Blake at Felpham

Felpham is a sweet place for Study. because it is more Spiritual than London Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates her windows are not obstructed by vapours. . voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard & their forms more distinctly seen & my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses.
William Blake, Letter to John Flaxman, September 21,1800

wan do tree fear

The name of this blog comes from the following poem by
Bob Cobbing:

wan
do
tree
fear
fife
seeks
siphon
eat
neighing
den
elephan'
twirl

WOMANWANDERSWARNING

The late Hannah Weiner's posthumously published Page(Roof Books, 2002) is a remarkable piece of writing. It seems to me to be less a matter of schizophrenia or clairvoyance, both of which “afflicted” Weiner. The book seems squarely in the tradition of the more experimental of the poets of the latter part of the century, particularly Bernadette Mayer and Ron Silliman. Each page of Page appears to be written in a day, over a day perhaps, or maybe in a minute. The book is made up of four serial poems, the first and longest and most perceptive, entitled Page, as its an analysis of what makes up a page. It is unclear exactly who is doing the talking in the poem, it could be heard voices, or seen words, but just as easily Hannah Weiner talking, or rather writing, to herself (“Hannah, youre stuck”), educating herself. It is an epistolary book, and probably is just as easily genealogical or biographical (the 'character” sis could easily be her aunt as addressed by her mother, or vice versa, or the aunt addressing Weiner). There are others in the book, a Douglas, a Richard, a Charles (Bernstein?) and quite a lot of ron Silliman (or ron or silliman). It is such an amazing book it doesn't really matter, all versions work, all versions of Hannah and her relatives and friends. Perhaps all of these people could be said to be results of schizophrenia, perhaps not. The book is about relatives and relationships. Altogether always.
The poems here are research, exploration (“in this even we study ourselves”) in the tradition of Mayer, MacLow and Cage. They rely on repetition, refularity, structure and a strange relationship with time: “one page a day remembers someone.” This is about completeness, integrity and control, therefore about becoming a being(s) and therefore freedom. There are addresses to 'sis,” who is herself (or others, as above), there are addresses to 'mother' who must certainly not be. There is the invention of words, there are combines (“OBNOXIOCAREFUL,” “illusionment”). There is concern for the sentence, for syntax and for ignoring the rules of such. There is concern for process and also for subject: ”have your subject,” “to be a subject.” She is also funny: “go wild stupid furniture green around.” There is underwear, once “ronsilliman underwear.” There are events, emotions and stories. But whose? she likes words (after all she has seen them on her forehead), she likes writing, she likes being a poet: “seen words finishes happy myself make yourself a poet.” This is a fun, luxuriously baroque book. Yes it is a little manic. Full of struggle, full of understanding. Hannah is Hannah backwords. Exhilarating.

"What Sustains the beautiful is loss"

Is this true? This remarkable sentence is to be found in Louise Gluck's introduction to a much praised book of poems by Spencer Reece, called The Clerk's Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). It is sort of characteristic of the book, which is everywhere overmuch.
The title poem was published in the New Yorker a while back, with a page all to itself, which gave this poem, poet and book a lot to live up to. The title poem is likeable in some sense, but also repelling in another, the sense of detail is both wonderful, funny, but also somewhat lurkingly patronizing, or even self patronizing. Many of the poems are a little too that. Annie Dillard in a blurb, says that these poems "will exhalt you." There is a lot of talk in the introduction about 'studied attention to detail" and a "profound" sense of loss. Now, there certainly is a lushness to the poems, but it is a lushness of emotion that is way to over the top. There is not a real lushness of language, what is lacking is a trust in language, lacking in the poet and in the introducer in regard to the poems. All of which is not to say that there are some very very effective poems in the book, mostly in the less personal, less over-determined of the poems, which are the ones in series, especially those entitled ghazals. Luckily, this is a good portion of the book. A strange and bizarre production all around, including the cover reproduction of an amazingly pale, elegant young man, a portrait by Sargeant of one W. Graham Norton, which of course, continues to overdeterimine how one might read these poems.

Another version of Dante

Drawings for Dante's Inferno by Rico Lebrun. The Kanthos Press, 1963.

Born in Naples, Italy, Italian American artist Rico Le Brun (1900-1964) emigrated to Springfield, Illinois to study stained glass technique, and to New York in 1924, where he worked in advertising and fashion illustration. He moved to California in 1938 where he taught at a number of institutions, including the Walt Disney Studios and UCLA. His drawings for the Inferno are networks of fine, light lines, conveying nevertheless a deep sense of darkness and tragedy, and in the case of “Ugolino,” of man's inhumanity to man. His illustrations for the Inferno were among his last projects.

