse. That is the problem. How can we bury the thing that does not belong to us? 

In Virgil’s Aeneid, while traveling to the underworld to retrieve his father, Aeneas asks Sybil, his guide, what will happen to those whom Charon refuses to carry across the river. Sybil tells him those who are not allowed to pass to the underworld are the "helpless and graveless" souls, marked by the absence of a permanent resting place. Only when their bones are buried, can they be admitted. Otherwise, they will haunt the shore for a century before Charon is allowed to ferry them over.

The memory of my stolen notebook is a zombie that returns to unsettle my nights. There is a shadow of it and everything I write. An abortion metaphor.

Cellos.

Tonight, I sat on the grey sofa with a freshly-shorn Radu and listened to Damien Rice with the teens. During Rice’s more cinematic pieces, the teens kept quiet, listening, toying with Radu’s bone. I let myself drift through the rooms and places in which some of those songs first met me. We all drifted a bit. This tandem drifting continued until the youngest noticed the prevalence of cellos, those angles of bows and elbows bent over the wooden curves. “They sort of just wait and hide inside the song and come out when the music curves,” she said very seriously, “—- when it gets sadder.”

Cellos have an extraordinary capacity to take the violin’s lament and deepen it. I said this (or something similar) to the teen, only to find my own mind turning to something I’d read earlier this week.

It behooves mortals
To speak with restraint of the gods.
If, between day and night,
One time a truth should appear to you,
In a triple metamorphosis transcribe it;
Though always unexpressed, as it is,
O innocent, so it must remain.

—  Friedrich Hölderlin


In this passage (which Maurice Blanchot used as an epigraph to The Work of Fire), Hölderlin seems to suggest that the “always unexpressed” remains “innocent” by virtue of never having existed in the world. Never having been subject to its economies of purity and profanation. And I mention it because I find myself resisting this idea of purity associated with the ideal, the never-incarnate, the utterly absent.

Isn’t poetry borne from courting a loosening of binds and divisions? Doesn’t the poem sit down quietly and pluck the tiny pins from its bun in order to feel the world more closely— in the midst of hair falling, in the mist of that half-finished self where language becomes porous?

The Rilkean in me prefers to be rung by a thing, open to its music.

To be rung by. To be wrung. . . .

The poems opens as would a letter to the “quiet friend” named in the first two words. There, at the beginning, he tells us to “feel” how our breath, our “breathing,” creates space around us. “More space,” he says of that interior motion that resembles silence to those who might share a room with us.

Human breath tends to be muted, heard only in the sharp inhalations and exhalations of fear, panic, or excitement. Most of the time, we breath inconspicuously, inaudibly.

Rilke addresses the reader directly, asking them how it feels to be rung by emotion. “Move back and forth into the change,” he says, “What is it like, such intensity of pain?” What is the shape and the detail of this ringing?

“If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine,” Rilke said. (“I make wine from your tears,” sang INXS.) In the darkness that cannot be bound, “in this uncontainable night,” a night so vast that it cannot be held within a single person, subject, or body. There, where the night is too big to hold:

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

The "crossroads” of our senses call for a certain imaginary that permits recognition. While reviewing stills from a home movie made by my father before he and my mother fled Ceausescu’s Romania, I recognized a pattern. This strange combination of boxes and lines on a blanket covered my mother’s legs in Bran, as she sat beneath a tree, using her foot to move a sleeping baby’s stroller back and forth.

That sleeping baby— clueless of what was to come in the years without parents— was me. When glancing at the black and white image, the mind misses the pattern in the colored blanket that sits on the chair as I type. The mind almost misses this connection at the crossroads of the senses…

Poetry is the bell that wrings us. And this demands nothing less than our complete attention. There is music in the waiting, and music in the despair of finding wounds one cannot suture. It is always too late, somehow. And yet, the cello suite teaches us how to phrase such things, as William Bronk notes in the poem below, where feeling is among the things we might never have dared on our own.

The brunette parts.

In a recent, rather wonderful interview, I was asked about “The Krakow Nude,” a poem in My Heresies . . . a poem about the portrait that used to hang in my DC apartment. Although the “nude” isn’t one I’d share online, the first image from the Krakow photo series is less provocative. It is, for better or worse, a moment in time that shaped other moments in time. But I loved those photos and they partake of an “almost” that animates our political, social, and cultural discourses about what it means to be, and to be free. To quote Joe Henry’s portrait of Richard Pryor in an entirely different context, almost like I was free…

Lights shine above me, they're like your eyes above the street
Lights shine below me, they're like stars beneath my feet
I stood on your shoulders
And I walked on my hands
You watched me while I tried to fall
You can't bear to watch me land

— Joe Henry, “Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation”

I’ll see some of you in New York on Friday, which means the world to me, as I stand in a place I’ve always dreamed of entering— and read poems about the ones I cannot see.

