Antic View

158

2012-02-18T05:36:00.001-08:00

JH: Poetry may be what is omitted from some unknown whole. Aside from Twain's autobiography, have there been any other writings that have had an influence on your own? Influence seems to be a matter of sympathy, identification, recognition. Could one pick a text at random and assign oneself influence? Does sympathy inspire the specifics of inspiration? If someone were influenced sympathetically by Moby-Dick, for instance, that person may write a text devoid of whales and the sea, whereas someone who picked Moby-Dick at random might be sure to include whales and the sea.

AHB: I’m not sure why but it has been difficult to reply to your questions, as evidenced by my slow response time. It seems like certain writings elicit a sequence of response. I think of The Maximus Poems, which seemed impermeable but at the same time, a map driven for me. I think one can and people do pick a text randomly and assign influence. In such a case, the writer has a necessity, inchoate or undefined, that needs a resolving effort. The text then becomes the field of concern, because it already as authority. I agree quite with the observation of your last sentence. The sympathic influence creates inventive pathways. Random entrance to the work, like by a literature class, would respond to the obvious salients.

157

2012-02-03T09:03:00.001-08:00

JH: What inspired you to write an autobiographical book? I'm looking forward to it! Do you see autobiography as yet another narrative, with authorial insight which may or may not be shared with the reader? Can more be omitted from an autobiography than can be omitted from a poem? In other words, is there an essential of autobiography as there is an essential of poetry? The omission of a single word, phrase, or line can strip a poem of the poetic, leaving it a text. Is there such a fatal omission in autobiography? Would the omission lie in the author's approach to the autobiography rather than in specific words?

AHB: Autobiography is narrative, and an available one (I know the subject). For me, I must speak of specific events in my family that has left me ruptured from my brothers. That’s a deep well. But I do not want to omit goofy things, happy things, and the radiating spans of life. Reading the first volume of Twain’s autobiography last year helped me formulate the idea to write. He wrestled with format then finally just wrote as it came. So I have allowed myself to ramble. What I consciously omit will be what seems boring to me. Jung writes about how the conscious mind refuses what it cannot comprise, hence the unconscious. Yet the unconscious, we understand, makes itself known. I have always trusted that the less I get in the way of the writing process the more valuable, or at least interesting, the writing. In a sense, whatever I omit is still there.

156

2012-01-30T01:37:00.001-08:00

JH: Your mining analogy is a description of poem series as well as style. What is the relation of poem series to recurring characters? I cannot foresee that I will again write poems in any of my series, but I can imagine writing poems that include any character in my past writings. For me, a poem series is a matter of form rather than character. I don't consider my Virginia poems, for instance, as part of a series, though Virginia has appeared in at least two of my series. "Reminiscence" includes characters that may reoccur in future poems. The Creaky Wink may also reoccur. Speaking of recent poems, here is your "Probably So", a superb poem that makes excellent use of enjambment and prose/line interaction:

He’s

throwing his bullet wounds at us,”

said George Harrison. Could

you do the same, Absolute Reader?

Turning verbs to use nouns in the picture, and the end zone falters with completion. The idea in life makes a great prop. Charity cannot exist, but new Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine period. We must discuss the efforts of those counted for more than one. And

God said, “I will provide a train station.

AHB: I guess a general come what may attitude persists. I’m writing an autobiographical book. It roams about in time, because the logic of chronology is no logic at all. So we, writers, go for what interests us, proves useful. George Harrison really did say what I quote him saying (to Peter Fonda), at least according to the story. The image struck me as dynamic. And of course I let the bubbling currency of “news” (from radio or newspaper) seep in. A sort of reverse of Jung’s picture of the unconscious influencing the conscious. I don’t know why such a line as the last one would exist, which is exactly why I like it.

155

2012-01-14T05:24:00.001-08:00

JH: Style may be likened to a characteristic manner of speaking. One often changes one's way of speaking depending on circumstance. In writing, each poem is approached differently by the only way a poem may be approached, by words (the only visual/audible, verifiable approach to a poem, I should clarify). Is it true that each and every poem is approached differently? There is speaking, and there is the speaker. How different can a speaker be? A poet's style may be appreciably different than it was ten years ago, but is it likely to be much different from ten days ago? This ten-day difference may happen a few times over a poet's lifetime, but probably wouldn't happen every ten days over a poet's lifetime.

AHB: I suppose if you are mining the earth for whatever ore you first find the precious. As you dig, perhaps you find greater concentration. As you continue, you find that the concentration diminishes as the lode pays out. I think writers tend to approach each poem the same, like with the previous.in repetition of this writing act, we find something different.

So speaking of which, you supplied Wryting-L with the following different sounding piece. No Greek, and kinda flaky:

Reminiscence

The masque at the Creaky Wink, it was some affair! Me and Het Rancifer, were we the Red Death, the Yellow King? You'd think. We, venerable, inveterate to the Wink, masqued as Gravestone and Madness Creek, newcomers to the Creaky Wink. Some pair!

154

2012-01-02T10:29:00.001-08:00

JH: Few of my prose poems exceed five sentences. Can I say that I don't intend to write short poems? Brevity accompanies the lyric, and although I know there are many kinds of poems, I hold poetry and the lyric as synonyms. Regardless, I don't deliberately write short poems. Is cleaving to a type of poem a definition of style?

AHB: I do not feel like I cleave to a style. I write how I can. I think about style, as an object of originality, about as much as I think of my fingerprints in the same light. Sometimes I consciously put limits and dimensions to my writing, but in all cases the writing discovers itself. It does seem like it takes a certain confidence to know that the one sentence that you have written is ‘done’. I mean, a certain momentum exists in the act of writing. And see, I have written a short reply.

153

2011-12-24T07:10:00.001-08:00

JH: I never had mentors outside of books. It is indeed no easy task to become a better writer of sentences. To me, a prose poem is a poem that just happens to be in prose. What is the structure of prose poems if not the words themselves? One exception could be punctuation, which can provide the space that line breaks provide in verse. Another exception could be paragraphs. Often, your prose poems are several paragraphs long. How would you compare stanzas and paragraphs? Also, is there structure without space (separation) as there can be structure without repetition?

AHB: John Ciardi, or someone like that (someone much quoted as an authority but not so much someone we look to for the poetry itself), said (effectively, ie, I'm just about making it up) poetry snaps into shape whereas prose can be constantly whittled. I form paragraphs both semantically and visually. If it feel like the thought has changed, I move to the next paragraph. I also break if the appearance of hte word block looks too imposing. I have no problem with endless prose blocks but some pieces want air space. There can be structure without space but that can really be imposing. I'm thinking of ancient Greek and Roman writing with no spaces, which often can be rendered in multiple meanings. The reader, allowing for a modicum of interest, will find a structure. You, by the way, having been writing poems of single sentences.

152

2011-12-19T15:42:00.001-08:00

JH: Welcome to the Billiverse is indeed genius! To comment on "Familiar Actaeon", and to answer your question "What's this with nails and wings", I present my most recent poem, "Shepherds' Council":
Hands that to roods have nailed paws lupine, and have nailed paws leonine, nail to cypresses wings cygnet, as Artemis holds cygnets dear, chaste Artemis Who disdains display even for vengeance, and holds vengeance dear solely upon discovery: this is had from Her nymphs when they hymn of Actaeon by Artemis imbruted, which change surely befell shepherds of late vanished to us.

* * * * *
Unlike with Virginia, I did not intend to write more Actaeon poems. After I wrote my first two Virginia poems, I knew I would write many more Virginia poems. It is not only characters that can influence one's future poems. A poem can influence its poet's future poems, sometimes to the extent of altering how that poet writes poems. Has there been such a poem for you? For me, that poem was "And now refers only to Lethe's diverting ripple",
And now refers only to Lethe's diverting ripple
which struck me as having a natural use of the line. I wanted to see if I could write natural lines at will. This led me to a consideration of the line. In a poem lacking measure and form, how to end the line? Eventually, I began writing prose poems. I came to realize that unless the poem calls for lines, whether naturally or by formula, there is no need for lines. Sentences can make a poem as much as lines.
You write mainly in the prose poem. What caused you to write prose poems?
AHB: While in college, I suddenly started writing lines across the page, underhanging the next line below the last letter of the previous. It was a breakthru for me.When Robert Grenier, my teacher saw the poem, he got excited enough to publish it in This 3. In that poem, let us say, I accepted what Olson wrote about the open field of composition.

I do not recall a breakthru that said Write poems in prose now. Certainly it meant something to me to read, say, Baudelaire's Poemes en Prose, for the license (tho those poems are largely stories). I think semantics concerned me. That is, I understood the sense of line musically (thanks to Creeley especially, him and his enjambments), but I found line breaks getting in the way of the sense I wanted to make. For a long time, commas were the only punctuation I used. Which means endlessness. I'm going afield in my answer but I think it's all apposite. When I kept a journal,rather than fuss sentences and punctuation, I used dashes. These could be end stops or brief pauses (periods or commas). So I got a sense of freedom and structure, both, in using them. And as I became a better writer of sentences, no easy task, I heard the rhythm and sound better. And finally, I recognized that I could be straightforward, at least in delivery. Poetry as we find often loses itself in the mystery of invention. We do, after all think, in consciousness, in sentences. I think poetry without structure is gibberish. That a poem is a structure. Random words mean nothing until the brain discovers a structure (whether intended by an author does not matter).

