Fancy meeting you here

    Thank you for saying that.

    May I sit down?

          The fluted shaft on which she had taken her seat

          would have afforded a resting place to several

          persons, and there was plenty of room even for a

          highly-developed Englishman. This fine specimen

          of that great class seated himself near our young

          lady, and in the course of five minutes he had

          asked her several questions, taken rather at ran-

          dom and to which, as he put some of them twice o-

          ver, he apparently somewhat missed catching the

          answer; had given her too some information about

          himself which was not wasted upon her calmer fem-

          inine sense. He repeated more than once that he           

          had not expected to meet her, and it was evident

          that the encounter touched him in a way that would

          have made preparation advisable. He began abruptly

          to pass from the impunity of things to their sol-

          enmity, and from their being delightful to their

          being impossible. He was splendidly sunburnt; ..

          he was dressed in the loose-fitting, heterogeneous

          garments in which the English traveller in foreign

          lands is wont to consult his comfort and affirm 

          his nationality; and with his pleasant steady eyes,

          his bronzed complexion, fresh beneath its season-

          ing, his manly figure, his minimising manner and

          his general air of being a gentleman and an ex-

          plorer, he was such a representative of the Brit-

          ish race as need not in any clime have been dis-

          avowed by those who have a kindness for it ..

I think the phrase we are

looking for, in returning

to the recalcitrant enter-

tainer we think of by the

name, Henry James, is "re-

sort wear," an escapist

taste for psychological

reliability and tentative-

ness of characterization,

such as are submerged by

the present déluge. How

exotic, the acute and the

careful have come to seem,

while to James they were

just comfortable kit for

a sensible navigation.

Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady

1881

Designations to dissolve

Every time I read Shel-
ley, I find myself ask-
ing why we call his an
English language voice.

                  ..

                  And the dim low line before

                  Of a dark and distant shore

                  Still recedes, as ever still

                  Longing with divided will,

                  But no power to seek or shun,

                  He is ever drifted on ..

                  What, if there no friends will greet;

                  What, if there no heart will meet

                  His with love's impatient beat;

                  Wander wheresoe'er he may,

                  Can he dream before that day

                  To find refuge from distress

                  In friendship's smile, in love's caress?

                  Then 'twill wreak him little woe

                  Whether such there be or no:

                  Senseless is the breast, and cold,

                  Which relenting love would fold;

                  Bloodless are the veins and chill

                  Which the pulse of pain did fill;

                  Every little living nerve

                  That from bitter words did swerve

                  Round the tortured lips and brow,

                  Are like sapless leaflets now

                  ..

                   

                    

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Lines written among

  the Euganean Hills

[fragment]

1818

Another term

                 . . . like a flag

meant for a ceremony where the part

we're meant to play is a mystery,

and everything is about to start.

Nathaniel Perry

Nine Acres

  Seeds and Seeding

  [fragment]

Copper Canyon Press, 2011©

The rush

La première entreprise fut,
dans le sentier déjà empli
des frais et blêmes éclats,
une fleur qui me dit son nom.

                   The first undertaking, in the

                   pathway already filled with

                   fresh, pale sparkles, was a

                   flower which told me its name.

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
Illuminations
  Dawn
  [fragment]
John Ashbery
  translation
W.W. Norton & Co, 2011©

Who's raping whom again, Jefe?

 Amidst all our delight in the

 Mad Hatter libretto we enjoy

 in the new government, I have

 always regretted its transfer-

 rence of exploiting our undoc-

 umented residents for winning

 the Sinecure, in underpaying

 wages, in cheating them in so

 many countless ways, that one

 should regard that direst of

 all genital impertinences as

 something of a Party favor.

 So much as even to dream now,

 of squandering this wonderful

 mechanism in exchange, albeit

 extorted by delicious terror-

 ism, for a passive little ed-

 ifice of incurable porosity,

 seems to throw out the bath

 without a bathrobe, i.e., to

 strut, without the requisite

 hair shirt.

ii   Eduardo Seco
     Corte
     undated

iii  Mathias Lauridsen

This houseboat day

On parking my car in the driveway,
after an amiable lunch in town,
I flicked open one of my detested
devices to see if there were any
urgent messages to address, before
joining my English Cocker for an
afternoon constitutional about the
grounds. Nothing pressing, apart
from word from The New York Times,
of the exit of the most-cited En-
glish language poet at this page,
at the permissible age of ninety.

