wondering – Page 4 – The Art of Compost

Roseburg OR

So when you become a Buddhist you take some precepts, and one of them’s don’t be angry. That’s a precept, not a rule or a prohibition, in other words a live edge no one can tell you what means, at a given moment, or whether you’re being true to or not, but you.

One of the things I find me wondering tonight is, when does keeping the precept mean, yeah, be stinking mad. I went to my President wanting righteous anger (lead, man, lead) and did get some –

He’s a good man. And doing better now he’s unelectable. But I want flames out his eyes. I want Old Testament prophet apocalypse. I want leave no prisoners in righteous fury. What kind of insanely deformed social contract could imagine, let alone allow, let alone allow so often we’ve grown used to it, battlefield weaponry in the hands of a gravely mentally ill young man?

I teach. What if it happened here, on my campus, what if he’s in the hallway outside my classroom? Would I fold up, or would I have the cool command I want to think I would? (I faced down a grizzly once, how about a gunman?) I’ve never touched a gun. But in my imagination of this moment, my whole body and mind is a gun, and one purpose, cease the threat to my kids.

I’d kill to save my children if I had children. I think I would.

My whole body and mind a gun. I’m not a peaceful man. That’s why I need the precept. Too, we’re all animals, we’ve all got some fight in us, and that’s as it should be, isn’t it? There should be room for flames to come out our eyes.

Also there should be no such thing as guns.

But, since there are, there should be real gun laws, don’t you think?

Write to someone in that sort of power. See if we might make it so.

Student Blog: Piles of Distinct Pieces

At the end of oh a long day. Woke at 2am to a possum scratching noisily at a hatch to the crawlspace under my bedroom window and that went on some hours. Now after office hours, teaching, teaching prep, and an edifying but mind-twisting course at the local REI on orienteering with map and compass – now a glass of white wine and a big fat artichoke steaming to be had with butter and garlic, and in the gap as it steams one more blog for you.

So here’s a blog, as all these have been so far, on seeing freshly. In this case, seeing what’s real in the daily, unique in the ostensibly interchangeable. A very William Carlos Williams sort of blog.

Pennies, for instance, we act as if one were as good as another. Look at them better, though, and each is its own creature, has its own smudges, patina, has carved its own arc through the ether to your pocket or your change jar.

Or stones. Everyone talks about snowflakes. Fuck snowflakes. Stones are very different from other stones. Why don’t they get some fucking press?

Why’s this matter. We live in a world system that’d make a given face, a person, interchangeable with every other, if it could, and maybe it could. To recuperate one penny or scrap of stone from all the others and say – this. In that plain ordinary moment attention is love, squishy yeah but that’s the word for it, and nothing the world commodity system raping the earth and our spirits can do will undo the moment, and the system has to fall back and die.

Doesn’t fall back far. Doesn’t die for long. But does a little, does a bit, and’s good and good again.

Out of the mouths of nieces

By Isabel, age 10, nature poet in the key of blue.

Writes her dad (my bro): “Asked if she had written a poem, Isabel answered, ‘No. It’s just words that were in my head.'”

My work as a teacher would be so straight & simple, if I could just put this at the front of the room, point, quote that, and go.

Sheeee-it, my work as a poet would be so straight & simple, if I could about forget making poems, & just put some words in my head on some pieces of nice paper.

P.S. Am I just being a foolish uncle or is it kind of exquisite how that raindrop hangs from that that more-than-line but not-yet-branch? Light as air and heavy like a pear.

First salad

K all those foodies who go on? about first freshness and all that? and I and you gag? Well I take it back.

Wee as it was, this little salad, from my teensy way late raised bed, oh my. That little yellowy-orangey tomato finished finishing off my childish childhood aversion to tomatoes raw – so sweet. Radishes, mesclun, snap peas, ah.

WILLIAM LOGAN.

THIS IS WHAT THE RED WHEELBARROW DEPENDS ON.

YES I HAVE THE WORDS IN THE MEANT ORDER.

READ THIS PLEASE TO SAVE US ALL.

Addendumum

From Bedient again –

As it feeds on bygone texts, conceptualism may be marooned in the bottoms of a melancholy attraction to dead zones. How various are its ruins: consider decorative ruins, as in Elizabeth Clark’s graphically pretty reduction of Raymond Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa to its punctuation; exhausting tabulatory ruins, archived debris, as in Brian Joseph Davis’s compilation of 5,000 film tag lines; abstraction ruins, witness Dworkin’s Parse (2008), which cannibalizes words about grammar with the grammatical terms for the words; arbitrary-emphasis ruins, as in Goldsmith’s obsessive compilation of phrases ending in “r” sounds or, in a reverse move, the graphic de-emphasis in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008) and Rachel Zolf’s “Messenger,” their barely legible 6–8 percent gray font; and, to make an end, ruins by over-extension, including paragraphs or stanzas deliberately stupid with repetition. (“Against Conceptualism”)

What’s the line, question to self, between ruination & compost?