I mentioned Grenier earlier. Have you a had a mentor? I mean someone you knew personally who helped your writing. Obviously I claim Grenier, tho I never stayed in contact after that one year.

151

2011-03-06T04:25:00.001-08:00

JH: I agree that fluidity -- rhythm -- is essential to poetry. Rhythm points to something else, and, via rhythm's recurrence and variation/error, this pointing is itself evocative, and evocation is another essential of poetry. Is poetry an essentializing machine? After writing the word "machine", I wonder if it should be replaced with "entity" or "process". I prefer a word such as "entity" or even "machine" to "process" when describing poetry. Does poetry essentialize myth and history? If so, are they essentialized only within poetry?
I wrote my first Actaeon poem in 2007. It wasn't until 2009 that I wrote another Actaeon poem. In 2010, I've written quite a few Actaeon poems. It seems like the Actaeon poems will never end, but there have been several characters who recurred in my poems who now occupy the area between hiatus and cessation: Virginia, William Wormswork, Aglaia, etc. I'm more aware, more self-conscious, of Actaeon's presence in my poems than I've been of my other characters. I don't know if this is due to Actaeon (or Artemis) or to my current stage as a poet.
You also have had characters that appear in several poems, and you have written Welcome to the Billiverse. Could you speak of this excellent work, please?

AHB: Yes, we both use characters in our work, which seems to be uncommon. Your Virginia and your Actaeon clearly have a wide and personal meaning for you. For myself, I guess I like the locus of otherness that a character supplies.

I have used Fu Manchu and his nemesis Sir Denis Nayland-Smith (from the novels of Sax Rohmer) extensively, and Tarzan and Jane. Additionally, I come up with names that just interest me, like Captain Element and Professor Radiant. These names seem implicative without being specific.

I am not sure that I can speak of Welcome to the Billiverse, altho I say that in prelude to speaking about Welcome to the Billiverse. The main character(s) derive(s) from someone I knew, but took on a life of its/their own.

I just let the weird stuff out, basically, in writing the stories. I allowed myself to serve slapstick humour. I wrote the thing nearly 20years ago, then maybe 15 years ago, when I was not writing much poetry, decided to see the work as a whole, not just a bunch of stories. For maybe 10 years it was lost to me, because it was in Word Perfect format and I no longer had access to that program.

I am wickedly unsure about the thing as it stands. A writer friend wrote to say it was genius, if only I could cut it down to size. I actually have cut it enormously, but I see the point. I just haven’t had the focus to work on it.

I guess I consider the book my Confederacy of Dunces, albeit without the tragedy attached to the author of that work. Dunces has flaws, for sure, the plot becomes tiresome, but the main character is so splendidly presented that one reads on. I feel like the central characters of Billiverse offer a similar extended human weirdness.

But anyway.

Your Actaeon embraces of multitude of concepts and implications, both personal and cultural. Cultural, certainly, because that mythic character is ‘well known’. But also personal, as your involvement is not expressed but intimated. Here, then, is yet another appearance of your Actaeon:

Familiar Actaeon

The wings of cygnets were attached -- with cygnet, often, and without -- and by nail always; one nail per wing, one wing per cygnet -- cypress by cypress, but it takes deity to attach a deer to a vanished man.

* * * * *

The imagery is surreal, yet reasonable also in a mythic, dreamlike way. What’s this with nails and wings, etc. The last phrase booms. It telescopes the ‘familiar’ myth into something personal as well as archetypal. It is a transmutation.

150

2010-11-20T05:32:00.001-08:00

JH: A poem's arrival, often named inspiration, is swift. The composition of a poem is likewise swift, though the revision may take some time, such as hours or even days. If almost all of my revisions of "These gargantuan hounds" and "This dawn" were omitted and the page of each poem were to include only the first appearance of the poem (the first draft) and the final (finished) version of the poem, not a lot of words would be removed or added. Why aren't the first appearance and the final version of a poem always identical? Are they identical, just not in the world? Can we regard differing versions of a poem as being the same poem reflected in different surfaces? How then to find the most accurate mirror?

I too often think of poetry as oracular. If poetry is oracular, what isn't oracular? Is the revision of a poem oracular?

"These gargantuan hounds": The hounds are much larger than the hounds of the Actaeon myth and my Actaeon poems, while Actaeon is not enlarged. Once again, a poem's space brings Actaeon and the hounds to the same place, allows them to move together in the same place, the place where, in the myths and previous of my poems, Actaeon was killed by the hounds. In a poem, space and place are superimposed.

"This dawn": Actaeon imbruted, Actaeon metamorphosed into a hart, has, figuratively, a new dawn, a dawn as new as an infant's. The infant Oedipus was also defenseless in the wild. In a poem, the figurative can be underscored by an additional figure, which can more strongly contrast the figurative with the literal: "This dawn of Actaeon will be dragged from the skies by hounds."

AHB: I think my interest in fiction stems from the collision of figurative and literal. And this interest... I want to speak a little about fiction and poetry.

As a reader growing up, I liked stories and I liked biographies. That is what writing meant to me, tho not in the sense of me putting words to paper. I liked the resolutions and completions, however false, that such writing offered.

When I started writing myself, those resolutions and completions were not available to me. And what interested me was indeed 'real' things and 'imaginary' things jostled together.

I find that I allude and refer often to historical events and persons. This would be a direct and conscious understanding received from Charles Olson and his sense of history. I just recently finished reading, for maybe the 3rd time, Son of the Morning Star by Evan Connell, about the events at Little Bighorn.

The massacre, to apply that term, has become a fascinatingly immense icon of some great complexities of this world. People take plenty of meaning from it, yet that meaning is fluid and far from set in stone. That fluidity seems essential to poetry. By the same token (I think) 'your' Actaeon shares space in the literal world with a figurative sense that is 'yours', you as the writer of the poems.

With both movies and novels, I merely put up with the resolutions that seem to be the intrigue of plot. The resolutions do not satisfy me because they are from the figurative world, yet read from the literal. That is, to achieve these resolutions, a lot of fakery goes on. I think I combat that fakery by simply not concluding what seems to be plot.

In your poems, especially these Actaeon ones, I see an effort to dismay the literal with disjunctive jumps that the reader must make. The literal remains, yes, but not at the sacrifice of the figurative. I believe that different ways are sought in poetry to relieve the literal from its control of language.

The crappy poetry that I see fails most for mindlessly proffering figurative expressions as literal, i.e.: whipping up a load of malarkey.

149

2010-08-08T02:05:00.001-07:00

JH: Everyone's place as a poet is wobbly, due to the multivalence of poetry. Poetics and poetry are two different things. Poems and the idea of poetry often influence poetics; poetics sometimes influence poems; poetics never influence poetry. Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, wrote Milton. The antiquity of poetry (“antiquity” in place of “timelessness”) can make for feelings of belatedness. Poetry wasn’t with anyone’s beginning, nor was anyone at the beginning of poetry. Who was born mindful of poetry? Whose first poem was poetry? Thus, no one is late to poetry, nor is poetry a lost Arcadia. An example of your punctual gift of poetry (a gift bestowed upon you, a gift proffered to us) is “Those Jerks in the iPhone Commercial”, recently posted to the Wryting-l list:

There is a poem presented in glass form, chills of summer. A whisper
of father and mother makes increment, glistering patois. Shades of
Apache clouds cling to New England willow. People are not panicles, no
matter how planted. Last thought is first thought.

* * *

AHB: The poem is a collection of phrases and sentences. That, sometimes, seems the whole story. Plus the noise of the television inspired the title. An emotional current runs thru because words are conditioned that way. I can never remember if it was Williams or Creeley that wrote, he wants to say something but is saying it anyhow. Without supercharging the idea of poetry, I must say that poetry often feels oracular. In the writing if not the reading. My poems are brief events that I do not return to often. My wife posted a poem of mine on Facebook. When I read it, I liked it, but I did not recognize it as mine. Your own poetry seems oracular to me. I may be using oracular incorrectly. I mean the language flows thru you, the writer, not exactly bidden, not exactly contained. NOT like Edgar Cayce, whatever that story is about, but shepherded or… Here are two brief poems that you recently posted to Wrytings-L:

These gargantuan hounds

The stars their cockleburs, what quarry do these gargantuan hounds course? In other words, who opposes you, Artemis? As the devotee walks between your temple's columns, so Actaeon imbruted walks among the legs of hounds outsized.

* * *

This Dawn

The brain of Actaeon imbruted is the brain of infant Oedipus deserted. This dawn of Actaeon will be dragged from the skies by hounds. * * *I had to look up imbruted, These works come from somewhere, seem related, and hold mystery…

148

2010-07-26T16:01:00.001-07:00

JH: How old is a poem when it arrives to a poet? How old is any worded thought? Poetry, which doubles, re-routes, and shadows words, may underscore archaic words, including mythological names, as a result of language's dusty bloom. A poem is anachronistic. Nothing outside of a poem occasions that specific poem. A death may call for an elegy, a marriage an epithalamium, but not a specific elegy, nor a specific epithalamium. Yet the poem calls for a specific poet. What does this say of the poet's place in time, in history? Perhaps a poet doubles, re-routes, and shadows the person who is known, if only to that person, as a poet. Then, the poem and the poet meet in the person who composes the poem.