"Form and dream destroyed."

1

The world feels both near and far right now, hatching and unhatchable, cast upon the mercy of the gods we invented to save us. The birdsong and the honeysuckle blooms are both present and absent. This aura of illo tempore glosses familiar things.

Richard Hugo, as shared by Tom Snarsky.

The chalices between the caper and caprice, as described by John Cheever in his journals:

An excerpt from John Cheever’s journals.

2

My Heresies also feels near and far; intimate and yet unapproachable. How eerie to type the words “pre-order” in this discontinuous moment, where I am grateful to be read and yet silenced by dread when facing the poems’ struggle with eschatology and teleology, a struggle that believed itself to rest in the past tense, as if MAGA could not happen again.

Hold my chalice, fellow humans. All the beer in the world won’t save us from being burned by the mirrors of this moment.

One lies on the grass “like a worm,” so to speak, only to find that the ‘kind’ of worm matters. The poem, too, is one kind of a worm that alters the soil it moves through.

Thus do leave my worms in the grass next to Franz’s . . . and study the wind in PJ Harvey’s portrait of Catherine, “Patron saint of nothing” — for we are all fashioned by the mouths and memories and music of others. Blessings and curses from the same stone.

The relationality of American fascism.

Contempt.

Contempt is the primary affect expressed by JD Vance. You can watch it crawl across his face during speeches and recent political profiles. Of all the peacocks in the MAGA pageant, he is the most American monster of them all: a product of multiple, intersecting systems including the military which shape the ‘exemplary’ arc of his life, which amounts to a trauma plot with rural bootstraps. Vance goes to Iraq and then studies law at Yale, where he finds himself among the anointed (a prime recruiting ground for fascism, given the sense of entitlement that is cultivated in students who believe themselves to be “the best and the brightest”). One needn’t cite the Kissinger-complex to note the over-large role that Yale played in justifying and legalizing George W. Bush’s “war on terror.” Like his peers, JD rises to the top and marries Usha, who is arguably smarter than him, and who provides him with access to the immigrant family network that positions him to discount speculations about the racism inherent to his obsession with white supremacy (coded as “western civilization). In the process, Vance also masters the elite social networks which enabled his book to be published.

And yet: JD Vance has been robbed of something.

As he stands before the mic in Germany, his eyes glimmer with resentment and rage. Like most MAGA acolytes, Vance sees himself as the perpetual victim. And, much like the evangelical American Christians raging about the “war on Christmas,” Vance polishes the myth of his own persecution.

I have said this before and I will say it again: Christians have never been persecuted in this god-forsaken country. It is precisely this absence of lived experience with actual persecution that enabled James Dobson to build a financial empire by hawking the brand of American Christians as long-suffering, persecuted victims. I am tired of the lies and fake martyrs. MAGA Christianity can’t even handle an eye-roll— they keep so many guns that toddler-shootings have become a regularity here. Your American Jesus wasn’t crucified yesterday. Your macho god is as fake as the Pimp POTUS’ spray tans.

Evil is ordinary resentment huffing supremacist ideology based on sacrificing a scapegoat. It’s not esoteric. It’s not deep. It’s simple. And when it appears among the truly underprivileged, it tends to be aspirational, the result of identifying with the power of the oppressor. This contempt rooted in a sense of entitlement is always representative of power, of having access to power and expecting that access to reap dividends.

In the past month, I have had almost identical conversations with Birmingham residents who voted for Trump. If it is surprising, it should not be. Essentialism fails every test: this is how Kelly Anne Conway and Lauren Boebert advocate for policies that eviscerate the lives of humans with whom they share a gender. Power is power. Wanting power often aligns us with the oppressor.

Because literature does, in fact, matter, I will note that the Italian writer, Alberto Moravia, quietly brought affect studies to the novel; his subject being the men and women who were seduced by Italian fascist ideology. It’s hard not to ponder the blind loyalty that characterizes MAGA: Trump’s flock will follow him anywhere. Much like Netanyahu’s.

And it strikes me that there are several passages in Moravia’s Contempt that speak to the present for me. Here is one of them:

“Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is a form of vengeance, of blackmail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.”

Netanyahu, Trump, Putin—- and the millions of careerists who desire money, power, and glory so fervently that they have invested in silence to assure the ruling classes of their loyalty.

