composing – Page 8 – The Art of Compost

Erasure and treatment

Started looking round, wondering where to start a post on my own efforts in erasure and treatment, creative demolition and reformation of a source text – a loving demolition, a savage reformation. I sure am not going to subject you, nor endure myself, some blow by blow account of my misadventures. But it was interesting to see where I got started. I’d forgotten.

Salt Lake City circa 2010 and I’m finishing my diss. I’ve read into the shining spaces in Johnson’s Radi Os and been blindsided by the Blakean rainbows of Phillips’s A Humument. I’ve a stash of found matter (NYT clippings) ten years after a day I’ve not been able to write of to around or about. And I understand, post-Bervin, erasure’s growing old, as too 9/11 and poems about 9/11 have some time since grown old. Understand as well my sense of old and the currency of old are not maybe typical of the avant-garde I maybe or maybe not aspire to keep company with.

Well anyhoo. Our discourse around 9/11 seemed censorious in all sorts of ways. Repression that made it seem past in ways it was present and present in ways it was past. Repression with political beginnings and a mercantile middle and self-preening ends. And with black bars I could maybe indict the targets both obvious (war crimes of the Bush admin) and subtle (oh come let’s say it liberal friends we can be sanctimonious). Also black bars seemed easy to make even for such graphically mega-challenged as I.

So I went there with the redactors and they there with me. Made a few heaps of found material and did a selection thing derived a bit from Johnson a bit from Phillips and a bit from Bervin.

I never ended up publishing these in any version or trying very hard to. A good friend, one I showed them to early on, was upset by them, and she’s a New Yorker, and that she was offended, though I didn’t get it then, I took serious, and thought best to move on. So maybe Sal you saved me from something stupid. Where Sal by the way ARE you?

And well now I do get it. Seems kinda obvious now. Sal I didn’t mean to silence the voices of the victims. I meant that the voices of the victims had been silenced. But yeah thanks for saving me from my stupid. Still though where ARE you?

Pretty crude, yes? compared to what my students have been up to. Gonna skip a bunch of steps in my own progress to get to where I’m about at now. That’s the next post.

And then, after that, because onward is always, their next adventure – handwriting. The inscribed line, thick or thin, mischief or dutiful, studied or fleeting, how it expresses a moment of spirit, before and in language.

Student work – Treated page

A few responses to the treated page exercise I gave my students as we met and read and viewed and wrestled with Tom Phillips’s A Humument. All struck me. Each differs from the others plenty. None imitates Phillips servilely. All take care with their erasural gestures, understand them to be, as they are, presences in their own right.

One that foreswears mimesis almost entirely and uses abstract form pattern and colour to expose the ickiness of its source text’s speaker. (A lot depends with this exercise on the right kind of friction with one’s source text.)

One that goes maximal, takes erasure as a baroque occasion. (I neglected to note the source text here, oops.) It actually has texture under your fingertips. Glitter that bites back.

And one that goes minimal, erases erasure, or proposes that we omit omission, or something like that, its ironies tangle my head. The source text is Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and it mucks with their most famous pro-imposition, “Omit needless words.”

A dismantlement of text that can’t help but call to mind Susan Howe’s, as this from “Fragment of the Wedding Dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards” in Souls of the Labadie Tract:

(A poet I’ve never had the guts to try to teach.) There were others good, wonderful even, or that didn’t in themselves transcend but were important explorations for their fashioners. There’s in fact no knowing what will beget what. That’s why I don’t grade these, they should be done in great spirited freedom.

In a few I’ll hope to write a bit about my own muckings about with treated pages. Nothing so colourful as these. Also want to write about really good discussions we had today on qualities of line (actual and implied, that’s from Taylor) and the non-blankness of the blank page. First though dinner – steak!

Teaching note

Wrestling a bit with the question, in my visual poetry course, whether and how to involve my own creative efforts. My thought has always been, a teacher should keep his work to his own damn self, none of that preening, thanks much to yehs. And yet I’m a living working maker and maybe that could be of help to my students. Esp. since almost every prompt I give them emerges from some struggle I’ve found myself in and found a way at least partway through. Abnegation of ego is more ego.

(Too, I’ve already stretched the envelope, posting their work on this blog. All kinds of sound reasons not to do such a thing. And the effects seem to have been good, benign, affirming, from the signs I’ve been given to see.)

So well my thought is to post, among the prompts I give my students, and some of the works they do in response, a few of my own efforts, recent or distant, with maybe a few comments. Maybe they’ll come see them maybe no.