AHB: Your words above are poetic and poetry. I find my place as poet wobbly to say the least. This can be asseverated by how infrequently I have been replying to your Antic View installments of late. The person who composes the poem, I mean in this case ME, struggles with the other world, of usefulness. I have to attend to the business of life, which is somewhat at odds with poetry. Not fully so, because poetry instructs me, even as I hone my writing for practical purposes. To write well in any genre and to any purpose is never a betrayal of poetry, but in doing that, I am not explicitly writing poetry. So much of my 'career' has been fueled by quantity, which is an Olsonian word. Now I hunt an endeavoured quality of directness and accuracy. You identify an essential in the separation and merger of poet and poem. Poems are always new. I feel old in the clutch. I learned too late that a large local poetry reading would occur next week in the Boston area. On my birthday, even. Yet I am excluded, having not attached myself appropriately to the movers/shakers hereabouts. The person who composes the poem must tap a shoulder and presume. I am at a loss that you are not A Famous Poet. I am amazed that the magiserties of Days Poem are not commanding the day. I am a fan of your multi-valence time machine of words. Speak further, Poet.

147

2010-03-21T04:23:00.001-07:00

JH: I don't think of purity when writing a poem, though when writing lyric poetry I try to follow the poem's unfolding as a poet while contributing little to nothing as a writer. The less writer and the more poet in a poem, the more that poem gestures toward purity. In "Of The Coronation", the word "the" was not called to the first sentence, but it was called to the second sentence. The words "the" and "this" are called as much as "Scylla" and "Actaeon". The names "Scylla" and "Actaeon" are instances of expansive reference, which is a reference to mythology, history, or literature, fields where a name or phrase attracts many other names, phrases, treatments, and commentaries. This, like the polysemy of words that aren't proper nouns, allows an inclusiveness that would thwart purity were multivalence not a facet of poetry. A poet's receptivity to poems can resemble method, a poet's approach to poems. Style is a poet's receptivity. Style is immediacy, the way some people can read English at a glance and others cannot. One can write, through habit or will, a certain kind of poem for years and then, in a day, receive one's style from a very different kind of poem. Was style present, unfinished and inaccurate, among the sentences or lines of one's poems outside one's receptivity? If so, is this seen only in retrospect, or does detection precede receptivity? Indeed, your poems are without excesses of manner. An example of your stylistically exact, which is to say pure, poetry is "Stage One", recently posted to Wryting-l:

Robert Grenier is a relevant undertow, and Robert Lowell is a causation while limp. Or pine is a memory of non-pine, on a beachhead, with news from Elizabeth Bishop. Meanwhile, a telltale romance develops with numerous words organized as hash marks in the stadium. Definite impulse, throne room, a buttress or two. We read these maps, camouflage.

You are the flock that stays, says Lowell to Bishop.

***

Could you speak of this poem, please?

AHB: I was much mastered by the reading that I did. This is not unusual in the young writer, but it took me a long time to free myself from those explicit sensations of impact from other writers. Robert Grenier, my teacher (for one year), is indeed a relevant undertow for me. He was whence I learned of the writers that would influence and inspire me. Thru him, Olson, Creeley, Stein, etc. And I struggled to obey the instructions from those writers. But the point is not adherence to their rules, it is to find my own. I feel that I have.So if my work really seem without excess of manner, it is because I learned not to value manner. Hence, I suspect, my antipathy towards Robert Lowell. On my blog, I give thought to Lowell’s manner. I think his poetry depended on manner.

Someone who could have seemed mannered, but never did, was HD. Her invocation and evocation of ancient Greece is so immediate. Which is exactly how I feel about your poetry, which lately has hearkened muchly to Greek myth. So much so that the reference to The Sorceror’s Apprentice (and its suggestion of Mickey Mouse) natheless sounds a pure seeming ‘ancient note’.

This Actaeon

A lyrist makes of absence a hound. His pack of hounds increasing, is this Actaeon more accurately likened to Marsyas or The Sorcerer's Apprentice? What challenge in sight, what lyric -- exultations, these, or queries?

I do not know how you capture this ancient sense.

146

2010-03-02T17:11:00.001-08:00

JH: The poem "On Eileen Tabios' Novel Chatelaine" comes from Eileen Tabios' novel as come, to take one example from the poem, "red roses / from immense crystal vases." The idea of issuance is probably what inspired me to write the poem. "Neglect oranges / a vineyard." is by way of variation -- the sentence could be re-phrased along the lines of "Orange comes from neglect". I've written two other poems on works by living poets: Seamus Cain and Lanny Quarles Theatre is one of three elements in literature that have occupied me lately. The other two are coincidence and, to put it quickly, milestone. Of coincidences, their appearance and also their refusal to appear: are coincidences more common with the literary? It's common for me to think of a book or a text and have it appear, or at least the name, soon after. Is coincidence the manifestation of memory as a map unfolding? Would the study of coincidence be the study of memory? Is coincidence analogy? Is there a relation (I almost wrote "coincidence") between coincidence and motif? There are milestones that are identified (as milestones) either at the time or soon thereafter, and there are milestones that are identified years later (and there are also lost encounters that are identified years later, and would perhaps be as ephemeral as though they had never happened). One milestone in my life that wasn't identified until years later was the encounter with reading Greek and Roman drama—the start, imperceptible at the time and some time after, of a fascination with Greek and Roman mythology—if it is the mythology fascinating me, and not the names which I must commemorate. Any such milestones in your life? If the personal is duplicable (by returning to themes in one's writing, or to habits in one's life), how personal is it? Is the aleatory, the milestone unacknowledged and unclaimed, more personal? AHB: I think I would answer yes to most of your questions, perhaps on the theory that doing so presents the most possibilities. I have just started reading a bio of Robert Lowell, by Paul Mariani. I do not care for Lowell’s work (I am trying to decide how fair my antipathy, longstanding, is fair), and I thought Mariani’s bio of WCW was a crock, but Lowell is interesting for his forceful sense of milestone. His poetry depended on important moments. That is fine but he goes awry, I think, and I think a lot of writers do likewise, by making a milestone. He had a practice of creating importance, which is of a falsity that wearies me, however much I myself am guilty of it. I think I have eschewed that tendency. I know that your own work is not so troubled. I am frankly fascinated by the restraint and direction of your work. Do you think in terms of purity? I know such a word is loaded, but I think your willingness to follow the strictures that you have discovered, that are implicit in each poem’s development, suggests purity. Just recently, you posted to Wryting-L this poem: Of the CoronationDoubtless, says Cephalophore, this head fell from a bough and I hitherto headless gathered it up: in a grove nothing is out of place. The world making sylvan study, Scylla has her hounds as surely as Actaeon. This crown that betimes gnaws me I name Absalom. * * * * *I love the phrase “in a grove nothing is out of place”. It seems like Poetry’s purest possibility. The names within this piece all seem earnestly invited. In that, I would hearken to HD. You do not seem to be investing the writing with the outer rind, id est, self -consciousness. You invite. I know that you use aleatoric techniques. I also know that you do not use them exclusively. Here is an impression, which I ask you to discuss. I feel like in my writing, I have worn off the excesses of manner, I have learned to avoid the sort of traps that Lowell could stumble into. Your method, in contradistinction, aligns with a ceremonial or ritualistic process that cannot step wrong. Is there any validity to such a sense? Do you, sir, write crappy poems at all?

145

2009-10-09T16:26:00.001-07:00

JH: Sometimes a poem will arrive while I'm thinking of poetics and structure, which may be a coincidence, as the thinking is lengthy. Ditto my reading. A poem is often the illustration of a definition of a word. As a definition has its own words apart from the word it defines, so an illustration (an instance, an example) has its own words apart from the definition it is to illustrate. The examination of a word is larger than any one poem or poet, which permits poetry's perpetuation. Will a word ever be used completely? If ever a word is entirely representative of its language, because a poem encloses it beyond interpretation, does the language die? This brings me to "Colloquy". There is the possibility that all of "Colloquy" is what The Translator hears/translates, if Signum is mistaken about The Translator being out of earshot, yet correct about The Translator translating words into English immediately or near-immediately upon hearing them. If so, the pauses between sentences and speakers could be instances of The Translator hearing, or translating, an untranslatable word as silence. Would this possibility be lost in a performance of "Colloquy"? What does writing a poem in the dramatic or even the colloquy form do to the reading of the poem? Are performers to be envisioned? When reading a sonnet, do you see pictures as you would a novel (if indeed you see pictures when reading a novel. Sometimes I do. I read such pictures as peripheral sightings, as I would take note, out of the corner of my eye, of a physical fact such as a tree or another book)? Whether or not performers are envisioned when reading a play, a colloquy, or poem written in dramatic form (or using terminology found in theatre, or alluding to drama), the idea of performers may be noted, providing another facet, or hedgehog quill, to the poem. In such texts, another existence is projected, one as independent of a reader's knowledge as the dictionary definition of a word. I once had a fascination with theatre that lasted for about two years. I read almost as many plays and theatre histories as I did poetry. My interest in avant-garde writing was spurred by reading plays and performance texts of the surrealists and dadaists rather than by experimental poems. I have never acted, though. Have you? I have seen few plays and no operas or ballets. The perishability of performance, memories of a performance seeming more like personal memories than memories of letters, and the conjuring of a performance in the reading of a play are all things that drew me to theatre. Here is a recent poem of yours, posted to Wryting-L, titled "Scraps Guilt Pprocess":

Dense marvel child, thought is weight. Thought is Walt Whitman
Incorporated, along a smooth river in green tempo. Variance occurs on march, walking to process while alert, firmed, dilate. Now we read
hence, here, the momentous. There was a crash of young person, wishing to be. Event of crashing young is a noun. Event of crashing young is noun falling down. Event is young noun falling crash of event. So much for that phrase lodge. We talk of tempo bout look, magnitude sand puns. puns shape language with diversion. The apples of this fall are ready. Are you full of time like the rest? You stop and read the margins, then inward, until a sentence is filled. Stop when you are done. Do not smack the sat one, last in essence, last in judgment, last in how we weigh. A crash of taught magnifies and spells a thrifty sort of doom, numbers then and now.

