Stein and Community

In response to Ryan’s post on community and the Modernists. I want to first state that I really liked the post right up to the point about Gertrude Stein.

While I do agree that many people think Stein’s “wackiness” is something easily recreated (or invaluable, juvenile, weird for weird’s sake: for those who don’t much care for her), or just random language. And I’m not exactly sure I agree with Ryan’s base components breakdown.

“1. required dexterity to utilize a pencil, pen, crayon, or keyboard” which is a gross oversimplification of her style. The best way to test this is to try it yourself. It’s not as easy as it looks.

“2. ability to describe an object in a roundabout manner” I think anyone who has spent a good amount of time with Tender Buttons knows that this oversimplification is tired, yet often heard. Her writing is not just “describing” something. The complications to that description are apparent in pieces like “A Box”:

A BOX.

Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of being round is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it is so rudimentary to be analysed and see a fine substance strangely, it is so earnest to have a green point not to red but to point again.

Stein’s work operates as a system of pointing away from objects, even if at some points it comes back around. The object becomes a medium for understanding itself and the space around it (at times, both physically and mentally) , but the way the thing operates, the way an object reminds us of something else, the way we see an object, not what the object is.

I think that one key to defining much of her work is her quest for breaking things into their base components (base truths or commonalities), making Objects, Foods, Rooms into highly complicated syntactical units of space, connotation, and stream of conscious writing, looking for some kind of underlying truth, or “Light” as we’ve taken to calling it in class.  Like Perloff says in her essay on Stein and cubism, “Tender Buttons provides no answers, its distinction being to establish relationships that we never knew existed.“

And finally “3. self-evidence.” I’m not exactly sure what this means. But I like it.

A full text of Tender Butoons at Bartleby

3 essays on Tender Buttons by Bruce Kellner and Marjorie Perloff

conceptual poetry?

The Dirt Mall – Pt. 1

Here’s a link to my Olson inspired poem The Dirt Mall. I’m thinking about really expanding this poem for the creative part of my final project. I’ve been listening to Olson on PennSound on my headphones, trying to steal his rhythms, while writing the poem.

I’m open to any suggestions/comments/questions anyone might have about process, word choice, format, etc.

As for the “academic/research” portion of my final project, I’m thinking about (researching and) writing an interview with the dead Charles Olson, splicing together old interview responses and using biographic material (from the two biographies I just ordered off Amazon and SPD) for the answers.

I still want invest a lot of time and research into this project but just writing a paper doesn’t feel right (and not just because I’m lazy). Is anyone else having similar thoughts?

The Language of Language (a variation of content)

The Language (from Words)

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full

of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.

“In Words, written in the early 1960s, Creeley turns each word, each phrase, each syllable on itself, as if inside them he will find an answer he cannot find in the world, only to realize that that words and world are intertwined, like the soul and the body. Or perhaps like lovers in a quarrel. Reference is always a relationship.” —Charles Bernstein

Creeley takes language apart only to find that there are translucent sinews that hold a certain light (as we called in class). Maybe “Truth” is not in the sentence or clause but in the word itself, and truth is not “Truth” it is light. The act of saying, speaking is important to Creeley. What is at the core of a word. Like the atom, the deeper we look the more we find inside.

He seems occupied with the in different modes of discourse between saying, “I love you” and writing “I / Love you,” between the poem and the poet, the methods we use to discover meaning in language.

There is also a gravity to Creeley work. There is a tidal pull to his lines that draws the reader down the page, a stumbling through grammatical or ungrammatical lines.

Robert Duncan, although dramatically different from Creeley in execution of the poem, brings us once again to the light: “Duncan interprets this Romantic impulse as an eternal one, alive in the perverse, resistant voices of poets.”

Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. “They came up
and died
just like they do every year
on the rocks.” The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.

The poem does not come from the poet; the poem, “feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, to breed itself.” Duncan sees the creation of the poem as a “spiritual urgency.” This is reminiscent of Jack Spicer (not premeditated, not from Self) , but I can see where the two diverge. Where Spicer’s language (furniture) for channeling spirits is that of radio waves and martians, Duncan lapses into more romantic tendencies, “at the dark ladders leaping” idealizing the intuition of the thoughtful poet.

These authors are all frantically looking for that light that lives inside language down to the very word of it.

Robert Duncan

(The only good thing to ever come out of Bakersfield, CA.)

Robert Duncan and Romantic Synthesis

&

Ground Work: On Robert Duncan

by Michael Palmer

Robert Duncan’t Web Page w/ incomplete biography

On Duncan Translating Rilke

Wrath Moves In The Music: Robert Duncan, Laura Riding, Craft and Force
in Cold War Poetics

Magic & Images / Images & Magic

and an excerpt from “The Structure of Rime” in The Opening of the Field

Neither our vices nor our virtues
further the poem. “They came up
and died
just like they do every year
on the rocks.” The poem
feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,
to breed itself,
a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping.

Robin Blaser

Robin Blaser From Language Is Love

We must return to the Lark of our speech.

I would have them eat of the heart of this

form-of-life that they might participate in

the form of it.

Language is love—the only way to enter

the form of our lives.

Charles Bernstein’s Afterword to
The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser

Lyric Capability: the Syntax of Robin Blaser by Meredith Quartermain

Bob Creeley

Robert Creeley’s Nothing New

Ben Friedlander’s Selected Poetry (audio version)

—I especially like the poems from Pieces.

Everything Left To Say (Five Poems by Robert Creeley) ed. by Charles Bernstein

“What is the measure of the poem: words, phrases, metrical feet, lines, stanzas . . . or thought? Each line has its own separate gravity and yet connects, but with difficulty, to the next. We are caught in the between: in time, in a now we learn, each moment at a time, for ourselves only.”

Lorine Niedecker On Louis Zukofsky

“Felt deeply, poems like all things have the possibilities of elements whose isotopes are yet to be found. Light has travelled and so looked forward.”

Puritanism Rules!

Reading 4:

God’s universal law gave to man despotic power
Over his female in due awe.

John Milton

sleep-logic

For Jennifer Garcia

in a loop
like Vermont
is launched into
a dove

I am a
soldier to
nappers

in a cold
winter
night we
can
think iron
guts

never let
a
dove
sleep
high to
low