Serene, recalcitrant figuration

















Nest, shell, ship





















Amphibious repose, & out-look

Dear Fugitive Caesura:

As for values,
PROMISCUITY vs. PERSPICUITY, go.
[sigh]
Still another bungled come-uppance,
huh?

Osmotically Yours,
Ward-of-the-state

Antiphon:

res amissa recitals, redounding aplomb!

stupefaction, baffled & lithe:

dichten assumes a shudder, toddlers:

censorious cursor, whole saga of lyric contortions
contracts, at last, to one flinch:

sugary go-forth, uh, you chagrins us.

That guy knows
from leggy gorges,
goes stutter- or side-
stepping, votes "care
& dear concern." He'd
lend me a quantum
of fervor---love, love,
love---leaving me, tho',
fumbling sullen half-
assed angelisms.

Pressure trans-
ducers & triggered
spark-gaps are used
in nuclear weapons
& also in treat-
ment of kidney
stones.

You owe me a
cynosure, better
still a bell-
weather.

('There's a layer of ASH
in this fucking cheese!')

Just yonder, 18
silver stars, of
several specific
gravities, lazily
twist & drift, a
glint per second
per dangle added:
PRECIOUS PROPS

A cleavage makes a space, sure, but creates also points and planes of possible contact where formerly there were none to be found.


Annul
froward
continence,
moribund.


"Slowly every one in continuous repeating, to their
minutest variation, comes to be clearly realized...
every kind of one comes into ordered recognition.
More and more then it is wonderful in living
the subtle variations coming clear into ordered recognition..."
(Stein).

How some writers commute in and around Language City.

Californian Outer-Space

Verbs for Signal Phrases

Author is neutral: describes, explains, illustrates, notes, observes, points out, thinks.

Author infers or suggests: asks, assesses, concludes, finds, proposes, shows, supposes, suggests.

Author argues: claims, contends, defends, holds, insists, maintains.

Author agrees: admits, agrees, concedes, concurs, grants.

Author is uneasy or disparaging: belittles, bemoans, complains, condemns, deplores, deprecates, derides, laments, warns.

Dispatch from a Windowless Room in San Diego

In front of me now are a foam cradle and two lead snakes. Next to those is archival box 34 (folders 1-17) of the George Oppen papers, the only materials in the holdings that can be accessed materially, physically, instead of through microfilm.

Although the scanned, grainy, backlit black-and-white pages as they slide across on the microfilm screen have their own magic, their own special illumination of the phenomenology of writing (I am not one who categorically harbors contempt for the mediations of technology), this form and mode is not a surrogate for engaging original documents. Microfilm stands apart, boasts its own values. Rendering manuscripts as coils of tiny-then-magnified translucent images deceptively converts often wildly heterogeneous papers into a sort of dream-book---a glowing, whirring, clicking scroll before which one sits bewitched, but also in control, fiddling with knobs and buttons: forward or backward at variable speeds, up, down, rotate, focus, print.

Such enchantment and such pleasures of control are fine, I say, as far as they go, but one wants and needs also (not necessarily only) to hold the leaves, sheets, slips, fascicles; to see how the different inks and colors and markings play off each other; to determine or at least have better guesses about what words a scribbled phrase really consists in; and withal to find oneself in the place of, or as, the writer, physically oriented to some given page or pages just as the handler-inscriber of said materials might have been.

Kettle-Moraine Day-Dream