* * * * *

The wonderfully-balanced opening sentence of six words is halved by a comma, opens with "Dense", and closes with "weight". The word "thought" adds to both "Dense" and "marvel". Many more marvels in this poem! Could you speak of this poem, please?

AHB: I can say straightaway that I was not being clever with Pprocess, it is pure, if such they can be, typo. Which brings the question of the author’s purpose and influence on a work. Errors such as that occur, and the author gets to choose whether or not to accept.
I do not have a lot of experience with theatre. Mostly what I have seen is amateur (6 or 7 Shakespeare plays, for instance), tho I've been to the ballet a number of times. I like dialogue and have written dialogues since I first began writing. I say dialogues rather than plays, because mostly they have been without story. I have not attempted to tell a story, but I like how speech (which Robert Grenier hates) can function in a not wholly contexted way. Thru out Days Poem, for instance, there are 'speeches', usually sentences attributed to someone (Tarzan, Jane, Fu Manchu). A narrative is implied but not exalted. The implication of performance, and the variability possible is interesting.

Well, speaking of such implication, you posted an implicative poem to Wryting-L, derived (in some fashion) from the work of Eileen Tabios, her tiny novel. Speak of this, please. Unlike many of the classical and classic authors that bubble up in your work, Eileen is quite alive.

On Eileen Tabios' Novel Chatelaine

A silk pocket
(Unattached? Perhaps!)
blue as a watering can
jettisons
an iron key.
Neglect oranges
a vineyard.
Are jettisoned, slowly, and,
despite poesy,
mortal as vines:
red roses
from immense crystal vases.
O hart,
from your horns: light once more!
From zero
bubbles no remorse.
From a pocket
blue and silk spumes
a key iron
as any iron sea.

144

2009-09-05T17:47:00.001-07:00

AHB: You say that the word porphyry came to you unbidden. With procedural work, there is the sense of the writing event, that you prepare for it. Maybe you are not even ready with pen or keyboard close by, but you think of ways to proceed. Is there an anticipation of the imminent poem as you ponder these writing structures? I ask because when I write, I begin, often, with a phrase, the poem’s first words. No more than that, elsewise I wear out the possibilities even before I actually write. Or, barring that starting point, I begin with just an inclination to write. Mayhap I err in thinking these approaches differ in some useful to decipher way.

This leads me to “Hold my Hand All the Way”, which is in fact an occasional poem. I attended a memorial service, and wrote the words before the service began, within that feeling and necessity (the title is from a song used in the service). It is, then, the surprise of what would surface then. Your procedures are play, in the serious sense of that word.

“Dunderhead Heaving” is just a bunch of phrases that were in my head. The phrase Stream of Consciousness is wielded frequently and awkwardly, implying automatic writing, or some ignorant stance towards the creative act. I think Joyce meant the continual voices and articulations one hears in one’s mind when one bothers to notice. Meditation practices focus exactly on these voices, in an effort to substantiate who we really are. Tom Raworth and Clark Coolidge are writers who have explored or exploited that stream. Sometimes when I am patently not writing, I mull phrases such as in this poem. The specific case of this poem, I began with real names (of those who could interview me) (not me, actually, I was ‘inspired’ by Nada Gordon writing that she would like to be interviewed), then the names became these noun phrases.

So now you may comment on the unusual piece that you posted to Wryting-L:

Colloquy

SIGNUM: See that figure there, across the water? In profile? Seated. The reader. That's The Translator.
ONYMA: Translator of what language?
SIGNUM: You have to ask? You haven't heard of The Translator?
ONYMA: Not this one. Is there a story?
SIGNUM: This translator, whether by decision or cause, I don't know, neither speaks nor writes any living language.
ONYMA: Dead languages, then?
SIGNUM: Only one. English. It could even be said that The Translator hears only in English, since words are translated immediately, or with near-immediacy, into English as soon as they are spoken. The Translator has said this, and also says this of written words.
ONYMA: Impossible.
SIGNUM: Honestly, I heard it from none other than Talu.
ONYMA: Then perhaps The Translator is untruthful.
SIGNUM: If not truthful, The Translator is guilelessly misstating or willfully misrepresenting. It could be a matter of miscommunication, since someone who knows English is the rarest of rarities.
ONYMA: I know a few words.
SIGNUM: Veracity aside, as a premise The Translator's condition is thought-provoking. For instance, would The Translator hear an untranslatable word as silence?
ONYMA: Hear as silence, or translate as silence?
SIGNUM: Would an untranslatable word be replaced from a store of deliberately falsely-translated words?
ONYMA: The notion of a store of deliberately falsely-designative words could serve as a definition of language.
SIGNUM: Or a history of language. Does The Translator incorporate untranslatable words, or any kind of foreign word, into English? How true is The Translator to the spirit of English?
ONYMA: English! What if I were to cry the word "poesy"?
SIGNUM: I...
ONYMA: Poesy! Unyielding impassivity -- surely, hearing an English word is worth something.
SIGNUM: The Translator is out of earshot, I believe. "Poesy"? Isn't the word "poetry"?
ONYMA: I understood it to be "poesy". "Poetry" must be a porphyrogene youth of yet another epoch.
SIGNUM: Within a dead language, what of anachronism, and what of archaism? Does The Translator change our native language, say, into Chaucerian English? Is what The Translator hears -- or, a comprehensive, converting Echo, instantly repeats -- a melange of English epochs?
ONYMA: Different epochs for different days! Different hours! Months! Years!
SIGNUM: Is it, as with the possibility of incorporating untranslatable and other foreign words into English, a matter of context and consistency?
ONYMA: Does The Translator know all living languages, not an impossible task, and hears English with every word?
SIGNUM: Like I said, food for thought. Let's move on.

* * * * *

Colloquy indeed. This piece is more directed than much of your work. You had a purpose…

143

2009-08-21T17:50:00.001-07:00

JH: An excellent definition of poetry, your "A poem is a surprise in the words you live with"! Is surprise, or perplexity (perhaps a facet of surprise), the same height as reading, hearing, or interpreting a poem? Is the divide between a poem's poet and public illustrative of the ideal plurality of reading (or hearing) a poem? Is surprise one of the responses that brings a poem into the light after it is written? Is the poem an obscurity that no light can illuminate? What is observed when one encounters a poem? Only the poem, recognized as being a poem, and any allusions, personal or historical, one adds to the poem. Recognition and ventriloquism, and recognition through ventriloquism, this is what is observed when one encounters a poem. Recognition and ventriloquism lie atop a poem, what lies beneath? AHB: A poem is an obscurity that no light can illuminate, indeed. Within that obscurity is the life of words, primeval, primordial, prime. In this picture, surprise is energy of involvement, of noticing the actions of words and our confrontation with them. Words as microbes, or something. Well, this seems to bring me to a recent poem of yours.

For Us Tempunauts

William Collins' Ode To Fear, to dissuade John Wilkes Booth
Youth And The Bright Medusa, to allay Lizzie Borden
Helen of Egypt, to daunt Cesare Borgia
Winesburg, Ohio, to dissuade John Wilkes Booth

Lycidas, to hinder Elizabeth Bathory

Baudelaire's Poe, to deter Gilles de Rais
The Case Of The Negligent Nymph, to allay Lizzie Borden
Would Une Semaine de Bonté turn aside Cain's hand?

The Ballad Of The Sad Café, to daunt Cesare Borgia
The Left Hand Of Darkness, to dissuade John Wilkes Booth
Milton's Lycidas, to hinder Sawney Beane

The Age Of Innocence, to daunt Cesare Borgia

Baudelaire's Poe, to deter Charlotte Corday
John Milton's Lycidas, to hinder Gary Gilmore

* * * * *
I have read me some Philip K. Dick, but did not recognize the reference to a story of his in the title. What is familiar to me is placed in unfamiliar (surprising) relationship here. The collisions and intersections here are invitingly baffling. And presented in something like a sonnet form. I want to present another of your poems that appeared on Wryting-L.

Porphyry

Issuance, pathless you had been
Unlikeness, pathless you had been
Nightingale, pathless you had been
Allurement, pathless you had been

And from whose hand, imposture, your voice?

Of fable, my words, and of my words, no fable
Of Virginia,my words, and of my words, no Virginia
Oh, for a verse to height sable Virginia with fêtes!
Of fêtes, my words, and of fêtes, no expectation

Reverie heights hours rich with imposture, cypress heights a shade
And from whose hand, nightingale, your voice?
Polis heights error, wilderness (heart or nail) heights voyage

First, you use the word porphyry more than I ever have, I am sure typing the title was the first time I ever writ the word. Beyond that, the weird rhythm, as of a rite, for instance The Tibetan Book of the Dead. You may now explain the procedure behind or beneath this gem.