E.g., recently posted a treated page exercise, soon will post a few of their lovely answers, and might be – helpful?? amusing? cause for benign condescending laughter 10⁶ years hence among as yet unmade inhabitants of star system X93 in galaxy P1945Q? – watch that self-abnegation engine whirr into action – for me to post as well some of my efforts on the same terrain. And so I think I will.

I was cleaning the house, sorting papers, and the itch came to post to my blog, and so here we are.

The treated page I will write about when and if I do:

(That took me, guys, so you know, months. More, more than a decade, if you go back to the date of the source text – a dream I had of wandering as a child at ease in a marketplace.)

They are such a kind group. I was observed by a tenured colleague on Tuesday, no reason to be nervous, but of course I was, and they did beautifully, bore me up wonderfully, just by being themselves. Mean to tell them tomorrow how grateful I am.

all things bear one up
robins in the high meadow

Exercise — Treated page

So here’s the first exercise of the quarter for my visual poetry class. Cued by our wandering through Tom Phillips’s well known widely loved yet not for all that at all worn out A Humument.

The book’s an object lesson in the power of powering forward not knowing where the sweet bloody fuck you’re going. Glory of the aleatory. Here’s he in his Blakean vein —

The exercise. Treat a page of a prose work as Phillips has treated the pages of A Human Document.

Pointers. Be inspired by A Humument, by all means, steal moves from Phillips, but don’t imitate slavishly. The composition should feel to you like your process. Do take care with your erasure marks. They should do more than just cross out. They should express, manifest, draw eye and mind.

They’re doing beautifully by the way. What lovely conversations we have. We seem already friends in the free and easy wandering in mind I remember reading of in the Chuang Tzu … lessee if I can find it … nope. But this is as good, Chuang Tzu to Hui Tzu, who’s just told him his words are big clunky useless, like a gnarled and lumpy tree, so everyone ignores it, carpenters, painters.

Now you have this big tree and you’re distressed because it’s useless. Why don’t you plant it in Not-Even-Anything Village, or in the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it?

The sleep I want for my students when they make their poems.

P.S. Speaking of Cezanne, and Mont St. Victoire, saw a pretty indifferent one in Vancouver, apparently the only one he composed in a portrait orientation, and I saw why. But what blew me away, and made me excited about in and for the VAG for the first time in my admittedly little life, was an exhibit I wandered into mostly accidentally of contemporary Chinese art that poked and prodded and nursed and scowled at the long awesomely durable tradition of Chinese landscape painting.

I’ll hope to write more soon on what I saw there and what it seemed to see in me. For now a link to the curator’s intro for you.

Into the visual wild

Cometh spring, a new quarter, and our entry, I with 20 brave souls, to the wilderness of visual poetry. Typographic cows at leap over sans-serif moons. Overflowering word gardens. Poems with no words in them.

I’ll post some exercises, and I hope some student work, in weeks to come. Inly the shift from intense poem-making to what may be intense poet-teaching is feeling a bit rocky. But I think once I’m at one with the rocks it’ll be smooth going.

Living Writers: Word and/as Image

The written word is always embodied, on paper or in stone, on bone, among electrons. That means it is both visible and tangible. In addition to writing or reading it, we can trace it, paint on it, rough it up, sand it smooth, stretch it, shrink it, erase or deface it. Meanwhile, the visual image often reaches for the sort of meaning words have, asking us to treat it as legible. No one knows what these figures in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell mean—

—but most will feel that they mean. In the word-image nexus, meaning is often fugitive in this way, just beyond the reach of your eyes’ fingertips. In this course, we’ll study poems in which signs keep sliding toward picture, and pictures keep morphing into signs. Our primary texts will be those of living writers, many of them Canadian, but we’ll also dip into earlier works, from Egyptian rebuses to Anglican concrete poems to early Romantic prophetic watercolours. Get ready for a wild ride.

Interstellar addendum

Near the end of Interstellar there’s a bit I find transcendent (when I picture it) and really kinda cheesy (when I think about it). Though in another galaxy and at the heart of a black hole qui s’appelle Gargantua our hero finds himself in his daughter’s bedroom behind the bookshelf.