DEAD ZONES . . . . . . ADZE NODES

Addendum

This too from Bedient, on a day when the nation’s highest court has affirmed that whole principalities of desire once loathed belong wholly now to our body politic. That this many more faces of our libido belong now to human dignity.

[D]etachment from affects means … suppression of the psyche’s outspokenness, which is vital to its health, and a stop to the sociopolitical usefulness of both the libido and the rougher emotions. These emotions fuel what Stéphane Hessel, one of the shapers of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, celebrates as “indignation” in Time for Outrage, Indignez-vous! (2011). This new neutrality also stultifies the creation in art of major new aesthetic affects, distinct universes of feeling: Moby-Dick putting forward one affect, Wuthering Heights another; Rilke his, Rothko his; and so on.

Each work we call great is its own cri de coeur. Wonder if that much at least great art and great legal cases have in common.

Stray thoughts on aleatory poetics and conceptual poetry

Thinking about aleatory poetics, that is, chance operations, the acrobatics one does to get will or self or intent out of the way. Whether that’s rolling the dice, or opening a silence to ambient sounds, or transcribing a day’s traffic reports.

Well the thought was this. “Let the universe compose the part of the poem proper to it.” A relief not to have to express yourself!

Thought that came a bit later was, “The trick is telling what part’s proper to it and what part’s proper to you.”

Then I found I wanted to put “it” and “you” in just those scare quotes. Where does the one end and the other begin?

Cage might not have needed his cageyness, nor Heidegger all that wildering swirliness, had he trusted the emptiness more wholly.

Like I’m one to talk. Whimpering about my achy gut.

My other wonder’s about the the title Against Expression that Craig Dworkin (for whom I feel true affection) and Kenneth Goldsmith (with whom I feel true amusement) gave their anthology of conceptual poetry.

Could be argued that in it, expression isn’t opposed there so much as front-loaded – the expression’s in the inception, the inceptive idea, then the rest is allowed to unfold either deterministically or chancewise, which is fine and fun and sometimes beautiful and very often a vital corrective to a navel-gazing aesthetic consensus. And it lets the cosmos show its chops.

But it’s still expression. And it tends to be an expression of will and intellect and even a kind of control and mastery – at least it has a sort of coolness to it often that suggests, I master the inception, I need not master the rest. I, poet, watchmaker god.

I dunno. I’m just thinking out loud here. I’m drawn to these practices and offput by them too. They offer a way out of the nutshell of the self. But it seems a way of intellect and will, coolness and mastery, wit and a kind of Classicism, and for all that their productions, some of them, turn me crazily on, I’m shut out in the end by the paucity of impulse in them.

They seem the place where the animal in us goes to die. Seem to renounce rather than transform what in us pisses fucks and shits. Am I wrong? Have I missed it?

I want a poetry that weds the animal to the angel in us, the algae to the nebula, not one that subs the higher for the lower (Classicism) or the other way round (Romanticism). Christ I’m sounding like Rilke kill me now.

The aleatory, in our poetry, may be our spontaneity externalized.

Pattern play – making marks

Looking round for blogs for the blog unit for ENG 460 The Art of Compost 2.0 and came to this one. And this pattern, dunno if it fits for the course, but hells it sure is purty, more than purty, it moves and keeps on moving. Earths and skies and more skies and heavens in it your eye climbs. Or rock strata thought drops down thru. What I love most in it’s the move up & the move down in it, are one. Wow & wow.

Elise Partridge – Launch of The Exiles’ Gallery

Oh late, oh night, and here are give or take some words I said at the Vancouver launch for Elise Partridge’s The Exiles’ Gallery, now out from House of Anansi Press, you can find one here.

So we’re here to celebrate a new book of poems by Elise Partridge. Elise can’t be here with us in a bodily form. After her struggle with cancer she has gone what some faith traditions like to call home. Not her tradition, as far as I know, or mine, but the word, “home,” gives me a comfort when it shares a sentence with her name. Too, it gets me thinking about her title. It’s an odd title. The Exiles’ Gallery. The sounds in it hardly touch each other. THE EXILES’ GALLERY. It’s as if our mouths were to be acrobats, temporarily. Or as if all the phonemes in there were jonesing to get the eff out of there. I hope that way of putting it wouldn’t, doesn’t, displease her.

You might even say the sounds are exiled from each other. And something like that’s true with all her book titles. FIELDER’S CHOICE. CHAMELEON HOURS. The phonemes are oddly at odds. I say “oddly” because she can sure as hell do euphony when she pleases to

some small donations from these golden trees

Now we welcome the widening water

The, not dissonance of her titles, their refusal to euphonize, she’s up to something.

Quick check, everyone raise their hand who’s not exiled in some way or other from something. Thought so. (Two guys raised their hands here. Really? Really?)