On that note, David Brooks’ recent (desperate) pronunciations fall flat. Like many neoliberal apparatchiks, Brooks argues from the wrong foundation, even as he advocates for mass demonstrations. Worldviews matter: they are the basis from which we imagine a future. It is too easy for the anointed to forget that the US has never been the land of milk and honey for migrant workers and various immigrants. Patriotism, itself, is an increasingly pernicious mist that attempts to unify an opposition to Trump without upsetting the billionaire class that determines US elections since Citizens United.

I am staring very closing into the mirror of Josip Novakovich’s words in Shopping for a Better Country: “I was taught not to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism; the word patriotism was an attempt to present the same ugly nationalist phenomenon of favoring your country over others; patriotism was a patriarchal swindle that made it easy to recruit soldiers to shed the blood of other peoples.” I am leaving this mirror here for those Americans who like to mutter exceptionalist nonsense like “Yugoslavians have always been at war,” as if those wars were not started by extremist nationalists evoking a battlefield humiliation from centuries before in order to condone genocide, massacre, and a maniacal devotion to vengeance.

Contempt. Watch for it. That’s why your Trumpist friends laugh and cheer as the White House issues its latest vulgarity. They may shrug in your presence but, at home and in their cars, they love it. See? They’re getting their revenge. And there is no deeper story, unfortunately. There is no god, no principle, no depth: just contempt for the designated scapegoat.

Happy Harrowing of Hell to all who celebrate.

"That the drizzle will not dim."


Two things, which may appear to be unrelated— but each has its April, so to speak— the first being Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” a composition that would influence John Cage . . .

1

“Do not forget that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and subject matter of a work. The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflection.”

— Erik Satie

Half a sheet of musical notation scribbled in 1893 by Erik Satie, discovered after his death, would go on to change the course of modern composition. Written above the music, Satie scored the following instructions: “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence and serious immobility.” Satie's Vexations parodied what is known in Wagnerian music as the "unendliche Melodie" (unending melody) with an unnervingly skewered piano line including instructions to be prepared for performance "in the deepest silence." 

The story of origins for this tiny composition is as haunting as the piece itself. 

Continual, unrelieved dissonance: this is what Erik Satie's Vexations brought to the world. First published in 1949, it is his longest composition–and the length is defined by repetition, or by the replaying of one page 840 times, exploring a single three-part diminished chord. Robert Olredge calls it “the first piece to explore the effects of boredom, even of hallucination, both on the performer and on the audience, as well as being the first piece to incorporate a period of silent meditation in its performance indication.”

The first known experiment in organized total chromaticism with no sense of direction and no tonal center, "Vexations" renders its notes completely homeless. There is nowhere to return—there is no center to conclude it. Musicologists suggest that if its theme contained the missing letters AN, then this might also be taken as the first experiment in serialism.

On March 21, 1893, Satie began comprising the nine Danses gothiques in an effort to regain "the greater quiet composure and the powerful tranquility of my soul during their tempestuous affair, which lasted from 14 January until 20 June 1893." What's unique about these dances is how they open into a 10-minute sequence of chords, punctuated by surprising harmonic juxtapositions.

Fast forward to April 2nd, a few weeks later, when Satie gave Suzanne Valadon an Easter gift, a composition for her titled Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour! It bears his hallmark whimsical signature—and a sketch of Valadon on staves—but there is nothing giddy or light in its shadows. The undertones reach for other pieces; it is written with the same mixture of full-strength and watered-down ink as Vexations.

The only element that stays constant is the bass theme—as Robert Oldredge explains, “when the chord sequence is repeated, the upper parts are inverted, and even if the inner part of the first statement remains at the same pitch the second, it now appears to the listener as an upper melody.”  Oldredge again:

"Just as Vexations divides into two strains in which the upper parts are a mirror reflection of each other, so these upper parts also divide into two exactly symmetrical halves in which the same notes and intervals are variously re-notated enharmonically. Mirrors—in music and poetry.

Satie must have written them in the same time, cut from the same durations, since both pieces have the same tempo marking, and Vexations begins with the same chord with which Bonjour Biqui finishes, as if intended to be an extension of the other. These ambiguous diminished chords represent Suzanne, for they also occur as the first six chords of the nine Danses gothiques, which Satie designated clearly as attempts to work through the relationship. 

