Some of the poems have a shape, some don’t.

I chickened out and let other people read them. Immediately I felt this was a mistake. I wanted to take over and perform them, because I can perform them the way they should be performed. I’m surprised how strongly I feel that these poems are performance pieces. Hard admission for a shy person.

I feel more motivated to perform than to publish.

Maybe I need to live with one page at a time. It’s easy to skim over them without paying close attention when I’m editing the whole mess.

I have problems with plot and narrative anyway.

I still wish for a teacher. I accept that I’m not ready for a teacher.

I accept the task of learning to write by writing, learning to edit by editing, learning to perform by performing.

And my routine is changing so I don’t know where I’ll go from here.

A silly idea: Create a poem entitled Treesome which is Ashbery’s Some Trees in reverse. It reads very well backwards.

I made some more quick edits to Untitled Poetry Manuscript. I’m taking it out on a date tonight. I’ll be interested to hear people’s reactions.

I’m painstakingly reading through Some Trees with the guidance of Shapiro. I have to read everything at least twice. To my delight, on second and third reading, the odd turns of phrase seem downright familiar, even friendly. Oh, there you are again.

Birkerts doesn’t like Ashbery’s poems. He says they’re nihilist.

He says “I can only report on the defensive reflexes that their insistent refusal of meaning triggers in me.” (SB, p235)

And, linking JA with the deconstructionists: “Deconstruction itself offers no signposts for this evolution, only a method for taking things apart. In this, deconstructionists are like members of a terrorist sect.” (SB, p236)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I’m like the idea of taking things apart. Taking things apart is its own reward. It’s one way (the only way?) to see how things work. And sometimes you break things in the process. There can be a lot of damage.

Therefore, am I sympathetic to terrorists? No, I would say instead that I accept terrorism as real, as part of this picture. The system is a whole system. The hidden violence in our human structures holds hands with terrorism. Just like selfconscious literature holds hands with deconstruction.

More commentary on JA: “The whole is a slap–and to my mind a not too friendly slap–at the reader. Nor is there any point in invoking the surrealist example. This has nothing to do with surrealism. The latter is based upon the transcription of spontaneously recovered, alogical unconscious materials’ this is a calibrated verbal contraption.” (SB, p240)

And it’s not a “dream” either. But don’t they all lead to the same place?

It’s valuable to take things apart. Especially rigid mental systems (where the critic lives).

Take a long soak in lack of meaning and see what things look like when you come back. Don’t worry, these systems are not fragile.

I have more to say, but not today.

Sven Birkerts, The Electric Life

when I want writing to be like weaving, regular, with a pattern, over and over, front and back, side to side

when I want writing to be like knitting, taking a thread, working it through the fingers, elaborately looping, around and around, attached to those sticks that are rhythmically clacking

when I want writing to be like First Holy Communion, wearing a frilly white dress and veil, taking the Man into your mouth, reaching after ecstasy with all young hope amongst your classmates

when I want writing to be textured, gritty like sand, or cold as a snow fort, the texture of shelter, the texture of sun

when I want writing to be electronic, beeping in response to commands, structured and styled, fuzzy only in the intersections, embedded in the overlapping rules of each domain

I don’t know what I want

seagull wing smashed onto the highway
feathers lift in the wind of passing cars

not much time to write

interpersonal existence

a lot going on

I like the ice and snow scape outside my window

A weighty topic. I’m reading John Ashbery, An Introduction to the Poetry, by David Shapiro. It’s a thrill. It’s just difficult enough that it’s hard to read more than a few pages at a sitting. But the writing makes it totally worthwhile, irresistible. I feel the stretching of my brain reading it. Today I was having a fantasy that I would suddenly become vastly intellectual, magically able to understand much more than I ever had before. I could swallow this book in one quick hour, just because I was tantalized by the initial taste of it.

What is this drive to understand? I’m not sure it’s ethically worth anything.

What is this concern with ethics?

What’s it all about?

Funny how questioning gets you nowhere, as questions lead to ever bigger questions and then suddenly, you’re left with:

I just like it (desire at the root).

. . .

Shapiro says things like this:

Ashbery has a very full palette, and one must distinguish between grammatical anomaly, unexpected dream imagery, and the nonsensical. Ashbery is one of the poets who senses an epoch’s rule system for sense itself and revolts against it with wit.

Ashbery tries successfully to reinstate the poetic qualities of all possible sources–journalism, degraded ditties, bad poetry–by implying that there is no such thing as the poetic.

His poetry starts with the feeling of cliché, the banal, the given, but ends with something complex and strange: disastrous relations.

I could quote the whole chapter. I guess I better stop. I am sighing for something. I’m having an attack of intellect. That quality that is stunted, stymied, and not useful in my life.

. . .

And then there are issues: Hero worship. Harvard. Privilege. Parody, lack of compassion in. Preciousness. France. Influence and tradition. The ultimate value of inaccessible writing. Have we gone too far with thinking, have we come to a dead end. Pluto. The Third World. Rhythm. Story. Emotion. As in whatever happened to. The ends of self-consciousness, meta, writing about writing. IMAGINATION.

Imagination is the only thing that makes sense. Imagination is fun, and a problem-solver. I can see the point of that. And compassion is a good thing too.

OK, so much for that. Over and out for today.

I bought a copy of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery. I’ve been carrying it around with me like a secret.

It might be a perverse attraction. His writing is just so impossible. He is way beyond me. But it satisfies something inside me to dip into writing that’s so elegant and imaginative and vibrant, but doesn’t make any sense.

I study it, trying to see how he does it. I had to cut my poems down into shards of one or two sentences. I had to cut out a lot of random noise. Until I did that, they just didn’t seem like poems. And most of them still need work.

Ashbery puts together a relatively longer poem that doesn’t make any sense, and contains a lot of random noise, and it still seems to be a “poem.” Is it the language, the grammar, the sound-sense, some interrelationship between ideas, or is it just that he had the guts to do it?

Something interesting – certain of his lines and phrases jumped out at me because they seem like responses to some of the questions in my poems. I’d like to juxtapose these phrases with my poems, like postscripts. It would certainly seem eerie to me to see the interplay on the page. It would make me happy.

He does come up with some astonishing phrases. The title of this entry, “pink dew of afterthoughts,” is from Suite.

I’m collecting words to describe Ashbery’s work:

her·met·ic
Etymology: Medieval Latin hermeticus, from Hermet-, Hermes Trismegistus
1 a : of or relating to the Gnostic writings or teachings arising in the first three centuries A.D. and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus
b : relating to or characterized by occultism or abstruseness : RECONDITE
2 [from the belief that Hermes Trismegistus invented a magic seal to keep vessels airtight] a : AIRTIGHT
b : impervious to external influence
c : RECLUSE, SOLITARY

re·con·dite
Etymology: Latin reconditus, past participle of recondere to conceal, from re- + condere to store up, from com- + -dere to put — more at COM-, DO
1 : hidden from sight : CONCEALED
2 : difficult or impossible for one of ordinary understanding or knowledge to comprehend : DEEP

id·i·o·lect
Etymology: idio- + -lect (as in dialect)
: the language or speech pattern of one individual at a particular period of life

(Also – sociolect; not in the MW online dictionary; probably means the speech pattern of a group.)