Compunction

involves guilt, self-reproach,
contrition.

It doesn't truly obtain
otherwise---which is to say
that it is an offense
and a lie to announce "I'm driven
by compunction" when
you are actually suffused by

lyrical weltschmerz, which absolves any
one from personal shame.
..........
Resolutely staying open to, and hurting on
behalf of, the world's pageant of evils
is a noble comportment and mode.

Compunction, on the other
hand, is ignoble stabs
of self-loathing and striking
your chest with your own fist.
..........
The word should never
be claimed but
through lips trembling

with real fear, real grief
over one's own failures and malignity.

If you don't feel those things then
shut the fuck up about compunction.

Courtesy Lorine Niedecker

Lugubre for a child
but for you, little one,
life pops
------from a music box
shaped like a gun.

Some days you find
you are a furnishing
in your own home

a kinetic embellishment
tricked out just right
matching the scheme

Some days you find
a tiny fly in an empty
green mug

lying on its back
dried-out to greyness
spaceship-like

Some days you can't
write, but you do
anyway
......................
No one dead
from the rain today
I hope

no drivers out
there who lost
control, etc.
......................
Each thing so close to
every other thing, colluding
so the given day'll render

Nothings

av-----av
ert----oid

thews, thaws---rueful or dour
hew haw

THE 7 DEADLY SINS AS
DISORDERED LOVES

turn, or tune it, run, ruin, tinny, tiny
twin/n/ed---

An eschatological way of seeing
of operating
that works hard not to
pose, impose, and imposter---
that expects unknowns
to seep out/break forth---

NOT TREATING BUT TREATING OF
to minister and not administer

Morphologies of effects:
themes, motifs, pheno/arche-types...

TO TEND (intrans.), TO TEND (trans.), TO TENDER
firstness is savor, how something feels, all sense-
perception as taste-&-touch...

((epiphenomena are overlapping numbers
played on vibraphones---a fluid
surround, a billion
or so invisible dull barbs

keeping you in place))

I do not espouse openness

neither do I espouse closure

but I do reject the rejection
of it

Icons

Ladykillers and Maneaters,

WE

are insects

in love

Nothings

Make Do
Play Fair
Meaning Action
Make Known
Count Down
Left Out
Make Sense
No Thanks
Never Better
Give Pause
Mean Well
Come Again

Writing

Nothings

What are you about?
Whistling missiles

What did you take me for?
How did you find me?
How did I come across?

"Primates en Accion"

Sluiced rudiments, alluvial nutrients

Pedestrian, "domestic
& unavoidable,"

.........................
NO SUCH THING AS A SUBTLE
GRASP

O'Hara Pastiche

Gosh where am I apparently crossing
some street called
Bobby Short Place
nothing but Italian shoe stores

and crap jewelry where's a goddamn
cafe I can hide in take a load off I'm
sweaty then suddenly I'm scuttling
under some gold

and black and I read The Carlyle so this
is where it is! A man in a suit (not
even sweating!) and grass-green
tie is eating olives all by

himself I can almost smell them as I
pass and I'm tempted to pat his
shoulder confer a wordless
blessing the rich being plenty poor as most

Twenty paces further on I spin
who knows why a quarter-turn and a
giant silver god is reclining and
(so it seems from just this spot

where I'm writing) diddling the crotch
of the giant silver goddess
who floats half above him ignored
totem of 980 Madison

Writing

Pedestrianism

"...the vagaries of you and me"

step upon step after step, less
often forward than
around corners and into or out of
positions of rest

"domestic & unavoidable"
STILL HERE, STILL HERE

learning to let the unaccountable be
itself
and taking careful account of what
driftage, trivia, or disorders
ask to be tended

knowing when to abet or court
disorder, as a check against the reflex
to pathologize it

STILL HERE alleges every particular
at infinite remove from the hermetic
sphere of heimlich

to step out, to believe that the world
of signs is a world
of things and relations, to willingly
subject oneself
to the irritant-wounds
of engaging said things and relations,
and to the "rubbishy anticlimax"
of every day's event