142

2009-08-02T17:23:00.001-07:00

JH: The sonnet "Five Unicorns And A Pearl" has three lines that are repeated three times each ("Gertrude Stein, Three Lives", "Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers", and "John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers"), two lines that are repeated twice each ("Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales" and "William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain"), and one line that appears only once ("Henry James, The Portrait Of A Lady"). I chose the titles that are half of the lines in order to name their lines. The "My" of "My Mark Twain" implies "one", certainly, bringing the polyvalence of language into the poem ("My" also refers to the lyric "I"). The title of the poem, "Five Unicorns And A Pearl", is also the title of a diary in Carl Jacobi's story "Revelations In Black" (first published in Weird Tales in 1933). The impetus for this poem was my wanting to write a poem whose lines equaled a one, a pair of two, and a trio of three. These numbers add up to fourteen, thus the sonnet form, which also allowed me to vary the placement of the lines. Aside from the mimicry of the sonnet form, what, other than patterning, is the reason for the lines being in their respective places? I have been wondering about the difference between procedural poems and patterned poems. A procedural poem implies a source text (or texts) and a specific (formal?) process that creates a new text from the previous text (or texts). If there are literary references (for instance, surface literary references such as titles and authors' names) instead of quotations, and no other linguistic material, is this a procedural poem? The alternation of lines in "Five Unicorns And A Pearl" implies movement, but there is no reason for the movement, such as in my GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE (see Antic View #83) or The Recital (see Antic View #115). What is the importance of movement to the procedural poem? Is pattern, in the absence of narrative, static?

AHB: A pattern poem may be ‘mindless’, in that the pattern might outweigh other energies of the work. Mindless in the sense of going forward mechanically. When writers are too betrothed to patterns, metre and rhyme, say, our interest as readers diminishes because the pattern is just repetition. Emily Dickinson’s subversion of the strict tempo patterns is the locus of most interest for me, and I suspect for others. Rhythm is pattern, and that’s interesting musically (or more richly, Terpsichoreanly), Bo Diddley beat or double jig, but I do not think the logopeian thrill resides in that rhythm. Procedure seems to be a sort of translation, or let me say transmogrification, because it has more syllables. Procedure activates in a text and a dissatisfaction or hope, finding ways to open text(s) to unexpected possibilities. In “Five Unicorns”, the reader recognizes that you have gathered (in you mind) these particular texts, and saw them connect somehow. There is a pattern to what you have done, but the pattern is not the engine of its motion. In the making of your work, you actively process your reading. All writers process their reading, but you do so consciously, and your interest is not to collect modalities that you can use, but, perhaps, to release found modalities into their own activities. I like that you cite Weird Tales, which certainly is a locus of weird possibilities. I play with procedure, but am awkward in the process.

I do not think the use of procedure versus the sort of practiced unleashing that I endeavour is a large differentiation. A poem is a surprise in the words you live with, however that may come about.

141

2009-06-28T16:25:00.003-07:00

JH: A poem clarifies a mystery by stating it (and opening new mysteries that usurp the previous mystery's empery). A poem is the mystery of language, a mystery that cannot be clarified by any language outside poetry, nor any language outside a particular poem. A poem can ask questions, inferred or ending with the standard interrogative punctuation, that go unanswered within the poem, but, unlike aesthetics, can leave nothing unfinished. In a poet's oeuvre, words recur from poem to poem, and a reader may make a case for the recurrence of themes, but one poem does not complete another poem. In the past two years I've near-consistently written poems with Grecian and Roman names that would have themselves persons. I didn't set out to do this. This particular ancient world and its poetries are part of the definition of any one of the names of the figures in my recent poems. "Helena" is comprised of excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe's "To Helen" and from the first scene of the fifth act of Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus". In an earlier poem, "Helen", I combined excerpts from Poe's "To Helen" with excerpts from H.D.'s "Helen", and introduced a word, "languors", not found in either poem:

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home, remembering past ills and past enchantments, the enchantments of all Greece, the languors of old Rome. The agate lamp within thy hand. The lustre as of olives where she stands. How statue-like I see thee stand, remembering past enchantments and past ills.

The agate lamp within thy hand. The still eyes in the white face. The lustre as of olives where she stands. The folded scroll within thy hand. Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face: white ash amid funereal cypresses. The enchantments of all Greece, the languors of old Rome. How statue-like I see thee stand. The still eyes in the white face remembering past enchantments and past ills. Greece sees, unmoved, the agate lamp within thy hand. Thy Naiad airs have brought me home. The lustre as of olives where she stands. White ash amid funereal cypresses.

This is writing with pre-existing phrases instead of pre-existing words. Arrangement, selection, and repetition are where I as another writer am seen, and if the mythological references are read as corresponding to a preoccupation with antiquity and mythology in my previous poems, then my hand is more distinct, though still unidentifiable. Your poems are expansive toward names, including figures also appearing in mythology, history books, and articles about celebrities. One example is "Helen's Door", which was posted in March to Wryting-L:

this is a new poem, a button insistent on the start of 'things'. a poem is a language, fieldstones in the field of Troy. workers unite, telling Trotsky hilarious. the years prove fiendish, and someone kills Trotsky. Trotsky is not a poem, he was associated with a man. when he wrote poems, the stars lit a framework upon which the exacting nature of words could be made brilliant. stars are sharp. Jennifer Aniston was the moonshine near Brad Pitt. we need that area of a poem, even thinking that a clicking monstrance like Jennifer collides meaning in a way. something vital in play, then, as we read thru the script. Jennifer Aniston is stipend, residual check (of course), and a hairstyle choice. Helen—you know, of Troy—got some stupid for a pattern. well, we walk into that, the armies meet for 10 grueling, then playful gods show half interest nothing tells a better story. when Angelina—you know her—spent the chance, it was grand occasion. the threads of language left Agamemnon and Menelaus, cool umbels over the seed of Greek lit, and portaged to a stuck prepositional rebroadcast. meanwhile, centaurs of activity raided the hamstrung rendition. we are tired when we forget. A new poem is just the last poem marked up. then Troy falls, and Odysseus shadow dances for James Joyce. all that in comp lit captivity, for you, dear Reader, to unweave. the good career move will always surprise. Jennifer as unction is always next door.

Could you speak of this poem, please?

AHB: I bet I could speak of this poem. I will first say that you supply a copy of what I sent to the list. This copy reveals my haste. I am inconsistent on capitalizing the initial letter of a sentence. Decisions such as that are part of the process, however mundane they may seem. I was comfortable with no capitalization of the initial letter, but now I am rethinking that, and I have yet to train my fingers to follow thru. Even issues like this are important, as the poem is made. The poem is an indication of what is around me. I have read at least four translations of The Iliad (Fagel, Fitzgerald, that scholar that Pound knew, and Pope), but the instigation of the poem is the movie Troy, and furthermore the unavoidable tabloid intrusion of Jennifer Aniston with every visit to the supermarket. I am not fascinated with her, but with the apparent fascination that she receives. Is she then Helen? I do not know, but she is hard to escape.

I feel that I remain receptive as I write, and allowing Aniston and Agamemnon to cohabitate the poem’s space is a sort of duty, a presentation of my inscape. This inscape is not edited, or at least I am comfortable with silly conjunctions and the burbling of the popular clutch.

Bottom-lining, you and I found our ways to a resonant place. I have absorption of popular culture while you seem more involved with the classical text (as evidenced by the text: I have already indicated that I have studied the classical texts, am not wholly relying on pop culch). Ok. Your latest poem to Wryting-L is an oddity of sorts, but seems to relate here.

Five Unicorns and a Pearl

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales
Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain
John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers
Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales Henry James, The Portrait Of A Lady
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers
Edmund Wilson, The Triple Thinkers
John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers

My wife read it to me, I had yet to read it, and delivered it straightforwardly. The rhythm caught me. The conjunctions seemed pregnant, but I cannot fulfill their promise. The titles bear numbers, mostly. The James and Howells both imply one. At least in line count, the poem looks like a sonnet. I do not know your procedure, and have publicly guessed wrong on your work (what I thought was procedurally written was written brain to hand to paper). It would—you would agree?—be the reader’s task to decipher the procedure, why each line is implanted as it is. I do not know how you ‘chose’ the works here, but there is some sense of absorption, the works were available to you. To ponder procedure in cases like this is an involvement. Jackson Mac Low described his procedure carefully because that was part of the work’s invitation. N’est-ce pas?

140

2009-06-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

JH: A poem having few words allows concentrated interaction among the words. The array of relations (including contradictions) is less than in a long poem. This limitation, which occurs upon comparison with an appreciably longer poem, is literal and not poetic: the poetic is boundless in its references and mysteries whether a poem is one sentence or a thousand cantos. In poetry, a flambeau and a pharos alike are will o' the wisps. Is length chosen by the author or the poem? One could lengthen one's short poem and condense one's long poem. One could by accident or design edit out the poetic in one's long poem, and one could, with one's short poem, stop before the poetic appears or edit it out. This editing could happen after the poem is written or during the writing of the poem, whether willingly or unknowingly. Why would anyone willingly remove the poetic from one's poem? How, practically, could this be done? Would this entail removing certain words and phrases, either leaving nothing in their place or replacing them with other words? Would the remaining original words noticeably interact independent of the replacement words? Could the remaining original words somehow indicate the removed words (indicate not the removal alone, but the words that were removed)? A poem is complete unto itself, but with the removal of even one word it would no longer be the same poem (thus no longer complete unto itself), and in the instance of the removal of the poetic it would not be a poem at all. The poem in the absolute is free from revision but manifests itself, a manifestation complete or partial, via the poet. The poetic in a poem is what is commensurate to the poem in the absolute, the poem as it reveals itself to the mind of the poet who is to write the poem. The poetic is not solely what of the poem in the absolute is transcribed or recited by the poet, but also what is fabricated by the poet to resemble (a trompe l'oeil for whose eye, a mockingbird's song for whose ear?) the poetic, as some of the poem in the absolute may (must?) be lost to the poet in its appearance or in the poet's writing or recital, lost through the poet's misapprehension, ignorance, forgetfulness, haste, lingering, etc. This fabrication is a correspondence (in all the meanings of the word "correspondence") with a part of the part of the poem in the absolute, a correspondence brought about by the meeting of the poem in the absolute and the poet in their shared language.