One doesn't like to hear of an ex-
tinguishment of wonder and genius,
at any age. Deep into his 80s, he
found himself translating the boy
Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations, 
for which practitioners of three
languages will never forget him -
English, French, and Male Youth.

Preparing to attest to these few
facts I did observe the precaution
of counting citations here, for
William Shakespeare. They are in
second place, voluminously, but I
reckon that John Ashbery engages
the search engine as translator,
as well as poet - much as David
Ferry, and long may he do so.

I have accepted the loss of Shakes-
peare, on the premise that it will
never take place, as I listen to
Mozart, too, to stay hip with the
times. John Ashbery is the most un-
cannily American, uncannily contem-
porary poet in my reading, and not
least for his having seeded his
work with breathtaking likelihood
of future accompaniment, to people
in our place, never abandoning the
voice of fraternity, once removed.

Insulting as the vestal virgins of
his art may take this familiarizing
embrace to be - and couldn't we all
voice that objection - one declares
it on the grounds of Ashbery's per-
sistent, prescient sharing of our 
place. His poetry will be a fixture 
of guest rooms, of bedside tables, 
of daybreak at the barricades, and
at twilight of illusion, lifting. 
He is constantly being found.

As here, where I enjoyed my lunch
today in Charlottesville, Virginia.
I had a good companion, but then I
always do.

           And Others, Vaguer Presences

           Are built out of the meshing of life and space

           At the point where we are wholly revealed
           In the lozenge-shaped openings. Because
           It is argued that these structures address themselves
           To exclusively aesthetic concerns, like windmills
           On a vast plain. To which it is answered
           That there are no other questions than these,
           Half squashed in mud, emerging out of the moment
           We all live, learning to like it. No sonnet
           On this furthest strip of land, no pebbles,

           No plants. To extend one's life
           All day on the dirty stone of some plaza,
           Unaware among the pretty lunging of the wind,
           Light and shade, is like coming out of
           A coma that is a white, interesting country,
           Prepared to lose the main memory in a meeting
           By torchlight under the twisted end of the stairs.























John Ashbery
Houseboat Days
  Poems
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977©

Labor Day USA

       People remark, we don't 

       really have Labor, any 

       more. For that matter, 

       it's more as if we don't 

       even have days, any more, 

       but diurnal episodes of 

       verismo in high places.

       A society conditioned by

       forced doses of sadistic

       teasing is the new Union.

Simon Fitskie

2015

Franz Kline

1947

Helen Frankenthaler

Madama Butterfly

2000

Sabbath slack jeans

After a lifetime in baggy khakis,

I noticed a fashion note in the

political press the other day, to

the effect that our brownshirts

were affecting one's style, to dis-

guise, as Roxane Gay put it in The

Times, their white mediocrity. Oh,

one did feel a sting in that aper-

çu, and waves of sympathetic panic

for the iconography of white medi-

ocrity's epidemic hold on American

sportswear, to say nothing of waist-

bands worn to be read, as keys to

the kingdom. That said, one's medi-

ocrity can become a badge of some

kind of honor, the less adaptive

it appears - not to force too ag-

gressively, that equation between

indolence and privilege we all en-

joy denying. No; the adoption of

an indistinguishably same pair of

trousers for the span of an am-

bulatory life, has a way of free-

ing the mind to propose itself in

other terms. I can't enumerate the

daydreams I've preserved, by never

going shopping. In liberty of de-

lectation, too, and ignoring its

grievous insensitivity to the em-

ployment of millions, abstinence

may represent the next best thing

to the avoidance of restaurants.

Of course this is a conservative,

quaintly rural disposition, with-

out any of these justifications

at its source. Where continuities

are as detestably illegitimate as

the ones our mediocrities favor,

I wear no pocket for them. But I

have other reasons for abstaining

from trifling deflections from my

style. I did not invent them.

                 Black absence hides upon the past

                    I quite forget thy face

                 And memory like the angry blast

                    Will love's last smile erase

                 I try to think of what has been

                    But all is blank to me

                 And other faces pass between

                    My early love and thee

John Clare

Selected Poetry

Geoffrey Summerfield

  editor

  Stanzas

  [fragment]

  ca 1841

Penguin, 1990©

Philipp Pröls

Robbie Wadge