Bonjour Biqui and Vexations are the only pieces entirely constructed from these chords. This is how we know Vexations also dates from early April 1893. This is how we know Valadon was the vexation. Satie mentioned the “icy loneliness” that descended after his split, and you can hear it in this piece– not as melodrama but in the plodding banality of repetition, where even the jagged steps that make heartbreak feel unique decline into more of the same. A pain is a pain is a pain is a platitude. There is a Kierkegaardian obsessiveness that winds up bound to repetition, and Satie, too, plays it as it lays in what Sam Sweet has called "the avant-garde's original break-up ballad." 

It took decades for musicians to appreciate the anti-art gestures of Satie's vexations with its deliberate induction of boredom, and the way environmental noise became louder or more disruptive as the drone of repetition continued. 


2

If I do live again I would like it to be as a flower—no soul but perfectly beautiful. 

— Oscar Wilde (in his Letters)

I keep returning to Giovanni Sollima’s Il Bell'Antonio, trying to find words for the way Sollima pushes the cello to its limits, beginning with that turn, exactly at 4:36, dissolving, unraveling, crawling along the edge of sonority, it takes my breath away.

But the shift, itself, is indicated by Kathryn Scott a bit earlier, on the piano, at 3:38—- just before Sollima pulls his left hand away from the cello briefly, holding it aloft, elbow curved, before reapproaching his instrument. Returning to it differently. And perhaps it is the nature of that return that also fascinates me. The way he prepares himself for what is to come.

* Tangent or tango: Sollima’s L'invenzione Del Nero opens with a few chords that sound similar to the ones following his “return” in Il Bell'Antonio. Since I am not a musician, I’m interested in how musicologists, musicians, or those who can read Sollima better than myself think or hear in Sollima’s (maybe) repetitions, particularly in pieces like Fandango (after L. Boccherini), and perhaps others in his Caravaggio. Are any chords being used symbolically? Is this conventional for or to him as a composer? Has he expressed distaste or skepticism about symbolic chords in interviews or text? Sincerely, the over-reader.

Blacktops.

(NARRATOR:) At this point mouth exits the circle.

— Tristan Tzara, The Gas Heart

Sometimes you bump into a photo taken by someone else and are stilled by the realization that it is an aubade. An O!-bawd. A shadow of a former self you cannot redeem without destroying —

I refuse to redeem her.

No ghost deserves to be shaped into a developmental arc that explains why the selves we abandoned led to the self we perform, a construction so fragile that it requires countless defensive structures to sustain, protect, and coddle.

Perhaps the idea of ‘self-esteem’ has always tasted a bit silly to me, an unsustainable Americanism that resembles our lifestyles in order to brush away the thought of what Ingeborg Bachmann and Joyelle McSweeney have poemed as our deathstyles.

Aesthetics of closure aside, a part of us dies but it does not disappear, does not vanish beneath the earth but remains and hovers in this insubstantial form that Jacques Derrida dragged into hauntology, and revisited in his elegies as well as his writings on friendship.

Though
I
sang
in
my
chains
like
the
sea

In a 1923 piece titled “Faites les Jeux” (published in Les feuilles libres, no. 32), Tristan Tzara said that he wrote to destroy the feeling that pushed him to write, a sensation that was too personal, too loud, due relentless at a time when he was actively pursuing his longtime dream of abandoning personality, and not existing as a person. This desire to be “apersonal” (as contrasted with the desire to be “a person”) also appears in the poem “Wire Dance March,” as well as early Dada, which hallows Tzara’s decision (ostensibly made by mother) to ensure that he would never fight in a war. Love sends its sons to Switzerland and then expresses surprise when they wind up in Germany. In early Dada, Tzara’s sense of himself as “a deserter” is never mentioned. Only later would the poet explore this particular shade of his absence.

From Tristan Tzara’s “Lost” as translated by Heather Green.

En fin, no fin. Every etcetera includes the look backward, and the looking-back, the creature trapped between her presents and the presence of a future anterior.

Or, to quote The Psychedelic Furs—

When in New Orleans . . .

One leaves NOLA Poetry Festival with love and gratitude for the thriving poetry scenes and groups that co-exist in this city—and the poets who commit themselves to nurturing and sustaining them.

With four hours of sleep to my name, after driving bleary-eyed back to Birmingham with Miriam, I am crawling into bed— but not before blowing my gratitude for the past five days to the hardworking board members of NOLA Poetry Festival, whom Bill Lavender credited with the festival’s continuance.

Starting at the end, namely, the Pool Party for Poets . . .

The moon over Rodrigo’s pool.

Dear Rodrigo, thank you for opening your pool to us every year and caring so deeply about poets and poetry and community. Maybe you will see this. May you won’t. Maybe you will find some time to recover from the chaotic beauty that swarms around poets.