AHB: You write acutely that "the poetic is boundless in its references and mysteries whether a poem is one sentence or a thousand cantos." That is apt and accurate. The poem is a mystery word landscape of endlessness and possibility. In writing, one follows the instigation: in rewriting, one aims for that reference and mystery.

I think of Williams’ savvy assertion, that you cannot get the news from a poem, but people die every day for lack of what is found in a poem. Poems are empires of thought and language activated into unique distinctions that clarify mysteries by the act of enacting them. Does that make sense? Because we write with an eye to surprise ourselves, as well as the reader. Here is a recent piece that you posted to Wryting-L:

Helena
I might have unto my paramour that heavenly Helen which I saw of late. Ah, Psyche, too simple is my wit to tell her praise. The agate lamp within thy hand. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter when he appeared to hapless Semele. How statue-like I see thee. Ah, Psyche, from the regions which are Holy-Land!

The agate lamp within thy hand. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium? In yon brilliant window-niche brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter when he appeared to hapless Semele. The agate lamp within thy hand. Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face. Be silent, then, for danger is in words. Too simple is my wit to tell her praise whom all the world admires for majesty. How statue-like I see thee in wanton Arethusa's azured arms. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Ah, Psyche, the agate lamp within thy hand. That heavenly Helen which I saw of late. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter when he appeared to hapless Semele. Be silent, then, for danger is in words.

It just occurred to me that this poem, and others of yours, makes me think of H.D. Her writing was an envelopment of a poetic world, Greek poetry. Does that in any way describe your own work? This poem, like others of yours, seems constrained b y an indicated language, and yet parlours (with the French verb parler behind it) of conversation and intelligence seem to be infused within its seemingly severe borders. And you have written sentence long poems, likewise spreading in their embrace. What is the inkling of such writing? That Helen Doolittle was a patient of Freud is a note worth contemplating. I mean that there is a sense of release into the torsion of her imagination, at the same time the self-consideration of Freudian analysis. I guess I can conclude with the question of your relationship to the words, when you write so strangely

139

2008-12-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

JH: Why do I not write a poem daily or yearly? Writing one poem a month is not a plan of mine. Once I write a poem, I spend time reading it by itself and in relation to other poems of mine (especially poems closely preceding it). The next poem I write isn't necessarily influenced by the previous poem. I don't begin a new poem until my thoughts of the previous poem are no longer in the forefront. The rhythm of this permits, so far, about one poem a month. When writing a series the poems follow each other more closely, chronologically and otherwise. My Virginia poems are not part of a series in this sense. I don't have a plan for the Virginia poems as a whole. In the last two years, I've only written six Virginia poems. It may be I am taking longer to read the figure that is Virginia. "Beneath The Ray" may be compared to "Mimicry In Ruins" (see Antic View #130 and #131). "Beneath The Ray" possibly quotes individual words, "Mimicry In Ruins" possibly quotes phrases. How to relate certain words within "Beneath The Ray" to each other to make an interpretation or a reading (is the difference between an interpretation and a reading a matter of degrees, with a reading occurring upon a person's seeing and/or hearing a text, and an interpretation requiring posteriority to a reading?)? The double meaning of "lyrist", one who plays on the lyre and/or one who composes lyrical poetry, in the second sentence is not invalidated by the appearance of "lyre" in the fourth sentence. If "lyrist" in "her lyrist" means an author of lyrics, it is possible that, if the second appearance of the word "her" refers to "Virginia" and not "rose", Virginia's mentions were authored by another. If "lyrist" in this case refers to the player of a lyre, this doesn't mean the lyrist isn't also a lyrist, or that Virginia's mentions weren't authored by a third lyrist (if indeed there are words accompanying the lyre). In "Beneath The Ray", the words "higher", "brighter", and "brightest" imply a hierarchy of lyrists. How to return to every single word in a poem ("O, the constancy of the rose, and how like imaginings!")? Within a poem, the first appearance of each recurring word is a lost Arcadia.

AHB: I learn from your method, which is not so much foreign to me as unthought of, or not yet incorporated in how I work. Periodically I look thru my archives, and by that I mean the last 9 years (since I met my wife, uncoincidentally: I almost never consult work before then), I find individual poems and working themes, that I ‘take back’, accept now. But I do not have a plan, nor have I the time to delve the mass (I await the MacArthur Foundation’s check). Each poem is a particular event (I started to use seems like as the verb but indeed I

know), derived from previous events, each being a poem. I can see how you would say that your Virginia poems are not a series, still, they represent a consistency of your attention. I would love to see your work en masse, collected. Charles Olson did not just write Maximus poems, and he discarded a number that I think belong in them (I guess we have to trust George Butterick in this matter, and I do, but still…). The Maximus Poems highlight and asseverate Olson’s field of attention, or I mean focus. In sticking with the igniting energy as you do, you allow a fulfillment of the line of your thinking. I have long wished to find my Maximus/Cantos/A/Leaves of Grass, etc. Days Poem(makes a great gift!!!) is a microcosm of that possibility, it was each day’s attention span. It was also a wearing effort that I could not sustain in that form. I want to try staying with a poem in the way that you do. My writing is constantly an experiment, in a very plain sense of the word: a test to see if the present articulation provides a path. As usual, I am talking about myself, but I do want to remark on the short pieces that you have lately writ. ‘Mere’ sentences, which look so sparse and hopeless of endeavour, yet the Donne-like twists of their syntax and waywarding is lovely and new. Do you have a sense of these pieces in their brevity expanse, I mean in the concentrating poetic which endures in them? Oh, I imagine that you do…

138

2008-12-19T17:53:00.000-08:00

JH: Your poems are well worth the wait! Since the past year, I write approximately one poem a month. The intervening days aren't a worrisome expanse. I've published all my non-collaborative poetry, and eagerly anticipate the publication of collaborative work. Each reader can decide which of my poems was worthy of publication. Once a poem is written, publication places it out of the reach of its poet. This freedom is the penultimate stage in the human perception of a poem's self-sufficiency (the final stage is a poem's resistance to exegesis. Is the first stage a poem's resistance to being written, or its refusal to appear to a poet?). A poem is self-sufficient despite what anyone perceives, but what of the poet? Does the poet think of the poem in relation to the public, and so either brings the poem into the public or deliberately withholds it from the public? A poet is also of the public, and thinks of the public in addition to, if not in relation to, poetry. My artistic production is solely the writing of poems. You have mentioned that you've written novels and stories. I am one of many who would love to read them! Are there any other writings you haven't shared with the public? Here is an Allen Bramhall poem that, thankfully, was made public, via the Wryting-L list:

Passacaglia Pathway

Words are slivers, in the destiny of that sentence proved by marsh and reed. Our gestures are terms of present arrangement, gifted pressure of Pachelbel. There rose a night of beaming, close moon, scattered tithing stars. Evidence luxuriated in the rhyme fest, gracious bending flower that rose, again. As tides gather in moonlight, as we swear to the tillage and fall, our gift remains, melodic basso ostinato. The season is fidelity, tho sentences are mocked by the nature of one last word. A period does not end a marsh or bend a reed, but wind over the proffered instills reference. Collegiate logic rounds the corner of intuited posture. How we stand in the mud means more, which is in effect as words spell array. What light in the graded year presents more satisfaction than this difficult haze of being? Love is a strict measure, kept filled with a sortie to limit. Limit is a multiple, pleased to be our meaning. Our love is the extent that life lives us. The cannon’s effort masks a dogma of intent, yet sails are beaming harbours, every day toward any horizon. Everything strange is made to be loved. Love is our clasp of nature indeed. A poem, then, will enter the harvest, bustle with snowstorm, collect a diatom of reverie, and delight you, me, and any other. Such is the cannonade, comrade.

* * * * *
Could you speak about this superb poem, please?

AHB: What inspires the once a month poem? When I was younger, the point was to write, and I was quite assiduous, writing daily, often at a regular time or times. I have not read Martin Gladwell but I believe (2nd or 3rd hand report) that he posits the idea that one doesn’t become the artist (or whatever) that one is to become until 10,000 hours of work. Surely he pulls the number from his intellectual derrière, but I acknowledge a breakthrough point. At which the poet (in the current case) is prepared to write a poem when a poem needs to be written. You seem to be at that point, and I feel that I am as well. Do you have a similar sense, or even get what I mean?

