Remembering liking it

When I could remember liking
doing it, but not what
I had done, I took myself on
walks in the woods around
Litchfield, and to the sea,
off Gloucester and Point Reyes.
Always the scents, always the
sounds, seemed as if they 
could remind me, and let me
in again; temperatures, 
abrasions were my lover.

Not this, you may suppose: but
some paper on what welcomed me; 
some flimsy paper on what you know, 
some remark, such as everyone 
makes but seems 
so scarce with me.

    Possibly he's saving this,
    a boy who's playing 
    the viola from the
    throat.


    Possibly he's
    breathing what I'd done.
















Connecticut Forest
  and Park Association
Connecticut Walk Book
  Eighth Edition
CFPA, 1970©


Erickson
Map of Point Reyes
  National Seashore, Tomales
  Bay & Taylor State Parks
Erickson Maps, 1972©

Why isn't it enough, that she demands a bad thing for him?

People speak as if Michelle Bachman

held some legitimate claim to be

in our government, simply because

she could get votes for atrocity.

Are we alive to endure this pretense:

that schadenfreude is not, by definition,

popular? Is her Party so triumphant in

its eradication of all memory, that the

starkest, plainest frenzy to injure looks

like an enthusiasm by any other name?

Were you there, for Reaganism's invention

of the phrase, the general population? 

Were you there, when that won victories

at the polls? Were you there, when men

went blind, by the tens of thousands in

the streets, because this discerning 

government denied their counting,

poisoned cruelly to death by drugs

protected by a patent to draw blood?

Or is there some pretending 

to be safe from her next favour 

to her mob?

Harold Brodkey

Sea Battles on Dry Land

  Notes on American Fascism

op. cit.

Randy Shilts

And the Band Played On

St. Martins Press, 1987©

Larry Kramer

The Normal Heart 

  A Play

Plume, 1985©

"It is next to my flesh, that's why"

It is next to my flesh,
that's why. I do what I want.
And in the pale New Hampshire
twilight a black bug sits in the blue,
strumming its legs together. Mournful

                    






     glass, and daisies closing. Hay 
     swells in the nostrils. We shall go
     to the motorcycle races in Laconia
     and come back all calm and warm.

For me there is an ineradicable element of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the poetry of Frank O'Hara, and not merely for its power of time and place. Ever since adolescence - that unimpeachable age of criticism - there has been a lot of the erotic for me, in the writer who could say in A Blithedale Romance, that there was no petal folded, no dew-drop latent in Zenobia. But then I felt that way then about how the telephone directory gathered all the Smiths in one place, each one an enthralling layer of new oral sensations, with quite a lot of alliteration when one got to Alan. What else was erotic, and may I say ebullient in Hawthorne for me, I did much later find in O'Hara - a self-consciousness of constituting a new voice, and a lack of remorse in doing so; an awareness of being with people who were making a new thing, and one of them.

And there is another reason why one appreciates so very much the poetry of Frank O'Hara. He is from me as distant as I am from the extracts I invoke here; and he didn't reach me by imagining who I'd be. He did his work.


He did his part, you could say. More than as a Fourierist in expressionism's arcadia, he was a villager of time, malgré lui. He did what they do, renewing the invention of the bloodstream.

Frank O'Hara

A Raspberry Sweater

1956

Donald Allen, editor

The Collected Poems

  of Frank O'Hara

op. cit.

iv, photo W.E.

Seems Mrs Palin was right again

Plain as day, there was Paul Revere again, warning the British about our small arms. Amazingly fair-minded chap, our Paul. By land, then, is it?

And how should any of us have doubted her illuminated comprehension? Would Rupert Murdoch just throw away money on some garden variety idiot, when he can seize a country the old fashioned way, by bribery, blackmail, and espionage? But take heart, all ye despairing cynics. The army of the good posture, the spiffy haircut is presently to be among us again; and should we not all be addressing the problem of quartering its troops?

Lunchtime walk ii: "beau rouleau sismique"

Our hottie in the T shirt has entered this compliment on a posting by Lionel André, a dialogue mounted for our fortunate consideration. The two poets are like the rest of us, drawn to the contemplation of trees. In a posting emphasising the tree's woven textures, André adopted the radical step of analogising an elevation of brick and mortar, and working the image to evoke a tree cut or fossilised in isometric section, depicting time within the rings we all know in concentric perspective. It isn't what he did; it's his letting be known what he saw. This was illumination we could hear. 

