The Earth With A City In Her Hair

I've always found the third verse of Bob Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" from Blonde on Blonde (1966) to be absolutely hilarious:

Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line.
She said that all the railroad men
Just drink up your blood like wine.
An' I said, "Oh, I didn't know that,
But then again, there's only one I've met
An' he just smoked my eyelids
An' punched my cigarette."

Not only is this extremely funny, but there's a fascinating utopian gesture here, I think, despite the fact that one does not necessarily expect to find anything utopian amidst the chilly landscape of B.o.B.

"Drinking up" someone's "blood like wine" is a sadly familiar human activity. And I don't think, sadly, I have to explain the idea at all, but just to be clear, let me define it as finding delectation (on the verge of, or crossing over into, inebriation) in the depletion of the vitality of someone one is exploiting, cheating, or just bullying. But however common this sort of enjoyment is, the "Mobile" lines suggest that it is ridiculous. Sipping and savoring human blood is portrayed as a strange mix-up, just like smoking an eyelid or punching a cigarette would be.

So Cruelty is viewed here as simply strange. That doesn't mean, of course, that many people will come to look at it that way. But I think that there's a suggestion lurking in this slapstick Dylan passage that--hey! this idea/feeling about the ridiculous nature of sadism isn't so hard to grasp. So that's why I say "utopian"...because to think of more and more people coming to such a perspective is to think, isn't it, of a future as amazingly bright, in its own way, as anything suggested by "When the Ship Comes In" from The Times They Are a-Changin' (1964). And it appears to be a pleasantly robust utopia, where people still, on occasion, slug each other in the face, and where they may choose to partake of cigarettes and other unhealthy substances.

And yes, I know, I know--having set down these words, Bobby D.'s own legendary bouts of cruelty are a subject that I should discuss at some point.

Labels: 60's counterculture, Dylan

Recently taking an intensive look at the excellent 1997 memorial issue of the online journal Passages celebrating the life and work of Larry Eigner (for some reason I've not been able to create a link to this, so if you are interested please search for "Eigner Passages 5" or "EPC Authors Eigner"), I found myself delighted by Kit Robinson's beautiful formulations defining the characteristic movement of Eigner's poetry. Take for instance the following two sentences from Robinson's essay:

"In Eigner, the desire to know anchors itself in the discrete particular, recording sense data in an empiricism derived from Williams, Pound, and Olson, then stretches itself by a series of shifts of attention, to create an arching figure for knowledge. The shapes those figures take are products of an insistent, restless movement on the one hand, and on the other a refusal to compromise the harvest of the moment by surbordinating it to any totalizing statement."

However, I also found myself wishing very much that Robinson would, at least parenthetically, note that there are other types of fine poems by Eigner than those involved with momentary particulars. A short amazing Eigner poem called "Whoppers  Whoppers  Whoppers!" that I take to be one of pure statement was ringing in my ears.

One of the virtues of David Baptiste Chirot's essay--ambitious in scope and relatively lengthy--in the Passages issue is that he indeed presents other sorts of Eigner poems than those that are most typical. Chirot finds it crucial to discuss an Eigner poem--"Whitman's Cry at Starvation in a Land of Plenty"--that speaks of Civil War prison camps, and of the persistent importance of the factors of "consumption and conservation and population" in human affairs. Chirot also presents a short Eigner poem called "a  d o t" that is a brief characterization of Space and Time.

Let's look at the poem I said was "ringing in my ears":


Whoppers    Whoppers    Whoppers!

          memory fails

              these are the days

This is a deft characterization--skewering--of the nature of Nostalgia. One convinces oneself of massive lies--whoppers--concerning the Past that make it seem so much more lustrous than the Present: as stated in the common phrase that Eigner alludes to, those were the days that were truly worth living. The phrase "memory fails" usually refers to forgetting some fact about the past, or something one learned in the past--say someone's face or name--but here it is transported towards meaning that memory is failing to properly evaluate what the past was actually like in comparison to the present.

"Whoppers" is the second poem in Eigner's 1983 volume Waters / Places / A Time. It's interesting to turn back to the first poem from that book:


              co-op

                  wind

                    ows a

                      door

At first glance, this may seem like one of Eigner's most modest exercises in the registration of momentary perceptions--using "modest" not to refer to the attractive verbal restraint found everywhere in this poet's work, but as a mild pejorative. Eigner has apparently arrived in his electric wheelchair ¹ at a building housing a cooperative venture, most likely a food co-op, and finds something attractive about the building's windows and its door. The split-up of the word "window(s)" into "wind//ows" suggests the word's derivation from an Old Norse word meaning "eye to see the wind".

OK. So now we can turn the page?