Rodrigo's pool around 6:45 pm.

Talking to Carrie Chappell, Bill Lavender, & Amanda Murphy about NOLA poetry, past and present, was a delight.

As usual, I wish I had more photos, if only because I tend to be best at remembering names when there is an image attached.

Grateful to Patrycja Humienik for the poem that she is— and for taking this photo of me and Carrie Chappell that could be a flashback sequence in the film David Lynch never made about poets at the pool.

And happy birthday to Sam Beckett, who wandered through my mind quite frequently on our mutual birthday.

Of course the best games are the ones that have the capacity to surprise us, and before I bow out to share my black pillow with Radu, I leave a hint of games to come, particularly the surrealist THE GAME OF DEFINITIONS, first announced under the title “The Dialogue” in 1928 (or 1934, depending), as published in La Revolution Surrealiste, prefaced by the following observation:

A question? An answer. A simple process of give and take which implies all the optimism of conversation. The two interlocutors pursue their separate thoughts. The occasional affinity, even if contradictory, is imposed by coincidence. A comforting procedure, in short, since there is nothing better than to ask questions, and to reply to them.

Of stayed executions... and eternity.

Once again, I find myself longing for an anthology of translator’s introductions, a collection that focuses on this incredible literary form that gets sidelined and ignored, despite its eloquence.

Take, for example, the translator's introduction to Antonio di Benedetto's Zama, where Esther Allen gives us the 28-year old Dostoyevsky, standing before the firing squad only to be spared execution at the last minute. “Just as the shots were about to be fired, an aide de-camp arrived at a gallop, bearing a stay of execution from the tsar,” writes Allen, drawing a parallel to Di Benedetto's own experience during Argentina’s Dirty War, where, “for eighteen months . . . he was imprisoned, tortured, and, on four occasions, taken from his cell and placed before a firing squad.” Allen tells us that Di Benedetto didn’t face the executioner until twenty years “after writing Zama... which in its growing and inexorable dread, its sense that the present results not only from the past but also from the future, seems uncannily imbued with what its author would live through twenty years later.”

Time is one of the subjects treated in Zama.

And Time is always a story about death, or our relationship to it as human beings, a species of animal that knows it will die. 

In Zama, the author refuses to locate us within a particular time. This refusal is a power that writers share with the gods and creators of the human condition. Allen’s translation presents a di Benedetto who writes from an imagined future, and creates from the space of the not-yet. She ties up her introduction by quoting Beckett's Molloy, which she describes “as an epigraph to the translation” — a beautiful practice, I think — : “The most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”

According to his biographer, Henri Troyat, “the memory of this false execution remained alive in Dostoyevsky's writing.” A false death here becomes a phantom located inside a life.

Aristodemus told Plato (or Socrates) that Pausanias of Athens’ lover, Agathon, offered him a state in which he could “become one with what will never fade.” The urge for eternity strikes the reader as well as the lover.

“…and so this phrase, which we’d passed over unthinkingly every day and which had held itself in reserve, and which, solely by the power of its beauty, had become invisible and remained unknown, comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave.”

— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom (tr. Charlotte Mandell)

"Short talk on whatever."

Remember that metaphor brings a new thing into being by strapping one known thing to another known thing and watching it move across the room. Poetry asks its readers for a species of double vision, as two things become a third and yet continue to remain themselves.

— Ann Townsend

i

I adore words. I ogle words that strike a sentence like lightning.

Words have hues, shades, timbre, textures – each word carries its connotations and associations like jangling bracelets on a wrist. When we ignore the connotative meaning of a word, the jangling gets left out of the soundscape. To me, every jangle matters; every sound wants to be heard as part of the poem’s music.

Each word also has a unique history. The noun, vegetable, originated in 1582 when an author named J. Hester spoke of "The hidden verdures of sondrie vegetables, animalles, and mineralles." The Oxford English Dictionary gives us thirty-six varying contexts for the word vegetable from 1582 to the present, and each context offers a different shade or hue of meaning. 

My copy of the Scholastic Dictionary of Synonyms, Antonyms, and Homonyms lists the following for abortion:

Poems are made from words, and some words carry that it's difficult to read them, or to make sense of them. “Abortion” is one of those words: it means so many different things that aren't articulated or described in conversation. In many ways, “abortion” gravitates towards meaningless; the abstraction overwhelms its visceral, embodied reality.

I want the forbidden, unspeakable viscerality.