John Ciardi was particularly fond of Lebrun's illustrations:

“For the last hundred years or so, most English readers of Dante have first become aware of him in those oversized, now flaky, brown volumes that contain the Doré illustrations. Because of the popularity of those volumes, Doré has become fixed in many minds as something like the official illustrator of Dante: mention the Inferno, and an English reader is likely to visualize exactly those dark Gothic landscapes with two hooded figures in the foreground, and the rest of the composition thronged by classic nudes, the men as muscular as Laocoön, the women voluptuous enough for a Sabine raid. The trouble is Doré did not understand Dante. Nor was he alone in that: Botticelli tried to illustrate Dante and came up with sketches so curlycued and rhythmically lilting that they might do for midsummernight's dance of fairies. Both men did what they understood how to do without taking the happy trouble to understand Dante. . . . it is only Rico Lebrun who succeeds in giving me a graphic Inferno, a series of interpretations that clearly declare their authority as graphic conceptions while faithfully rendering a sense of Dante. For -- despite all our habituated misunderstandings -- Hell is not a Gothic cave, nor is it a festival of dance rhythms, nor is it a series of monkish miniatures. It is a concept.”

One Version of Dante

The Inferno of Dante, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, with illustrations by Barry Moser. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980.

Allen Mandelbaum's translation is quintessentially postmodern, fully and multifariously cognizant of the private, political, sociological, historical and linguistic worlds of the Commedia. It privileges the complex play of language, the eccentric, the digressions, diversions and asides, the intense internal structure of Dante's verse, as is evident in the introductory elucidation:

“He needs every tangibility he can summon from the world of the shades---but summons personally, crossing into that world, witnessing. He needs to begin his journey from as state as like to death as one can get while still alive. He needs to read his Hegel well (just as Hegel must read him) to understand that not only the Christian but the Hegelian---or the Heideggerian---poet can gather ultimate energy from only one sure fount: the fear---the absolute fear---of death, a wood “so bitter---death is hardly more severe” (Inf 1,7). And to that end, it matters little whether what is feared is divine judgment or causeless nothingness, Madame Oubli and her company of Slabby-mists, of Nebel, Nichts, Neant and just Victor Hugo's 'old usherette' with he black spectacle.'”

Robert Irwin Quotations

To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception.

The act of art is a tool for extended consciousness.

The act of art has turned to a direct examination of our perceptual processes.

We have chosen that experience out of the realm of expereiences to be defined as "art" because having this label it is given special attention. Perhaps this is all art means.

If that state of consciousness I keep talking about became, in a sense, the consciousness of society as a whole, if we really thought in those terms, and were really that aware, . . . really that sense-sophisticated, then our art would be an integral part of our society and the artist as a separate discipline or art as a separate event would not exist.

Perhaps the furture role of the aritst will be to act directly as the arbiter of qualities in our livess. Quality not as an add-on, as it is now, but as a criteria in all matters of planning.

Any tool you use is legitimate. The key to the tool is whether it has the dimensions to deal with what have become your questions. I consider art as a thought form more than anything else.

My art ahs never been about ideas...My interest in art has never been about abstraction; it has always been about experience. . . . My pieces were never meant to be dealt with intellectually as ideas, but to be considered experientially.

From Robert Irwin. Part 1: Prologue:x18(3) Part II: Homage to the Square
www.diacenter.org/irwin/quotes.html.

Heavenly City

Robert Duncan's first book, Heavenly City, Earthly City was published by Bern Porter in Berkeley in 1948. The title poem from this volume was chosen by James Laughlin for inclusion in the 1948 volume of New Directions in Prose and Poetry, an annual exhibition gallery of new and divergent trends in literature. The New Directions volume is simply designed, clearly printed and editorially sophisticated, signaled by a dedication to the elegant and tasteful Alfred and Blanche Knopf. “who over the years of there publishing have greatly enriched American culture by providing English translations of significant European Books." Duncan, who is described in the contributors note for him as “young California poet” is in heady company in the volume, which includes essays by Mary McCarthy and Evelyn Waugh (on Hollywood) and fiction by Paul Bowles, Howard Nemerov, Paul Goodman, Carson McCullers, James Agee and Tennesse Williams. It is an intellectual and leftist cast of characters, but a tasteful one and in fact Laughlin provides “A Few random Notes From the Editor” his impressions of the war torn landscapes of Europe, still to him more aesthetically appealing than America. There is a bit of anti-communist rhetoric thrown in too, perhaps to soften the international flavor of the volume, which includes New Poems from Peru (A Little Anthology), A Little Anthology of Italian Poetry (Ungaretti, Montale and others) and a Little Anthology of French Poetry (Char, Michaux, Eluard, Gracq, Prevert). Other poets included in the volume are Richard Eberhart, Vernon Watkins, Pieter Vierck, William Jay Smith and Richard Wilbur. Duncan's long poem takes up 9 pages and has pride of place in the volume with more space than any other poet in the volume. The poem itself is in three sections with an overture, and is a gnostic confabulation of longing, love, bad reactions to love and confusion.

Pyrite

“A word like pyrite, for example, was for me, not simply an indicative sign; it was the Proper Name of a Sacred Being, so that, when I heard an aunt pronounce it pirrite, I was shocked.” W. H. Auden