However, if we hear the syllable "ows" also as a pun summoning the word "owes", this poem resolves into, or has one of its aspects as, a statement: The conception that there is a fresh wind within the co-op--that is, an ethos of indeed cooperative working and living; and that the co-op members, possessing this spirit, and having their special views, their windows into the outside world, owe it to the world to try to find a pathway, a door, into an era in which such values are more widely prevalent.


¹ Regarding Eigner's mobility, see the third paragraph of Robert Grenier's essay in the Passages issue. And see all the issue's prose essays--those by Dorothy Jesse Beagle, Charles Bernstein, and Ben Friedlander, in addition to those previously mentioned by Robinson and Chirot; and certainly as well the letters by Eigner himself, for valuable perspectives on this extraordinary man's life (1927-1996) and work. I haven't yet read the Passages poems dedicated to Eigner--and what am I waiting for?

Labels: David Baptiste Chirot, Eigner, etymology, Kit Robinson

When I had the classroom conversation about the Air Bag poem with Ed Dorn mentioned in my May 19 posting (about which I've been asked to expand, but I have some mental block about doing so--basically it's that I would feel compelled not just to report what I remembered of the exchange, but also to expatiate further on some very tricky issues), I felt compelled to disclose my own relation to cars and the preservation of Life and Limb: I don't drive. Dorn said something about that being a good decision for certain people to make.

After my second attempt at passing the Road Test (during a vacation from college), I told myself I would never take the Test again, as I might well be a menace on the roads if I ever managed to pass it. One thing that led me to this vow was experiencing the consternation of the man who sat beside me and administered the test. Well, what can I say?--being perceived, and perceiving myself, as "clumsy" and "lacking coordination" has always been an aspect of my life.

In practical terms, through rides from others, and Public Tranportation, I've gotten along fairly well without the License most citizens take for granted. I do feel I've lost something in terms of joy (and challenge). A friend tells me he felt a decline in vitality when certain circumstances caused him to decide to give up driving. When practicing for the driving test, while feeling very nervous amidst traffic lights and close traffic, I felt happy, and secure, speeding down Long Island's freeways.

In any case, I'm fascinated by the love of cars and driving to be found in William Carlos Williams' 1923 hybrid poetry/prose wonder-piece Spring And All. (I will designate each poem I cite both by the numbers that are used in the original text, and by the names Williams later devised for the publishing of the poems in other contexts).

In Poem VIII ("At the Faucet of June") we are told that the presence of this relatively new entity, the motor vehicle, is extremely welcome and legitimate:

And so it comes
to motor cars--
which is the son

leaving off the g
of sunlight and grass--

In the famous conclusion to Poem XVIII ("To Elsie") the apparent absence of anyone with the ability to act and react helpfully in a social landscape of nullity and distress is stated as:

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

There's much that I'd like to explore about Poem XI ("The Right of Way", also known as "The Auto Ride"), but in this post I'd like to focus on the first six lines--I include 4 additional lines in my quotation to give a taste of what "I saw" leads to:

In passing with my mind
on nothing in the world

but the right of way
I enjoy on the road by

virtue of the law--
I saw

an elderly man who
smiled and looked away

to the north past a house--
a woman in blue

Two puns show how much pleasure Williams is taking in The Right of Way: he "enjoys" it both in the sense of 'having the possession of it' and in the sense of 'being pleased by it'; and this is "by virtue" of the law both in the sense of 'by means of' and in the sense of 'by the goodness of'. He's enjoying the order created by the traffic laws because they allow him to look out at and experience the world without excessive worry about the surrounding traffic (unless he finds himself witnessing and adjusting to a sudden circumstance of danger.) I would think that also he's gleefully enjoying the privilege of having The Right of Way in his favor whereas other cars don't. For when the possession of the right is the one thing occupying his head ("passing with my mind/on nothing in the world//but..." it is already quite pleasant; that his mind becomes filled by somethings that he eyes see is additional pleasure. (I should probably add that I am reading the phrase "nothing in the world//but" as meaning simultaneously "nothing in the world, except (this thing called The Right of Way)" and "nothing in the world, but rather (this conceptual/legal no-thing, The Right of Way) )¹

When thinking of how the joy of sight meshes in these lines with the elation of having an advantage (The Right of Way), I was reminded of another Williams poem I vaguely remembered in which the pleasure of seeing is starkly opposed to the desire to gain and maintain power and privilege. After at least an hour of frustrated searching, I discovered that the poem I had remembered was to found in The Descent of Winter, that other WCW poetry/prose hybrid of the '20s (1928 to be exact). And I was delighted to note what I had not consciously remembered, that this short piece also was an automobile poem!:

11/28

I make really very little money.
What of it?
I prefer the grass with the rain on it
the short grass before my headlights
when I am turning the car--
a degenerate trait, no doubt.
It would ruin England.