What's interesting about the word abortion is its abstraction. What’s devastating about the word abortion is the socially-constructed shame that prevents us from inhabiting it. An abstraction doesn't feel located within time. It is placeless; the subject displaced from the particular.


I have no idea which words will come to me. I have no idea where my writing will take me. I would like to stall this moment and remain in a state of expectancy. Maybe I’m afraid that the act of writing will shatter this vision, just like sexual fantasies fade as soon as we have climaxed.

— Annie Ernaux, Happening, translated by Tanya Leslie

Annie Ernaux’s book about abortion is titled Happening, as translated from the French by Tanya Leslie. In 1963, when she was 23, Annie Ernaux  found herself host to an unplanned pregnancy. Enter shame, and the fear of being marked as a social failure. Ernaux takes us through her efforts to get a safe abortion. She wrote the book 40 years later, to “break” the silence of shame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. The book moves across time so that the abortion is happening now, and Ernaux makes it keep happening, or maintains its ongoingness, by combining memories with diary entries from that time. 

Although the book draws upon personal memories, it has been called an “eponymous novel.” Ernaux's oeuvre expands fiction to include speculative nonfiction, or the errata of memory. One could debate genre in Ernaux for decades. Lit-crit aside, the author is haunted by her abortion: it is a stigma, a word related to the stigmata of nail wounds through the hands of a crucified Christ. Throughout the book, the speaker wonders about the presentation of the material, of how one deals in writing with such a happening, of how one recalls and reshapes it.

Happening is itself like an abortion, she realizes, and when she releases it it will become public, completely beyond her control. “I shall have no more power over my text,” Ernaux writes. (Note the translation here into “power over,” a phrase that elicits structuralist theories where “power over” is hierarchical, and associated with patriarchal structures of power that insist on standing ‘above’ the subject, above the body in question . . . a positionality that often gets written as a variation of abjection.) Writing about the abortion will also have its “aftereffects”—this reference to future time, and to being exposed or misinterpreted is common to Ernaux's writing, particularly since she reinterprets the self again and again over time, across novellas.

“This thing had no place in language,” Ernaux says of abortion (italics mine). It is also something she feels compelled to record, even so long (nearly four decades) after the fact, going so far as to state about writing this account: “(...) if I failed to go through with this undertaking I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy.”

This thing with no place in language is a gauntlet the writer picks up—to carve space for the unspeakable. Perhaps she is defiant. Certainly, she assumes that readers will trivialize her words, relegating them to the pathetic, or to “pathos,” or to the silo of pathologies.

To quote Ernaux:

The cost of narrating the abortion, for Ernaux, is as significant as the cost of undergoing it. In both cases, she is “determined to go through with it.”

ii

“May my silences become more accurate,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote in a notebook.

When Roethke died, he left 277 notebooks behind; each filled with lines and images for poems, observations, quotations, craft notes to himself, etc. He didn't use all the lines and images in his poems — but he wrote them. And saved them. Here is an excerpt from one of his notebooks, a “pep-talk” if you will:


iii

Hannah Hoch’s 1919 photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weiner Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany.” Your Weimar, her Weiner. Bringing a blade to the machismo inside the Dada circles, Hoch leveraged the connotations of the domesticated knife (i.e. the kitchen knife) to cut up and reshape masculinity.

“The male Dadaists, despite opposing the beer-belly values of the bourgeoisie, were quite capable of reproducing them,” Ben Lerner adds.

Hoch’s photomontage includes a tiny self-portrait:

“A gloom shagged with flags and tending towards violence. The initial fact (anger) is macrocosmic in the sense of being relevant to all occasions.”

Rosmarie Waldrop’s “Cut with the Kitchen Knife” is titled after Hannah Hoch’s 1919 photomontage. It is a poem in parts that leans into the curated “reading” of the photomontage in a museum or gallery. One can almost think of it as a series of captions:

Lerner describes Waldrop’s grammatical experiments with periods as “opening a silence within a single thought” rather than granting closure. “In Waldrop’s hands, a period is not the sign of authority but a tiny black hole within its logic,” he says, noting that she “deploys the period as a rest, often magical, in which potential meanings multiply,” and her periods often provide the sort of beat and breath that line breaks accomplish.

Like Hoch, Waldrop takes a form that draws on patriarchal authority—the lecture, the program note, the gallery description—and uses it against itself. There is no greater pleasure, which is not discount the pleasures of being alone with a fresh pack of watermelon sour-straws at midnight.

iv

Abstract subjects lend themselves to lecture forms or short talks. Anne Carson has a series of poems structured as "short talks." She takes a word and expands upon it, twists it, tries to catch its reflection in a rain puddle.