This vision wants to be and can be heard - and in French, as it was written; particularly the final phrase, which sounds as if it were an aria emanating from a wind instrument without valves, over a single resinous viola note, midflight. Ashbery has caught that string's grip.


Il y a une troupe des petits comédiens en costumes, aperçus sur la route à travers la lisière du bois.


There is a troupe of child actors in costume, seen on the highway through the edge of the forest.

For me a vigorous but also febrile sensitivity is one of the qualities of our hottie in the T shirt, which draws me to a blog which has amassed the seniority, now, of an entire year. One could not have imagined this prodigal giving away of one's own gorgeous dreams. Always, I'm just passing by the edge, admiring what I see inside. Much of what's here is borrowed from him, none of its use is his fault.








Arthur Rimbaud
Illuminations
  Enfance [extract]
John Ashbery, translation
op. cit. 

Lunchtime walk i: "disambiguation"

The buzzword of the hour in Wiki-speak falls inevitably to mind in encountering this seemingly conventional, if not almost rude portrait in monochrome - jaw, nose, clavicle, elbow, wrist, metacarpals and hips disambiguating the familiar sequences in angular stance against the sinuous driftwood found behind, porosity personified except by derivation.

One has seldom seen the folly of the illusion of disambiguation more suavely demonstrated, whether by default or not.

               

The subtle T-shirt tanline is more extraneous in marking this composition than the driftwood, as declaration of opacity's limitation of permeation, against the superficial foreground grain.

We see the permeability of these 

elements to be incontestable, opacity a veneer of utter vanity against observation, thought, experience and exemplary nature.

Poor Wiki, poorer student. The OED countenances disannul as having the same meaning as the term it would cancel, annul. How like decay to prosper where 
to strip would do just fine,
if not to drain, to clarify.

                                                      

iv, v  photo, Jean-François Heckers

Bathing at bedtime

We have been postponing our Pushkin, and this is plainly not sustainable. Nabokov gives us the reason, quite unabashedly, in an unforgettable chastisement - 

Pushkin was a brilliant wit (especially so in his correspondence); but he did not shine in the didactic genre, and his indebtedness to the elegant generalities of his time .. is sometimes painfully evident.

Yet in an age whose generalities are drained ever more of elegance by the day, an evening shower in Pushkin can be restorative. 

To live it hurries and to feel it hastes.

Prince Vyazemski, cited by Aleksander Pushkin at the opening of his first chapter of Eugene Onegin.

Then, when tumultuous youth's season for Eugene came, ..

He did understand.

Aleksandr Pushkin

Eugene Onegin

  A novel in verse

Vladimir Nabokov, translation

  and commentary

Bollingen Series LXXII

Princeton University Press, 1975©

La terra trema

One of the most persistent motifs of male iconography, the boating stripe paradoxically intensifies and desta-bilises perceptions at the same time. In a contemporary image from couture, it exemplifies these effects on every-thing it touches, most proximately the viewer's eye.

In world cinema the discoverer of the boating stripe is Sergei Eisenstein; its settler is Luchino Visconti. He resorted to it in two masterpieces which frame his oeuvre, La Terra Trema and Death in Venice. Impregnably aristocratic yet valiantly radical, Visconti was the natural custodian of a style which is internally redundant and outwardly traditional, yet diagnostic.

The stripe's capacity to emphasise the implicit character in diverse human conditions, is remarkable in a seemingly inflexible device. Not three feet separated from each other, two men may be more exposed, not less, in its adoption, and yet the stripe is not simply dichotomous. 

Its penetrability, rather, allows the radical to adopt it without self-contradic-tion. And because it holds the gaze beyond its usual half-life, its support of expression is more than proportionately magnified. Imagine Tadziu in a solid shirt; he dissolves, not Aschenbach.

Couturiers exploit some of this, painters a great deal of it, either in their own mode or on the canvas. A sweet and pleasing fantasy is, however, only one of its elements. Visconti brought the boating stripe to dramatic narrative, and one doesn't need to ask why. That we feel all its power to unsettle our assumptions is enough.

i, iv  Dirk Bogarde as Aschenbach, Death in Venice
         1971


vi     Sicilian cast as crew, La terra trema
         1948