That's rather self-explanatory, except that the concluding slur on Great Britain could surely provoke a long discussion, which I won't get into here. Returning to Spring and All, I'd like to note finally Poem XVII ("Shoot it Jimmy!"). It's a monologue by an enthusiastic jazz musician ("Our orchestra/is the cat's nuts--") and it doesn't ostensibly have anything to do with automobiles. And yet these lines, in which the speaker expresses disdain for composed music as against improvisation--

That sheet stuff
's a lot a cheese.

Man
gimme the key

and lemme loose

--makes me think, in the context of the car-happy world of Spring and All, not only of musical major and minor keys, but of a car key initating an exploratory, joyful windswept journey.


¹Note Williams' play with the word "nothing" in Poem VI ("To Have Done Nothing").

Labels: cars, Dorn, William Carlos Williams

"Walking The Dog". It must have been in 1979 or 1980 that Robert Creeley presided in Buffalo over a graduate seminar he idiosyncratically so titled, consisting predominantly of guest appearances by friends of his engaged in various fields of human endeavor. The visitors I remember as appearing are poets (my ordering is alphabetical) Edward Dorn, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov and Margaret Randall; sculptors John Chamberlain and John Duff; a Scientist whose name and even particular field of activity I can't recall; film-maker Stan Brakhage; and the hard-to-classify, and surely immortal, team of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Besides what occurred in the classroom, there were associated events, such as the screening of a curious and unsettling film about tattered realms of New York City made by Arakawa and Gins; and presentations of the wonderful 1960's National Educational Television interviews of Duncan, Levertov, and Olson, including not just what made it to TV screens but also outtakes.

This whole delightful panoply had been made possible by the resources that come with the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, which had just recently been conferred on Robert C. I should note that the class was cross-listed with the Art Department (I'm pretty sure Fine Arts rather than Art History), and a prematurely gray-haired artist/professor whose name I don't recall was officially Team Teacher alongside Creeley; as I recall he was extemely shy and never said all that much--perhaps because few if any students of Art had elected to take the class.

As the day came for Dorn's visit, my friends and I feared that his words for us were going to be but pointless and preening. For we had all been shocked by the recent release of Hello, La Jolla , which seemed pulverized, crabbed, and dopey--an incredible and arrogant drop-off from what previously he had done. After reading La Jolla, someone I know suggested the creation of a formal Anti-Dorn Society.

We couldn't have been more pleasantly surprised. Dorn was one of the best & most focused of all the visitors. His sly discourse, and the subsequent q&a, was gripping--he had come carefully prepared with striking contentions.

He said he was very suspicious of the way Singleness was being promoted everywhere as a wonderfully liberated way of life. He said that this catered to the interest of all sorts of Enterprises, since you could sell a Single person anything.

He said that people say no sincerity is allowed in the Workplace--but actually there has to be a degree of sincerity, or everything would grind to a halt : that which is not permitted is recognition.

He said everyone looks down in the 1950's, but that actually there was a certain legitamacy to that decade's development.

He said that people then felt freer to move around the country--he said that people now feel stuck because of the demands of bureacracies like those that give out Unemployment Insurance.

He said you could have much more privacy then--you could blow into some town, and get a job somewhere, without revealing much of anything about your past.

He said that when someone tells you that a policy must be pursued because of the needs of the Future, you should not listen.

(Yes, Dear Reader, that last one is rather problematic).

He said that the rigorous writings of geographer Carl O. Sauer were a lot more legitimate than what passes today for Ecology.

He said he that liked to put some things in his poems that were slippery & perplexing: "it's a service that you do for the reader".

During the q&a that followed, some Traditionalist graduate students (not members of the class, and not people who often or ever came to others of these sessions--I should note that this seminar was held in a very large room within the English Department building & anyone at all who wished to partake was always welcome) asked questions probing the relation of Dorn's earliest poems to British pastoral and lyrical traditions, but E.D. brushed these questions off.

Except for the question I myself asked, I don't remember more about the q&a, except that, as in his lecture, Dorn's discourse was not at all shabby. My comment/question was about "An Opinion on a Matter of Public Safety", the anti-airbag poem from Hello, La Jolla. I had found this poem to be both anti-poetic and rather callous. In addressing Dorn, I hardly wanted to speak of what I took to be the poem's aesthetic thinness; but I did want to discuss the public issue in itself, and in so far as Dorn's position was possibly a quite unhealthy warping of the Olsonian/Black Mountain concern for Attentiveness.

I cannot say Dorn "converted" me, but in our back and forth I was very impressed by the seriousness with which he backed up and defined the poem's argument. Whatever one made of it, aesthetically or morally, there was clearly a lot of thought behind his "Opinion" (a full account of what I remember of this dialogue may or may not be posted at some later date).