Anyway, the idea that publication places a poem out of the reach of its poet is interesting. I have lots of work unknown to the public. Most of it belongs to my extended juvenilia. In the 80s I began writing stories that turned into novels. All of these things owed something or other to A Nest of Ninnies, by Schuyler and Ashbery. I had this world of characters, and I wrote with a distinct disdain for plot. I think 2 of these works are worthy of publication (and acclaim!!!). Unless it is just fata morgana for me, but I do not think so, last time I looked at them. I have been so intent on producing, now I must present.
As to Passacaglia, I guess it is an ode to Pachelbel’s Canon. I know that it is a warhorse piece, but I love its measured resolution. I also associate it with my mother’s death, or it associated itself in that way. The act of writing is a serial welcoming of each word, which sounds like hooey, I know, but that is how it feels. That is how it feels now, it used to feel like a rush and blur, and maybe something came of it. The poem associates Pachelbel’s Canon, and the marsh I walk by everyday, and anything else around at the time. The writer is in the words that arise in these things, the writing arises from them: thus the poem as it came to me. I guess I must come back to the idea of one poem a month. Is the poem that you write an event of expectation (you sit down to write) or does the poem come to you in an off moment? Here is one of your Virginia poems, which perhaps you could comment on in the context of your once a month, as well as your practice. Do you have a plan for them all?

Beneath the Ray
A star, Virginia, glacial as its swaddling of farthest night, spoke -- oh, but they were songs fairer than any rose -- to me of a crown brighter and higher. Will Virginia share her lyrist -- but, oh!, is forgetful that ray, fleeting as doubt of surest crown? -- when I conclude rose was in her mentions the cipher for a star? O, the constancy of the rose, and how like imaginings! Virginia, had I the crown that charms the star, no discrepancy of breast from lyre could be found, though beneath the ray of the brightest crown.

137

2008-12-14T07:11:00.001-08:00

JH: I think one thing we have in common as poets is a responsiveness to words that carry large definitions. My poems often contain names from Greek and Roman mythology, each name a word that has a story (with variations) as its definition. Worcester has a vast collection of stories as its definition. Concerning our recent discussion on inspiration, a poem presented in our mind may not be introduced to the page unless it calls a name other than ours. Names familiar to us, or bearing familiar enticements, are welcomed. Can words other than these familiars be heard? If so, are they heard after the poem is written? Are these words the poem itself speaks, along with anyone who recites the poem via reading, speaking, or hearing? Is the recital of a poem the only true mimicry a human can perform? It occurs to me that in Antic View #136 I didn't address the interaction of novel titles and drama quotations in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue" (& etc), so I'll close with a few remarks on this topic. In "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue" (and other poems in this series), it can be proved that the words after a line's final quotation mark come from the second speaker, but some of the poem's words that follow a line's final quotation mark might be found elsewhere in the Corneille drama (or in any Corneille drama, in other authors' dramas, in other texts); since the phrase that contains them is invisible within the poem, their every instance in the Corneille drama is indistinguishable outside of context. Perhaps this allies with the possibility of the drama phrases being found in the novels assigned to them: the words after a line's final quotation mark could be from the novel assigned to them, and the words quoted from other lines within the poem could possibly be found in the novel newly assigned to them. If a novel's title obscures/replaces a drama's title, what does a drama's excerpt obscure/replace? Note the title of the poem. Speaking of which, there are seven other instance of the poem's title within the poem. The poem's title is an unlineated couplet - "of" could be seen as enjambment spelled out). A "false" (i.e., "inappropriate") title is the first line of a couplet, for a space would separate it completely from "its" (actually, the drama's) phrase. The couplets allow comparison and contrast between a drama's phrase or word (if not the entire drama) and a novel's contents, as well as comparison and contrast of the two genres. The titles within the poem are a display of visibility and immobility. A title is sometimes a word, sometimes a phrase, echoing one or another element of the couplets' second line.

AHB: Intriguing thoughts about your work. Speaking of which, are you writing much? I have not been writing much poetry, not for lack of wanting to. This quiescence has been documented by the lack of posting to Antic View: all my fault. I have not seen much of your work pass thru Wryting-L, our home away from home. I probably have queried this before, but do breaks in your workflow bother you? I am inured to them myself. I feel a sense of maturity that I do not go bonkers when I cannot write. An additional question is are there works of your that you do not show? I can see one’s that are not satisfying to you, but how about any that you like but still wish not to present publicly. Two years ago I did an art showing, just me (part of my Masters project). Of course I wanted to show the pieces that I liked, but in going thru my work, I decided to show pieces with which I was not happy. I am not a trained artist so I cannot save paintings with technique, therefore, I had some really amateurish work on display. Regarding them as they are, in context with my oeuvre, made sense, and I think this value came across, tho I still was embarrassed by how poor so many pictures were. One should not be embarrassed by one’s experiments. In all cases, I was groping towards something. Now, I do not mean to limit my question just to whatever amateur work you have created. Is there a realm of your work that you will not reveal? Is this question even answerable???

136

2008-05-24T18:41:00.000-07:00

JH: In "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue", the first line of each couplet is the title of a Eugène Sue novel. In the second line of each couplet, the first word in quotation marks is followed by a sequence of words from the first instance of speech in a Pierre Corneille play, and the second word in quotation marks is followed by one word from the second instance of speech in that Corneille play, as is the semicolon. Capitalization in the play's lines, except for proper nouns, is reduced to lower-case, and punctuation marks found in the play have been removed. The chronology of word order in a "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue" couplet is the same as that of the Corneille play - the word following the semicolon doesn't precede the word following the final quotation mark.

Each word in quotation marks is from another couplet's second line. A word after a line's final quotation mark is quoted at the beginning of another line. The second quoted word is from the phrase between another line's quoted words.

couplet one partakes of couplet seven and four.
couplet two partakes of couplet five.
couplet three partakes of couplet six.
couplet seven partakes of couplet four and one.

schema of the above:

couplet 1. couplets seven, four
2. five
3. six
4. one, seven
5. two
6. three
7. four, one

I garnered words from Theatre choisi de Corneille (Editions Garnier Frères, 1961):

couplets
1. Horace
2. Suréna
3. Rodogune
4. Nicomède
5. Le Menteur
6. La Mort de Pompée
7. L'Illusion comique

No word outside of quotation marks is used twice, nor does a line share a word with a title. The pair of words after a line's final quotation mark mirror the instance of words in quotation marks. So far, I've written two other poems in this series, "The Jean Racine of Georges Simenon" and "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne". The selection of words for these poems are invisible: the Verne, Simenon, and Sue titles that were not chosen are invisible, and all Hugo, Racine, and Corneille titles are invisible; the words in the Hugo, Racine, and Corneille plays that were not selected for inclusion are invisible. The selection of words within these poems are visible: the words not placed in quotation marks are visible.

I intend to write more poems in this series, which is part of a larger series containing poems like "The Ducks of Cotton Mather" (see Antic View #84) and "The Edward Gibbon of Phillis Wheatley" (see Antic View #103). This series allows for development. For example,

Otoliths.

"The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne" mimics "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue". Five of the couplets in both poems share words:

Couplet one. "séduite" is quoted in both. "encor" appears and is not quoted in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne", and is quoted in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue".

Couplet two. "jaloux" is quoted in the same position in both.

Couplet three. "vainqueur" appears and is not quoted in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne", and is quoted in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue". In both poems, "Memphis" appears and is not quoted (in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne", it is before the semicolon; in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue", it is after the semicolon).

Couplet five. "jaloux" is in the same position in both. "madame" is quoted at the beginning of this couplet's second line in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue", and appears (capitalized, as it is in the source edition of Hugo's "Angelo, Tyran De Padoue", where "Madame" is the last word of a sentence; in the Corneille source edition "Suréna", "madame" is not capitalized) and is not quoted at the end of this couplet's second line in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne".

Couplet six. "vainqueur" is quoted in "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne", and appears and is not quoted in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue".

(The source edition for the second line of "The Victor Hugo of Jules Verne" couplets is the 1964 Pléiade edition of Victor Hugo's complete plays.

couplets
1. Hernani
2. Lucrèce Borgia
3. Irtamène
4. Ruy Blas
5. Angelo, Tyran De Padoue
6. Amy Robert
7. Marie Tudor)

One need not know the language to read the poems in this series (which it has in common with many of the poems in my series GRANDUNCLES OF THE CATTLETRADE - see examples in Otoliths issues four and five). Readers could approach these poems like the Zukofskys approached Catullus, and the form would remain the same. In these poems, can the dictionary definition of the words be anything more than coincidental with the form, such as, in "The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue", "encor", "murs", "plus", "séduite", etc.? What do the coincidental (with the form) meanings of these words do to the meanings of the other words? Do the quoted words bring their phrases with them? Do they bring their Corneille plays with them? Speaking of the Zukofskys, you mentioned one of them in your superb poem

"Unpwned Momentum on Worcester", posted to the Wryting-L list:

accept these jet skies. remain unpwned but
surround a topic with servile pleas, for instants.
the dam seeps sanely. a whiff of common
ground seems like poem. no one relies
on Louis Zukofsky except
when the dread of melting seems
most dire. we relate in penned
moments, and come again. this sex
that stills the waters also ignites them.
those waters, sour when the rain is old,
charges us supremely.
we wr ite of daffy fiends, nuclear almonds,
cousinly trapdoors, and more than
enough. enough is a surcharge yet
when we exceed, primroses, pure as
water. water went the way, into the
breath of Worcester. we write
poems as staggering targets, gullies
for freshets, lapsed pining in the daily
reward program. such reefs and poems
that we assay, trying times but love
intends. it has this hold, it is
our boat. we right in deed and that's our
place. place is the name. such, that is,
that Worcester, least of all, can
hold. Zukofsky rips a
new one there, every day.

---

You've written many Worcester poems. Could you speak about them, please, in addition to "Unpwned Momentum on Worcester"?

