Antic View

164

2014-06-09T05:00:00.001-07:00

JH: When writing a poem, I can only think of that particular poem; thoughts of its publication or its inclusion in an ideal collection follow. Can I say that when I write an Actaeon poem it is as though I never wrote an Actaeon poem before, when there are recurrences of phrases? I cannot tell whether these recurrences are intentional, whether I have my prior Actaeon poems in mind. Do you keep drafts of a poem in mind when you are writing that poem? It is hard for me to ascertain whether I keep drafts in mind; if I do it is fleeting, as I typically write a poem in one day, in one sitting; I know, thanks to the drafts, what to avoid and what to approach. The difference between drafts and poems in a series is a poet may revisit poems and phrases within the construction of a series, whereas in an individual poem the drafts are lost unless appended to the finished, decided poem.
As far as the preservation and presentation of my Actaeon poems, perhaps a chapbook of the 16 poems. I could also include those 16 poems as a section in a collection of my poems.

AHB: I just hope your Actaeon poems are given a wider broadcast. I don't want to read poetry written to serve publication. Such will only be crowded onto a tippy pedestal.

I don't really have drafts of poems anymore. I write, reach a place where the poem says it is done, then fuss with it, most often in one sitting. Changes are made by overwriting. Whatever is overwritten is gone. I don't fear losing anything as I overwrite. A poem is an instant.

I don't mean to denigrate a sustained and formal rewriting process. My own poetry writing process demands that I surprise myself. This actually shows more clearly in the reviews and ruminations that I put on my No Awardwinning blog Tributary (www.tribute-airy,blogsport.com). Word choices appear that I didn't expect. In my poetry, disjunctive slips and leaps radiate the poem that I write. A poem is a momentary breeze or whatnot. It is not something I can fix, but only honour by writing it down.

Your writing has changed much over the years, as I have been witness to. Has your reading changed?

163

2014-05-16T03:55:00.001-07:00

JH: A poem can make much of a word that would not be large on its own, and a word can enlarge a poem. In the latter case, this enlargement is often temporary, historical. Grand themes do not necessarily make for grand poems. How grand a poem is when all the words tower! Rhythm is getting all the words to stack up.
As a reader, I want every poem that a poet has written, along with drafts. As a poet, I want only what works well within a totality. Just as a poem is a totality (and I would not want my drafts appended to a finished poem of mine), a book is a totality, and I would not want a book of mine to have poems that would be appended to that totality. There are 16 Actaeon poems in this ideal totality, but I could add poems that I have yet to write, as I don't think that the poems I've selected move toward a point where the 16th poem must be read as the final poem.

AHB: Emily Dickinson kind of did want her drafts appended to the finished poem. Or, speaking of her fascicles, she allowed for alternate word choice. I see drafts as separate poems. Myself, I don't really have drafts. With the computer, I make changes, and the previous is gone. Word processors allow for the retaining of drafts but I do not bother.

When I worked on typewriter, I used to number drafts. And I would retype for the merest change, even the correction of 'h' before 't' in 'the' . In Three Poems, Ashbery ponders putting everything in, or not. You can make a case, either way. As the writing goes, do you at all strive towards the published article? The Internet allows for things to get out there, but the Internet is a field of niches and a squandering of scope. What I mean is, do you plan for an Actaeon for the ages?

162

2014-05-08T05:19:00.001-07:00

JH: A fragment speaks for itself. What, then, does the indicated missing text do? A poem can stand apart from historical context, biographical data, drafts, and commentary. Can a poem stand apart from itself? When it is a fragment, it can (and, one could also say, when it is a translation). What about a series? What if we had only one or two of Rilke's Orpheus sonnets, or only a few of the poems in Leaves of Grass? For that matter, what if we are missing -- and I'm sure that we are -- one or two sonnets that Rilke could have included in The Sonnets to Orpheus, or a few poems that Whitman could have included in Leaves of Grass?

There are 16 of my Actaeon poems that I would want preserved in a totality. These 16 Actaeon poems would be in a particular order. The rest of my Actaeon poems (I've written about 100) would not be practicable for this ideal book, though I have no problem with them individually.