A bedroom a bit altered. Imagine turning the book in your hands inside out and finding it contained a tesselated library. A still –

Big debt to Borges, yes, but the visual feels alive to me. And apparently it sunk in to where I could thieve from it. A bit after first seeing the movie, with no sense of debt to anyone or thing, I made this one out of bar codes, for the death and dragging under of Dumuzi –

The debt I was aware of was to Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” a poem I don’t much like, but I had in mind the recent passing of a favourite English teacher, in whose company I first met the poem. And so called it,

Anyway, all this is to say, debts to others are so many, truly new thoughts so vanishingly few. Oh Ezra. Make it new – if it isn’t already altogether new, how could I, you, we, they, make it be.

P.S. The slantwise rough strokes are bits of woodgrain from my desk picked up by scotch tape splayed there. I want to write, soon soon, about woodgrain and accident, Martians Jack Spicer and Stephen Burt, and proprioception, but the moment is not quite yet – not quite yet – .

P.P.S. The bar code is from if I remember aright the paper that came long with my flu shot. And my dismemberment of it my vengeance upon it b/c it protected me not one whit, not one.

Now goth Inanna under wode

There’s an old quatrain from out the middle ages I first met as epigraph to Robert Hass’s Sun Under Wood.

Now goth sonne under wode —
Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode.
Now goth sonne under tre —
Me reweth, Marie, thi sonne and thee.

A book and a poet that’ve always resounded for me for how tenderly they assay the harms to which the mother-son bond is prone. Terrain I work in too as uncrampedly as I can.

What sat me down to write though were a father and a daughter. Watched Interstellar a second time last night and was moved (again) by all it did well and dismayed (again) at all it did poorly. And what I felt most (again) wasn’t the admittedly spectacular black hole wrung with light, or the rungs of sooty frozen clouds the astronauts clamber among, but the intimate distance of father and daughter the astonishing otherness of those sights makes visual.

It kinda broke me. I suddenly got I’m almost for sure not going to have that in my life. I’m a bit too broken to have a kid or have taken a bit too long to get me whole enough to do it. I’d probably do okay at it now but the window’s closing or closed.

A bit later the okay-voices came to say there’s plenty else to make a life meaningful, and they’re right, but for a bit it broke me.

You see why I go to junk mail. It gets dark fast around here sometimes. A few galla for you — one’s trying to hide behind a bit of beachwrack. (Goeth galla under driftwood.)

If I’m more open here than I’ve been, I thank Hass a little, my students a lot, who’ve braved to write about trials and disorders known by name but not plumbed for real in the halls of DSM V. To write and make beautiful and indeed sublime sentences out of. (Therapy prose: the more honest it is the more you cringe. Transformative prose: the more honest the more you soar.)

I do have to say, a joy of teaching is, the wish in me to father is met, not as it would be by a child, I know, but still, it is, and meaningfully. That’s for a different post — maybe a different blog — but it’s probably the most meaningful thing about teaching for me, equalled maybe only by the creative incitement the most happy arrangements have had to offer me.

Thought on the way to the grocery store yesterday evening: if at the end of my life I’ve touched more people as a teacher than as a poet, that’ll be okay, I guess.

So, Inanna goth under wode, and I’ve had to go with her, goddammher. No point putting it off, let’s get this road trip started.

The text’s a bit hard to read (working on that) so —

She takes the road no one turns on to the kur where our names go to die.

The kur is the Sumerian underworld — ruled by her sad sister Ereshkigal. Her snazzy feather is the Bank of America logo. The terrain she and her trusty friend navigate at some peril is a treacherous assemblage of security envelope linings.

From a later (Akkadian) text, “The Descent of Ishtar to the Nether World” (just for funs):

To the Land of no Return, the realm of [Ereshkigal],
Ishtar, the daughter of Sin, [set] her mind.
Yea, the daughter of Sin set [her] mind
To the dark house, the abode of Irkal[la],
To the house from which none leave who have entered it,
To the road from which there is no way back,
To the house wherein the entrants are bereft of li[ght],
Where dust is their fare and clay their food …

Don’t make too much of the pun on Sin. But think about it — a road you can only go one way on. Really, there’s no such thing as a one-way street, you can always go the other way when no one’s looking. Anyway, this passage has always been striking to me, for how through its stiffness it still haunts and shudders.

In my version anyway Inanna grows smaller as the scope of her task dawns on her.

Her faithful friend at a remove now, unable to follow any further, Inanna’s entered the weave of one of the earth’s textures, her feather guttering smokily, some sort of torch.