STILL HERE, STILL HERE
the poet mewls

Temperamentality

Choleric: dislocated shoulder to the wheel

Sanguine: washable magic markers

Melancholic: winding-sheet as tablecloth

Phlegmatic: name-brand snacks, & avoirdupois

Blurb-verbiage

exists at once in a future-past
and in a variety of temporal modes

fluid time set free from linearity

an open space that is motile
and multidimensional

multiple orders...multiple forms

mappings, cosmic calculations, flowering of the world, corrosiveness, desire, wonder

folds and fields of the actual

..................................
complex, wondrous, strange, blooming, polyvalent

quantum folds, deep space, mischievous orbits, all-ocean worlds, seismic tremors,

quirky thorn-opals
jeweled delight

traversing all manner of __________

tended, tucked

spacetime stimulant

Eye Dialect

-is a visual contrivance in which conventional orthography is modified to indicate dialectical deviations from the phonological system of the standard language.

-is a casual or colloquial speech which often characterizes an individual as belonging to the lower socio-economic stratum of society...a particular minority group.

-may convey both social and geographical information.

Nothings

Verbs: 'occurents'
Nouns: 'existents'

What becomes of or issues from
fertile clutches

"It plies a bracing, severe tonic both
iterative and terse..."

Why won't the cool air
linger longer? Quick, reassure
me that he doesn't really
believe that
nonsense. A SHAPE-
LESS MESS.
. . .
The text unexpurgated,
infested, histaminic.

Beasting/Fathomed Leagues

Take the Points

-----Tone it Down

Pioneer of the Nile///General Quarters

Friesan Fire

-----(Luv Gov)

-----Terrain

-----(Papa Clem)

*Big Drama*

*Flying Private*

-----(Musket Man)

Mine That Bird

..................................

Rachel Alexandra
Rachel Alexandra

Rachel Alexandra.

Forms of Smallness

Minutiae, miniature, short, little, diminutive, contracted, spare, compressed, fragmentary, tidy, economical, pithy, minimal,


Limited, weak, vulnerable, hesitant, quiet, silent, hidden, trivial, damaged,

...........

Private, Aloof, withdrawn, demurring, reticent, austere,


Cryptic, elliptical, gnomic, puzzling, riddling, obscure, hermetic,

Sutherland on Stein, on Language

...
Sutherland on Stein, on Language:

"vivid sudden willful happening"
beau desordre

"the movement and life of ideas as they actually eventuate in writing"

[self-contained, reflexive, devoted, folded-in-upon]

"the very tense and elegant behavior of the syntax"
"meant these lines of verse to be as attenuated and disembodied as drawing of Picabia"

"inveterate sequence and blur of overtones [English] has in normal verse"

Latin serves as "color or pedal"; American-nes: "severity, edigness, what you will"

syntax as diagram, as drawing

dry, tense lines, but sumptuous accumulation

[eventful/vibrant/companionable]

making everything of verbal rudiments, staying with them, making everything of them, living in their sacredness and preciousness; purity, tenderness, and all but religiosity of intention

redressing "debauched language"
...

Nothings

Issue is an outflow. Askance is chagrined.
Postponement, imminence, pending, impending.

"Thinking 'til, 'til, 'til you turn a corner and..."

Noticing: "just the mere turning of the head
when something catches your attention," allowing
it to absorb you, even for a moment.

And someone understands Negative Capability
as the capacity to notice some particular thing
as an object
of consideration, of feeling, thought, even of language,
but without quite
evaluating or indexing it, without
quite tagging it with meaning-and-location so that
it accords with some inured pragmatics already
in place. Naming is OK, since it is
gratuitous; to make and use names is not
necessarily to affix meanings or constrain one's
self to the bind of a realist fantasy, nor
does it mean that what you notice is apart
from you forever and unreal, perforce your naming it.

Allowing THE ADVENTITIOUS as such. Full stop on that
for now.

....................

Swirl it and the color will change,
the tone resolve into a desired via media.
....................
We're young and yet we're
keeping track of the ways soft tissue
is already giving out, glitching,
pulling down and away from bone.

These're signs but they're also facts,
every particular source of worry and pain,
periodontal pockets, crow's feet, liver spots.
...................

The Future Beneath Us

so that we can care
for it so it's not before
or beyond us because

we the people are and ought
to be foremost and top
most because even the idea

that time itself is ahead
or in front of us facing us
down is bothersome

unacceptable so that
future is tenable ground
proper object for our genius

our force and past can
be released skyward to
float and to be waved at

because if the future's
beneath us we can fuck
it missionary style

so that we can care for it
because we care for
what lies underneath our care

Tertiary

The primary is feelings,
glimmers, sport. It's the initial,
disturbances on some ground.
Chance.