Labels: Buffalo, Creeley, Dorn

To get things started again, (again), I was thinking of posting one of my own poems, and for some reason or other I've decided on the Emily Dickinson imitation exercise I composed for Bernadette Mayer's Spring '97 St. Mark's Poetry Project workshop, and later published in the Ohio magazine that's printed much of my writing, Ken Warren's "House Organ" (the asterisks in the poem's title are intended simply as asterisks):

Euphony Variations *Orbiting Emily*

When Fiddles shoo 'way--their Spikes of--Pride--
Where--Bells let fly their Knots
Might Clocks--forego--the toxic--Traps
Hide nestled--in their Tocks?

Praise--best Trumpets abhor--the Armor's Gleam
Rapped Drums--rebut the--Fight
Shout Grace--when abject--Throats still weak
Can grasp--soft--pliant Bird Song's--Might.

15-18 April 1997

Labels: Dickinson, Mayer, my own poems, St. Mark's

To have suddenly seen the surprising procession arcing across the eastern half of Columbus Circle, my happy traipsing about must have deposited me very near the Circle on 59th Street (officially Central Park South, at this stretch). This was during one of those glowing 2 & 1/2 or 3 week vacations I was sometimes able to take from the civil service job I held for many years till recently. The people I saw were definitely a marching unit, and from my first view onward projected ceremoniousness. Were they wearing uniforms; were they beating drums? Unhappily, or maybe happily, I didn't take notes as it happened or shortly after. Eventually I was astonished to see people toward the rear of the march carrying intricate, extremely capacious silver containers--maybe it was only the handles of these prodigious objects that were very complex, but I think perhaps some of the huge silver bodies-proper were twisty also.

What was this, some Dream? Some Trip? Some Film that was surreal, or symbolic, or documented some little-known custom? I finally noticed that those at the rear emerged onto the street from a western outlet of Central Park. I travelled toward the front of the procession to learn there that those folks were moving west on 58th street, then turning south again on 8th Avenue, where they immediately came to rest at a site near that corner. When all 30 or so celebrants were gathered there, from my distance I couldn't see them doing anything more than standing there. It was only 3 or 4 minutes before they dispersed.

When I walked over to the building in front of which they had stood, I saw signage that indicated that this was a restaurant that had recently closed. I knew then that it was a funerary ritual that my eyes had lucked upon. A couple of weeks later I noted that a chain drug store was the site's new occupant, which wasn't surprising since drug branches and banks as well as upscale botiques are well-poised to pay the most extravagant rents to be desired. I've made some inquiry, but haven't found out, though I am hardly inclined to think of this as someone's wholly new brainstorm, from what traditions this lovely rite was created.

Labels: New York City

Jonathan Mayhew once stated on Bemsha Swing that he hadn't blogged for a few days because "nothing had made him angry enough". I was taken aback by that formulation, wondering why electronic journal-keeping had to be so much the agent of fury. I wondered for what percentage of bloggers this was indeed the case. I also realized of course that Jonathan was making a humorous remark that was not intended to be the whole of the truth.

But now I find myself shaken out of my blogging torpor of months by virtue of wanting to SCREAM in regard to today's news concerning the imminent closing of Manhattan's Coliseum Bookstore at the 42nd Street location, across from Bryant Park and the New York Public Library system's Main Research Library, at which it had been resurrected since June 2003 (this Independent Bookstore had been inactive for 18 months after its existence from 1974-2002 at 57th and Broadway near Columbus Circle).

I learned of this on Silliman's blog today, where there are links to articles from The New York Times and The New York Sun. As I stated in Silliman's comment box I want to make a public vow not to buy any book or CD or whatever from Barnes and Nobles for one full year. Presumably I will renew this vow the year after that, and the year after that.

I shouldn't even walk into those damn places, with their cooled-out dopey depressive corporate ambience, even though it's sometimes convenient to look up facts in the books on their shelves, and always amusing to discover the rather frequent category mistakes in the books' shelving. Did I say depressing: the worst thing is to see the people slumped in undignified positions, sitting down on the floor with their backs against the wall, sitting down with their backs tilting away from the wall and their legs stretched out, or slumped in various other ways, because they want to use one or more of b&n's books for a long time, they don't want to or cannot stand for that length of time, and the few chairs that have been provided by store management are occupied. Oy, what poor, sad refugees these slumped persons seem!

What I didn't even notice when I made my comment on Silliman's this morning was that the linked-to New York Times article says that the venerable Gotham Book Mart "for financial reasons faces eviction from its space at 16 East 46th Street". Them too, so soon after their move from their long-time location in the midst of the 47th Street diamond district?

Labels: bookstores, New York City