“What’s wrong with your voice?” he said.

In a garden just outside London, John Berger listens as his friend speaks about an odd flower, a flower “like the breast of a tiny thrush in full song.” The flower, a birthwort, comes from Brazil. But its Latin name is Aristolochia elegans, which sounds like “a person, unique and singular. If you had this flower in your garden and it happened to die, you could mourn for it with its Latin name,” Berger’s friend says, “Which you wouldn't do, if you knew it as birthwort.”

Archaic language is singular – it jostles, demands attention, insists on being seen and tasted in its particularity.  

The particular wants new words—it desires to be apprehended in its uniqueness, like the lover rediscovers himself in a nickname– the intimacy of diminutives.

Here’s a poem by Robert Desnos, translated from the French by Timothy Adès:

This poem feels like a curse or malediction (meaning, literally, bad words). Like prayer or chant, a malediction relies on the power of words to change things. It is a kind of incantation, an act which brings language close to divinity by risking profanation. 

Notice the punctuation. It is a poem that declares itself with an apostrophe at the beginning, and then avoids any punctuation until the period at the end. But the apostrophe doesn't close the first line – this poem is all one line. Desnos uses an archaic word – begotten – in order to make the curse feel ancient, biblical, solemn, and yes, a little dressed up for church.

“Farewell, she cried, and wept a twig of tears,” wrote Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov in his strange poem, "The I-Singer of the Universong.” To weep a twig feels more permanent than a puddle. I love images which alter the nature of ordinary grieving gestures. 

A ‘twig of tears’ is an anachronism. Anachronisms strike like that lightning I mentioned at the outset. Officially, an anachronism is a word, object, or event “mistakenly placed in a time where it does not belong.” Anachronisms defy the most demonic god of all, namely, Chronos, or time, by refusing his reign within the sentence. They maledict a bit; they speak badly, or out-of-time.

v

IF YOU FEEL INCLINED TO WRITE…. Jot down five words that interest or intrigue you, and pick one (or settle for “birthwort”). Write a short paragraph about it, as if you were writing a catalog entry for a natural history or art museum. Describe the word. Build from associations that are particular to the speaker. Anachronize once or twice, very carefully, with an eye to the particular connotative value of the knife. Take us from the catalog entry into the private gaze of the viewer staring at the dinosaur bones or the painting in the museum. No one would trust that woman to say anything intelligible about the painting— which is precisely why her words are the most interesting ones. Title it short talk on whatever.

NOLA panels and yapping.

Though I am no Duke of Earl
You are my chatelaine
I love the way the world
Drives you insane

Flashbacks first. Doing this cartwheel in a New Orleans park at midnight early last year, where that dark tree resembles a smoke cloud or the soul of a missing dragon in what became into a Radu-riven collage. Looping early Frank Black on the drive down the month before. Walking through various fountains. Sharing beers in an abandoned church near a warehouse. Laughing and walking until my legs hurt in that wonderful that says “you have been walking all day because there is so much to see and if you see down the world stops”.

Between trains, buses, and automobiles, I’ve visited NOLA at least 11 times in the past two years and have grown rather fond of the city, its food, its tree-gnarled sidewalks, its breezes and colors and music and endless nights.

My Heresies comes out on April 29th, which means I won’t be reading or doing any signings at NOLA Poetry Festival. Instead, I will take the opportunity to yap yap yapppp with minds whose company I prefer to my own words. Please for the love of gods and heirloom tomatoes, please come say hi if you see me. Please tell me to stop talking!

If, by chance, you are interested in hearing me yap about my favorite subject (some variation on my usual theme of poetry being life, and life being poetry) alongside other poets whom I admire, this, too, is possible.

The “Sacred and Somatic” Panel will send you home with a list of writing exercises to generate that particular profanation that hovers between ecstasy and nothingness, which seems like the perfect way to prepare for the birthday of Samuel Beckett on April 13th (and yes, I am bringing his plays because it would wretched to miss a chance to do a Beckett line-reading near a tree or a statue or a mural in New Orleans).

How often our words are the ghosts of those we've lost.
So many moments are filled with their endings.

— Richard Jackson, “In the Time of the Living”

May you not rest in peace.
Don't rest, be
waiting always.

— Eugen Jebeleanu, “Without Respite”

"I said confetti": Poems, birds, and metaphors.