The secondary is the final,
the fact,
the sense of the instant having
two sides. It resists, obstructs,
slaps. The secondary is
things existing,
materials subject to entropy, gravity,
and other laws. Say force.

The tertiary is not third
in a series or hierarchy, but
the absolute, immaterial
mediation of primary and secondary.
It is the meaning, that is, the effect,
of time passing, duration;
that is, it is
continuity and the propensity of things
to learn, take habits, accrue relations.
Call it 'love,' if you like.

..........
Say, 'there is no separation
between mind and matter.'

Say, 'from the moment there are
signs, there is nothing but meaning.'

Heavy Petting

Re. "admitting
the odious facts"

& Re. admission or admissions

Caught in the crook of ________
Calculating relative obscurity
Coping with a Red Wine Stain,
if you know the disfigurement
I mean

Heavy petting, I recall, was forbidden,
thus marked an impossible boundary

Heavy petting is---
no surprise---a matter
of surfaces and---surprise---
a matter of mind
superseding body:
it, the mind, is no longer freely
compositing things and relations
in hearty, meaningful ways,
that is, via trembling perceptual
valves/pores/membranes/neurons

Heavy petting lets the body go
its way as it wants,
and heavy petting is therefore
transient, healthy, and pernicious
exactly in proportion to how
heavy it is in a given case

...............
To Stephen: "Admit"
To you: "Admit"

That/because the facts strike you as stones
and because you begrudge them that
and because you take pleasure in both
the strickenness and the resentment

The Below Courtesy of Randall Jarrell, Copyright 1953

The Obscurity of the Poet (2)

If my tone is mocking, the tone of someone accustomed to helplessness, this is natural: the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast--and as someone said, 'If you're going to hang me, you musn't expect to be able to intimidate me into sparing your feelings during the execution.' The poet lives in a world whose newspapers and magazines and books and motion pictures and radio stations and television stations have destroyed, in a great many people, even the capacity for understanding real poetry, real art of any kind (17).

Yet one sort of clearness shows a complete contempt for the reader, just as one sort of obscurity shows a complete respect. Which patronizes and degrades the reader, the Divine Comedy with its four levels of meaning, or the Reader's Digest with its one level so low that it seems not a level but an abyss into which the reader consents to sink? The writer's real dishonesty is to give an easy paraphrase of the hard truth (17).

Would that I were one of those happy reactionaries, born with a Greek vocabulary as other children are born with birthmarks or incomes...But I had a scientific education and a radical youth; am old-fashioned enough to believe, like Goethe, in Progress--the progress I see and the progress I wish for and do not see. So I say what I have said about the poet, the public, and their world angrily and unwillingly. If my hearers say, 'But what should we do?' what else can I answer but 'Nothing'? (20).

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself...And all these things, by their very nature, demand to be shared; if we are satisfied to know these things ourselves, and to look with superiority or indifference at those who do not have that knowledge, we have made a refusal that corrupts us as surely as anything can. If while most of our people...listen not to simple or naive art, but to an elaborate and sophisticated substitute for art, and immediate an infallible synthetic as effective and terrifying as advertisements or the speeches of Hitler--if, knowing all this, we say: Art has always been a matter of the few, we are using a truism to hide a disaster (21).

The Obscurity of the Poet

But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don't read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn't understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry (3).

Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure---i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected---they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true; some of the time the reverse is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry (3).

When someone says to me something I am not accustomed to hearing, or do not wish to hear, I say to him: I do not understand you; and we respond in just this way to poets (7).

...how difficult and dull the inexperienced reader would find most of the great poetry of the past, if he could ever be induced to read it! Yet it is always in the name of the easy past that he condemns the difficult present (11).

Anyone who has spent much time finding out what people do when they read a poem, what poems actually mean for them, will have discovered that a surprising part of the difficulty they have comes from their almost systematic unreceptiveness, their queer unwillingness to pay attention even to the reference of pronouns, the meaning of the punctuation, which subject goes with which verb, and so on; 'after all,' they seem to feel, 'I'm not reading prose' (11).

When you begin to read a poem, you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die (11).