Inanna, her powers

Inanna is that we are here together at all. Among the powers she connived from her father early in her life in a drinking game and stole away with by boat and brought to the docks of the great Sumerian cities were —

dagger and sword
black garment
colourful garment
loosening of the hair
binding of the hair

art of the hero
art of power
art of treachery
art of straightforwardness
plundering of cities
setting up of lamentations
rejoicing of the heart

She’s how a meal is more than feeding a hole and sex more than rutting and shelter more than reeds against the wind. She’s all the powers of civilization including the power to pull down a civilization. Not good or bad but bigger and smaller than that. The voice from the whirlwind when the voice is in roughly equal measures Leviathan and Coyote and they who made them.

As she readies for her trip the underworld she gathers the powers (me) drawn to the fore of her by good times with her shepherd king Dumuzi. An array likely to make her nether sister Ereshkigal (sexually voracious apparently and intensely lonely) more rageful than welcoming.

She placed the shugurra, the crown of the steppe, on her head.
She arranged the locks of hair across her forehead.
She tied the small lapis beads around her neck,
Let the double strand of beads fall to her breast,
And wrapped the royal robe around her body.
She daubed her eyes with ointment called “Let him come, Let him come,”
Bound the breastplate called “Come, man, come!” around her chest,
Slipped the gold ring over her wrist,
And took the lapis measuring rod and line in her hand.

Archaic but still kind of hot. I picture her with a hardhat and an orange safety vest carrying a surveyor’s tripod.

For this point in the book I need a broader account of her powers — need to say how great a disaster her departure is — so I’ve gone back to the survey of her me in her drinking game with her father. I’ve posted this once before but here it is again, somewhat improved. The first page —

And the second —

Why junk mail. A fertility myth tells how grain gets from the ground to your table to your belly. At some point it invokes sex (and not metaphorically, what those grasses are doing in the wind is fucking) and at some point it acknowledges the marketplace — grain’s not going to get from the ground to your gut without being bought and sold as a commodity, not anymore, not by the time such a myth as this comes about.

Junk mail is one mark of the marketplace in our day. It is somehow all at once ephemeral (who stops to read this shit before tossing it in the recycling?) and archaic (print? in envelopes? in my mailbox? really?) and omniscient (how on earth did they find me?) and omnipresent (day in, day out, my lord). So, that, and, too, if I can comedically resacralize the peacock by turning the Comcast logo into a funny hat, well, that’s a small whee for me.

A new scheme

Trying out a new scheme, wd be glad to hear your thoughts, esp. as I’m colourblind, yes it’s true, that bird to me in the leafage is movement first, red in green only after you’ve told me. So—waddya think? (I got tired of the purple green and sans serif myself. Like an unhip aubergine.)

Inanna hellbound

No saying why Inanna heads to hell. She’s queen of 2/3 of the universe — the whole of the known universe. What’s the call of the third third to her? Her ejected other? a secret melancholy? just a lust to acquire more turf? The “measuring rod and line” she takes as one of her me, her powers, suggests she means to chart and apportion the unapportionable. Or maybe she goes to rescue the lover she sent there a little while earlier.

Whyever she goes, she hears the call, and goes.

From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.
From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below.
From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below.

Why 3X? Because liturgy. An altered state we’re invited to enter the goddess through. And ear if I remember right is metonym for wisdom. Well anyway she abandons heaven and earth and holy office and all her earthly temples to fall to the underworld. If you got abandonment issues this is the goddess for you.

Hard to read on this scale so the text goes:

When they tire of riding the holy hardon Inanna gathers her me together for a road trip.

Those are her powers.

Won from her drunken father Sweetwater back in the day.

I’ve crassed it up some, sorry. But I wanted to bind it to their apex, when all is going lovelyly for both Dumuzi and Inanna, lettuce sprouting in its furrow, black boat quickened with cream, etc. The faces are harvested from scan codes on envelopes like this one.

Riding the pareidolia wave again. They’ve become for me the galla, the demons come from the underworld to claim their own. They’re neither inner nor outer and terrify me. The whole book’s my effort to make a peace with them. That’s why they get to narrate this whole sequence — thought being, give them some say, they might quiet down some?

I’ll hope to remember to write of Milarepa and his demons sometime, that tale, what I think it taught me. In the meantime we know this about the galla they have

Oooh scary right? Anyway I want to get brave Inanna, sad Inanna, maddening Inanna, on the road so I can go have some dinner, so here she is, with her galla attendant, and her faithful sidekick, cut from the same barcode as she. Thanks for your indulgences, many.