AHB: There is an obsessive necessity in your methodical details, which fascinates me. And that your work indicates the boundaries, or possibilities, of the thing there. That thing being the presence, or present, of a poem.
Regarding my poem, I wonder if I meant jet skis when writing it. Maybe not. I feel real edgy in using the negative of pwned, pwned being a word I got from my son’s vast experience of internet communication and gaming. I began writing about the Worcester series for you but that was only descriptive of what I had done so far, not useful, so I dumped it. I realized that I didn’t know why I was writing the series, what was pulling me. I can reveal that the poems are, modestly so far, a collaboration. I have been instructed to call my collaborator “an unnamed correspondent”. This person is en scene, and inspires and informs what I have written. I have taken words therefrom, as well. The Worcester poems, still in progress, continue in their way from my Brockton Poems, which were written full 8 years ago, in the early blush of my late blooming (I sort of rebecame a poet in 1999). I should explain that Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Abbie Hoffman, Robert Benchley (Benchley being a surprisingly strong influence on my writing) all lived in Worcester, as did rocketman Robert Goddard, and John Adams taught there. And when Freud and Jung visited the US together, where did they go? Clark University, in the 2nd largest city in Massachusetts. Shades of Guy Davenport. It is a basis, let us say, Worcester is, for poetic cogitations and divagations, if not method. Thus I have Zukofsky in its midst, and so forth, as can be seen. This all directly goes against your own more considered methodology, I know, but I think we arrive at similar places, i.e., the poetic.
As I wrote about the Worcester series, in what I discarded, I relished the specifics of my method and interest. Which are participles of the work but are more rumours than dynamic instances. This is problematic for me. My anecdotal evidence of a working means does not seem useful to others, or is so only in haphazard. I find a keenness in your description of your method. My Worcester series stems from an eagerness. I think clarity would come the more I work on it, and the more I intrude my correspondent’s input. I should add (because it may look suspect) that the correspondent is a real person not a literary device, and it was this person’s choice to be referred to thusly.

135

2008-04-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

JH: I've yet to write a poem from beginning unceasingly to end. If a lyric takes hours to write, how is the poem's inspiration heard by its author? If a sonnet has, for instance, one hundred words, Erato could intone it under a quarter of an hour, though its sonneteer may take hours, in a day or over months, to complete the poem. Another hundred-word lyric may be written nigh-synchronous with its inspiration, and be as powerful as the sonnet in my example. In a poem there is an equivalence of nuance and definition. Definitions of a word lengthen with the shadows, and shade becomes foundation. One faces this when reading, and re-reading, a poem; one faces this when writing a poem. An author may record a poem's first appearance to his or her mind, the first reading, or an author may record a re-reading of this poem. In a re-reading, what happens to the first reading? If new information, minute or momentous, enters, as is inevitable, a re-reading, it is not a copy of the first reading. If by definition a poem is powerful, this is a lot of memory to discard, even if only one element is altered (this also applies to the re-reading of another's poem). What is the author who delays recording a poem's appearance until a given re-reading, whether the second or twenty-fifth, waiting for? Words can be altered once they are written; the literary does not prohibit re-reading.

AHB: I respond after a lengthy hiatus. Not writing is part of writing. The literary does not prohibit not writing. I have been busy but it is not as if I could not have stolen moments to limn a few lines in reply. That wonderful back cover blurb of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems comes to mind, with this picture of FO walking the New York streets, typing lines on stray Olivettis, and never missing lunch. I think this replies to your questions. There is a need to wait sometimes, to go inarticulate, to await the word itself. The poem knows its flowering just as does the mighty daffodil. I think how resistant I was to Pound’s chockablock, but not to Olson’s. Or Creeley, goodness! His work always betrayed the necessity of working within stricture, whether of form, or of thought pattern, or emotional inkling. Yet so much of his earlier work, parlaying rhyme and metre especially, that I could not abide. Only when Pieces showed some new (to me) extension, did I start to pay attention. I have been thinking much about Creeley lately, reading some but also reexamining my assumptions and previous ideas. What you say of the writer goes equally for the reader. What is a reader who delays recording a poem’s appearance until a given re-reading…?

You posted the following poem to the Wryting-L list. One listee wished that you had provided a translation. I get that, but I think he misses a possibility by not accepting the poem strictly on its own terms. Je parle un peu, but what if I did not have un poco Français? How would I to read this poem eh? (A friend of French-Canadian descent spoke of how his grandmother would say, I don’t know, me, more like a transition than translation into English. Just as my New England tongue actually bespeaks ay-yuh without my noticing. I could not ‘do’ a New English accent if you asked me). Your method with this piece, I know, is methodical random selection of lines. Do you have visions of readers approaching the texts like the Zukofskys approached Catullus?

The Pierre Corneille of Eugène Sue

LA SALAMANDRE
«séduite» approuvez ma faiblesse, «encore» batailles; applaudir

LES MYSTERES DE PARIS
«jaloux» aux murs d'Hécatompyle, «nous» vous; madame

JEAN CAVALIER
«trompée» plus heureux le sceptre, «vainqueur» Parthes; Memphis

LATREAUMONT
«batailles» occaison encor se renouvelle, «grotte» voyais; secours

THERESE DUNOYER
«madame» mais puisque nous voici, «murs» jaloux; malheur

KARDIKI
«Memphis» vainqueur vit ses prospérités, «plus» Pompée; trompée

MATHILDE
«voyais» cette grotte obscure, «faiblesse» inquiétudes; séduite

134

2008-02-22T16:17:00.000-08:00

JH: Poetry, and the poet (in the specific use of the term in Antic View #133, which is how I'm using it in this 134th installment), appears from wherever thought appears, and is as distinct from idea, instinct, emotion, and that thought bears as idea, instinct, emotion, etcetera are distinct from each other; yet, as an idea - of custom, or of what is suitable to reason - may dispel an emotion, and as an emotion may quell an idea, or one may strengthen another, so may poetry, and the poet, respond to and influence varieties of thought. If poetry, and the poet, appears from a source outside the author, such as Muse or Daemon, then poetry, and the poet, is received by thought via the author's sense(s) of sight, sound, smell, touch, taste - singly, totally, or any combination.
In dream visions wherein poems are revealed, the dreamer's senses are depicted within the dream, if not actually put into play by the dream. A poem is as alien to its scribe as much or as little as that scribe's ideas, instincts, emotions, and all else his or her thought bears. We write our own poems to the same degree as we think our own thoughts. Writers of poems think their own thoughts to the same degree as other people think their own thoughts. The amount of thought the poem-writing process requires is prodigious, whether the time and energy an author consciously expends is as torturous as an alchemist's search for the Philosopher's Stone or as gossamer as blinking. Speaking of alchemy, thanks for your kind words on my "The Melting of Salts, or, A Defence of Poetry". The ultimate result of a successful alchemical process is the recipe. The recipe is what the gold, predicted by the lead (the lead is the foundation, without which there is no alchemical gold, no poem on the paper), predicts. What process created the recipe that is "The Melting of Salts, or, A Defence of Poetry"? There is mention of a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay "A Defence of Poetry", an "entire reading", which is an ideal of any who aspire to be an entire reader (who, in turn, could be an ideal of an author such as Shelley), an utmost reading of each word, of the whole text. An entire reading is mythical (and nonetheless possible), and indeed the ambiguous words "may" and "infer" are ambiguously placed: the inference from an entire reading of Shelley's essay is mythological, or all of the fourth sentence of "The Melting of Salts, or, A Defence of Poetry" is mythological, including the entire reading of Shelley's essay (and the essay itself - title, content, and referents - does it survive these Delphic vapors?). Are the words of the first paragraph's four other sentences made mythological by the fourth sentence? Is the second paragraph affected by the fourth sentence? I'm much taken by your poem "Tom Brady lives with us all", recently posted on the Wryting list:

wild poem renders make of death. the gosh of looming windows stills in soon the stuttered sequence. we read the room of filling tune aloft, whilst straining call overtly dooms the moon a preying time. dash the quickened dear till of the football life. the means is quell to the gnostic mention. a love of lists and pools of mountain lump greengage tremble mumbling rill and trill till the soil transit. posit often
cluster, run the moon again. again the staid and dying, again the oxygen refrain, again the dog of when that was. now the post and fueling, now the word unveiled, now the gesture compost. here the rife of fends for all. it is the day of daily parade, taken to a road.

Could you speak on this poem, please?
AHB: well, the New England Patriots won THAT game: I wrote the poem directly after the Pats defeated the Giants to end the regular season. and really, that's all Delphic vapours, whether or not I am a dedicated fan or not, and I’m not. The game itself was closely fought and exciting, so the poem expresses that nature. And yet, it doesn’t express anything, particularly, not directly, as statement. Poetry is often a presentation of unexpectedness. I could have written a paean to Tom Brady, the hero, but the writing event was not a matter of statement or opinion. Instead, I see as I look at the poem (the forethought was unthought, as usual in my writing), there exists a translation. Words are used, let us say, wrong in the poem. The wrongness is weighed by expectation, so that the less the reader expects, the more the reader can glean. Which is the hard won and inconsistently understood lesson of my formative reading (all credit to the Robert Grenier who helped bump me onto the path). So there, I have spoken of my poem, which expatiation allows me to see the workings that I blithely assumed as I wrote. You are more methodical in your process, but do you ever write in a fevered rush? I’ve done things like write non-stop for an hour, that is, as literally as possible keep pen (I wrote by hand) moving.