To be at home isn’t a given, and it isn’t that common, and maybe it isn’t even a right, to judge by how mostly we treat each other. It’s a lot more common for us to be in exile of one sort or another. Exile from your country or your spouse or your own sadness or the soil in your hands planting a flowerbed.

And there are so many things that a girl outside a country dance staring up at the planet Mars, and the parents who last danced grudgingly on their wedding day, and a homeless man under the Burrard Street Bridge living out of a shopping cart, and for that matter Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar in leaky fishing boats and wanted not anywhere, don’t have in common.

A thing they do have in common, and all us with them also, and her poems point us to it, their attention is a lighthouse on it, is such home as they do have, at a given moment, they’ve made it for themselves. For sure there are gifts, a look, a drink of water, no life without those. But home’s made through one’s own activity, dogged or desperate, out of what a moment offers, whether that’s ample, or it’s meagre, or it’s barely anything at all.

And that’s what I’ve been finding most lately in the poems. In their sounds, the extraordinary heterogeneity of them, which I’m embarrassed to be only now hearing. Sometimes the mixture heightens anxiety. Sometimes it darkens satire. Sometimes it’s pure praise for sheer mixed-up-ed-ness of this world.

[W]e strode
back to our avenues,
jaunty, just nineteen,
to troll like rowdy gods.

…

My neighbour’s daughter claps
as they lurch right
again

Praise for the sweet various flowershot dungheap of our world. Only world, her poems say, we get. Read them.

Then some beautiful readers reading some beautiful poems in beauty. I can’t give you those so here instead my beautiful friend.

(I was the last reader and told this little story and read this poem.)

For around a decade Elise and Steve were regulars on the property I owned on Salt Spring Island. While I was away they would tend to a plumbing system Byzantine in its complexities—clean up nightly prezzies from my cat—and once endured a plague of tent caterpillars I have to admit I thought they were exaggerating to call Biblical, till I got back, and had confirmation from the locals.

They did good work there, despite the distractions, Steve on his articles, Elise her poems, and this is one such of hers, “Invitation.” I read the poem, as not a last poem, but a leave-taking poem, full to the brim and then some with the love of life I loved and love still in her.

INVITATION

The stag and doe
lift their heads
in the brush

ears raised
as if
attuned to our tears

The grass reaches through chairs
by the shed
as if to thatch cushions
for the pair of us

The gate that won’t quite shut
with its scruff of lichen
invites us into the orchard

to pick “till time and times are done”
our choice of the bursting plums.

Trust yr boredom

Well isn’t that interesting. I said I’d post some stuff about my adventures in erasure and now I find I just don’t feel like it. I tell my students over and over – trust your boredom – it’s some of the best guidance you’re going to get. Bored with a line? Cut it. Bored with a poem? Throw it away.

A sour and maybe cranky wakefulness but wakeful just the same. Could I ask of them something I won’t of myself?

The deal I made with me when I started this blog was – write when I feel a wish to and write what I feel a wish to and not otherwise. Lots of duties and such elsewhere. Here I’ll see if what I’ve heard about whim is so, its fructiveness and sufficiency. So far it’s borne out well. Some fallow periods, some heavy fertile swells, an amiable rhythm.

So, having erased erasure, what do I mean to write about? I sat down without knowing. That’s the scary or even terrifying thing about trusting your boredom wholeheartedly. It might tell you what not without telling you what to.

One thing I do, when in this place, and I mean to offer this to my students wherever you are, is just shine an inquisitive light over all the terrain of my mind open at that time, and see what gleams back, even tinily. That might be the place where whatever the counter to boredom is, is waiting.

Here what shone back in mind was an image of a red rock cliff in an essay I’d run my eyes over a few minutes earlier, looking for something on erasure I might want to use.

My thought was a propensity for seeing faces where they ain’t, and then my thought was, that’s where I want to go, that’s where the living interest is, the way inert matter makes faces at us, or the way we make it into faces.

Project onto it a sentience it doesn’t have, if you’re the sort of materialist most people today are, or acknowledge the sentience we intuit it to have, if you’re the sort of postmodern animist I’m coming to give myself permission to be.

Gleaming in mind, I think, because I spent some of yesterday, and today, turning a portion of Dumuzi into a chapbook ms, title Junk Inanna Down, which will go off to a contest tomorrow. The final image, built out of junk mail, is this

Those eyes move me some. They’re a mother’s looking down at an infant in her arms. They’re Kuanyin coming to poor lowered noble Ezra in that Pisan tent. They’re the trademark stamp on the Bank of America logo blown up about 1600%. Sacred just bitch-slapped profane, ’bout time. Her earrings are the rest of the same logo disassembled. Her headdress is one of those scan codes you see on the front of an envelope a machine reads to shunt its news unwanted to you more speedily.

This one’s for Don, with love.