AHB: I've always disliked anthologies that offer extracts from larger works. I guess the willful loss bothers me. It find it difficult to read a fragment as itself when one knows there is more. Yet each word has a life and conviction; each exists in totality beyond any fragment's existence. And yet, I imagine any lost Rilke Sonnet nonetheless influences those that we have. That is, Rilke's making of those lost poems created the possibility of the ones that followed.

I am thoroughly surprised that you would/could boil down the 100 to a mere 16. Is this a matter of winnowing and sifting, or did you always have a track in mind that the 16 fulfilled?

161

2014-05-06T04:30:00.001-07:00

JH: The translation of six of my Actaeon poems into Spanish was not a collaboration, but the work of Diana Magallón, who also did the illustrations. Diana, a great poet and artist, contacted me and asked if she could translate some of my poems. When I agreed (enthusiastically!), she asked which poems did I want translated. I selected a few, and the result is on weeimage.
Are words timeless when they are not received, when they are seen but not read, or when they are read but not read carefully? Lacking a fuller presence than when they are received (received fully, or more fully), do they lack time? The time is all our own, the time is each person's. A poem that is timeless lacks something, if only time; but aside from time, this lack may be what is felt in the text of certain poems, that which is evoked but not expressed, that which, though behind the word, is not found in a dictionary.
What loads a poem with time? Is a poem that is not timeless ephemeral, a poem that dates? If not timeless, then historical?

AHB: Interesting that her name is Diana. I don't know what words do when not in use. I think of the ancient Greek poems, that we have almost entirely in fragment (which is a conflictive phrase, no doubt). Sappho's poetry (for us) exists in scrids, guesswork, and the opinion of those who had greater experience of it. Her words are largely gone but somewhere her poetry is an effective living power or energy. Her poetry, then, exists in time but as we now have it, her poetry has no time. But if the scifi novel came true, and someone Went Back in Time, and fetched her work in toto, her work would have a different time.

What loads a poem with time? The ocular presence of slang or reference. I guess. Francois Villon wrote a French that differed from the modern, and he used much slang tied verily to a time. Same goes for Shakespeare. Et al. Time as barrier tho needless to say, not impermeable. It's a matter of translation, which is a loss of immediacy. For me.

The translation by time is inevitable and perhaps confusing. Hugh Kenner explained the Shakespeare's phrase “the boys of summer” as referring to dandelions. Someone used the phrase as a title for a book, and now it brings to mind Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers now reside in LA, where no trolley cars need to be dodged. And we readers are left with the tracings of intersections. Ah, well!

The latest poem I have seen by you is “Parthenius”:

Actaeon, could the hart speak; Parthenius, could the fount. The hounds, they know their names, and cannot give them. And what name would the bather give? The bather... Parthenius, I believe.

* * *

I have yet to research the name Parthenius, but it almost doesn't matter. Your Actaeon poems seem like multidimensional extensions of the figures on some Grecian urn. Do you have a sense of presentation of these gems beyond messages on a listserv? I have suggested cards a la Robert Grenier's Sentences.

160

2014-04-02T05:41:00.001-07:00

JH: Internalized, absorbed texts may be considered as either a part of the poet's personality (character?) or as another personality of the poet; in other words, either as a part of the poet's personality or as the poet, the one who writes the poems. Which would you say? I would say the latter. In writing many poems about Actaeon, I am able to write an Actaeon poem as naturally as I am able to write a journal entry or respond to your Antic View questions. Naturally, but not effortlessly, else I could write an Actaeon poem on demand, as I can answer a question on demand or write of the day's events on demand. An Actaeon poem is more poem than it is Actaeon. I consistently like your writing, for example, this gem, "Walk Down a Path":

Artful indolent cold spell in the reply version of where you are. Place mobile war chant on loud, exert word for posture, extend depth to the least surface.

Impulse beckons. That means your loan arranger has scads of destiny to replace your life. You are politically viable, with a laugh. Fading is an intense practice of widespread. Delete autonomy, it doesn't pay.