 

“A gargoyle in the shape of a man, whose spinal column and brain have been taken out to make a path for the rainwater”

— Franz Kafka in his 1911 travel diary, while on a trip to Paris with Max Brod

i

Spring-songs and other wing-sprung things abound. In recent travels, I have been collecting birds in my notebooks, particularly pigeons— and thinking (again) about rhyme and repetition in poetry.

Deciding what kind of rhyme to employ, or what sound to repeat, is often part of edits, or part of the fine-tuning in a poem. Using a pure rhyme in a space where you want subtly may argue against itself, when a slant rhyme might do the work of creating tone more effectively. 

There is a poem by Jamaal May that does something remarkable with sound and image. The title, “There Are Birds Here,” carves out a very particular space and a terrain which is both the subject and the figuration.

The way Jamaal May pivots between repetition of the titular phrase and the meta-poetics of the metaphor. He qualifies — I mean, I don’t mean, I said, I was trying to say— and uses the poem as a vehicle for this effort to reclaim the birds from the metaphors others deploy to desecrate his Detroit.

Ruins, too, are beautiful. Only real estate developers and the Gentrification Committees of white supremacy consider the ruins to be an eyesore. This is what I told the man after he commented unfavorably about the crack in a porch tile yesterday!

Look at how much is growing from that crack— and how little we know of it. How much beauty in small doses we seek to extinguish in the name of social or aesthetic hygiene.

I repeat myself. Very well, I —

ii

Repetition: the spice and the vice of life, the strategy of birdsongs and spring’s efflorescence. Again, as if for the first time, April arrives with its lust-throated pink and magenta azaleas; wisteria sprawling over fences, luring bees closer. “Taste me,” it laughs. “If you turn away, I shall hound you with my scent, and plant words like succulence chamois islet zither in your mind, unbidden.” Pollen saturates the air with lust, covers tables and chairs and mailboxes with that gold dust.

“Spring is so blatantly sexual,” I thought while wandering through my favorite alley last night, a route with one single streetlight, a darkness perfumed with the scent of night-flowering vines seducing the moths. It is the same—-and yet different. And it is this difference which fascinates me.

Every April, I revisit Donika Kelly’s “Love Poem: Centaur” — a creature of marvel in its construction and articulation. It sacralizes as it profanes: the poem cannot do one without the other. Determining which line to sacralize by repeating can make a whole poem. In this one by Kelly, the repetition of the last line rubs it into our minds like a hoove pressing hard into dirt.

Like a perfectly tuned instrument, the poem begins with that “Nothing” that seeks to dispel (while perhaps also opening a shadow interpretation).

From the melodious friction between syllables—- the clicks linking “love” to “hooves”, the “burnishing” that expands into “a breaching”— each sound dances with the possibility of change in repetition. No barococo is needed. The poem advances by qualifying its statements—saying one thing, expanding upon it, and then going back to qualify it—before finally ending in those two culminating lines that feel like the whole purpose.

I pound the earth for you.
I pound the earth.

The final reiteration leaves plays into what it leaves off: the “for you” is gone and what follows is act that asserts the transformation of the speaker into creature who pounds the earth.

One sees similar moves in music, — certainly in lyrics, as with PJ Harvey and John Parrish’s multi-layered song, “Black-Hearted Love,” which I happened to loop last April, when writing some of the poems that would become My Heresies, where the lyrics foreground the “you” of the addressee:

And you are my black hearted love
In the rain, in the evening I will come again

Before reiterating this “you” at the end of the line:

I'd like to take you

And then cutting it from the end, leaving:

I'd like to take you to a place I know, my black hearted

Something is repeated; an expectation is set up; a new articulation re-shapes the addressee by defining them with that possessive pronoun. The direction established by the “for you” is extraneous. Although Kelly’s poem doesn’t reach for the possessive pronoun, one might detect it in a similar drive towards defining the other in relation to this space of possibility, what she calls “the point of articulation” fashioned from pursuit of the conditional (i.e. “I would make for you”).

I pound the earth echo-locates what Derrida called “the sort of animal I am.” This strategy of self-portrait as the impossible beast that plys the fantastic… I can't un-hear it. The centaur, this poem, an epistle to a love that locates it inside the body of the imaginary, where the trembling demands an other, a self that is no longer the prior self.

Rhyme, repetition, music, poetry— they make and unmake us. They wander off the track of realism into the realm of the conditional. Scandalous spring! Drizzle as soft as a jazz brush entering the jam! Outrageous pollen stains and weed-studded sidewalks! Azaleas and lascivious vines, I cannot wait to see some of your oracles and librettists in New Orleans next week at the NOLA Poetry Festival!