Easy exactitude when if comes to refrains. If you say it over, and add over, your days will arrive the space of menace. Do not misdoubt the cactus of seeming attribute.

A poem in the while commands a station in the naught. You were reasoning for a while, the while left home. Space is the detection of infinite, which fills the space between words aswork.

You are like a wind in words forever. So am I. So are the words that make forever.

****

Could you speak of this poem, please?
AHB: For quite a while you wrote of/about/concerning a Virginia that was something a person, something a place, something even a mindset. Your Actaeon poems seem to be similar in tactic and moreso. They seem to be written in sacred time, with actions and events (of Actaeon) caught (nympholepsy) in timeless radiance. It is not obsession from which you write but a sense of time's extent. My own poem above finds a frequent state for me where words seem formidable and timeless. I think I write wondering if words will work. All words could work, but they don't always. Or we (readers/writers/people) don't know how to receive.
You posted a link to Spanish translations of some Actaeons to Wryting-l. The translations include illustrations. I'll include the originals you supplied at the end of this post. Speak of the collaboration,
link: http://weeimage.blogspot.it/2014/02/acteon-by-jeff-harrison.html
originals:
Hunters, their valuation

If a hart, how was Actaeon a hunter? Who was Actaeon next to Hippolytus? Actaeon imbruted did not astonish the steeds of steady Hippolytus; no Actaeon rose from the sea. Artemis beheld, what Nimrod reshaped raised the name of Hydra, of Chimaera, of beast Nemean, Calydonian?
~
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.
~

Our Actaeon‏

Again disarranged, our Actaeon; a supernal's tooth, then our own. I am as many paces from this as from the moon. Actaeon had an Artemis; could we not have had a Circe, like those who served a wilier, luckier captain?

Actaeon still‏

Take my hand; I perish, maniac. Than a hart's stems I am more frail by far; my spirit will fail before I leave your fountain's side. Actaeon still, I cannot face another supernal, and several, and these supernals hounds.

Our Actaeon‏
Again disarranged, our Actaeon; a supernal's tooth, then our own. I am as many paces from this as from the moon. Actaeon had an Artemis; could we not have had a Circe, like those who served a wilier, luckier captain?
~
Actaeon still‏
Take my hand; I perish, maniac. Than a hart's stems I am more frail by far; my spirit will fail before I leave your fountain's side. Actaeon still, I cannot face another supernal, and several, and these supernals hounds.
~
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.
~
Actaeon
Down the rain of all my days the deer steps.

159

2014-03-31T03:43:00.001-07:00

JH: Do you ever revisit texts that you once found influential, but now leave you unsympathetic? Are there degrees of influence? Might an author no longer be interested in a certain degree of influence? There are types of influences, and one or more of these types may no longer interest an author; for instance, an author may no longer be interested in forms, or may no longer be interested in theory.

AHB: Let's just pretend there has been no two year gap. I do revisit influential texts. I would not say my reaction has become unsympathetic. More that the particular text has been absorbed. Not perhaps in detail, the way a scholar would, but that I had gained the usefulness for me from it. At this point in my life, I'm not trying to imitate writers, which I did consciously and unconsciously as a young writer. Spring and All by WCW comes to mind as just such a text. Its variety of approach with crisp short-lined poems interspersed with prose sections was eye-opening to me. But if I ever wrote a “WCW Poem”, I didn't want to continue doing so. And as much as I have learned from Charles Olson, I don't want to write Maximus Poems. Theory really helped hone my understanding of poetry but now theory would only serve to make me self-conscious. It should be noted that the pleasure I derive from reading poetry is pretty random. Often enough I cannot abide even the stuff I “like”. But I do consistently like your writing. You have for quite some time been producing these terse, enigmatic texts of barely a line. Many, like the following, feature Actaeon.

No Hart Follows

The hart leaps! The hart leaps! I had always seen the hart leap. The bather steps, the hart leaps, and no hart follows the bather from her bourne. The hound looks to the skies, the wolf looks to the moon, and neither hound nor wolf descry the hart.

* * * * *

It's a picture, or figures on a Grecian urn. Jeff, whence come these gems?

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?

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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