Comma, Comma, Comma, Comma, Come On!

Comma , , , , , Crazy , , , , , Poems

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Volume Two

José Garcia Villa

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BART
Ron Silliman

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“Lag”
(in The Black Debt)
Steve McCaffery

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6799
Kenneth Goldsmith

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Sea Lyrics
&
“What In Fire Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love”
(all collected in Ring of Fire)
Lisa Jarnot

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Vertical Rainbow Climber
&
“The Cryptographic Ocelot”
Will Alexander

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A Prefatory Note

I must begin with an apology, for the “Comma . . . Come on!” kicker-headline above. Admittedly, that headline badly puns the poor comma half-way (or more) to oblivion. In my defense, others have done the same. Consider please the following punning book titles, all of which are real as real as can be:

Comma Sense: A Fun-damental Guide to Punctuation

Lapsing Into a Comma: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print – and How to Avoid Them

Comma Sutra: Position Yourself For Success With Good Grammar

Those are something, eh? Okay, now that we’ve had that fun, let’s get on with the show.

Introduction

This post concerns six poets’ comma crazy poems. By “crazy” I mean nothing pejorative, and everything exultant. By “comma crazy” I mean that the comma, natch, is the key punctuation mark. These poems have a lot of commas (and I mean a lot, as you’ll see below), and just as important the comma also supports or advances a fundamental poetic purpose, at least in most of the poems discussed.

This post might only be an excuse allowing me to make a list, and to discuss a bit about, a few extremely well-made comma-centric and comma-licious poems. On the other hand, and assuming you’re interested or kind enough to read on, maybe some common comma tactics will, be, seen.

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Volume Two
José Garcia Villa
(New York: New Directions, 1949)

Volume Two is the ur-book for comma-crazy poems, and the earliest published of those discussed here. Garcia Villa goes comma-n,u,t,s:

What,is,equal,to,
Is,equal,to,

But,not,it.
Equality,is,

Achieved,relation,
But,the,equation,

Is,not,Identity.
Identity,is,

Solitary,Unit.

There are 165 numbered poems in Volume Two, and all but approximately 15 follow the same pattern as the poem above: a comma after every word (except for the periods which end sentences), with no space between the comma and the following word. A few of the poems are more than a page, although a good number (Garcia Villa calls them “Aphorisms”) are two or three-liners.

Volume Two,must,have,been,mighty,trippy,when,first,published,sixty,years,ago.

It,still,is,today.

In a note that begins Volume Two, Garcia Villa calls his commas a “strange innovation” and concedes readers “may be puzzled and perplexed.” He denies eccentricity, asserting that the commas are used functionally and poetically. Specifically, Garcia Villa explains they commas regulate “verbal density and time movement: enabling each word to attain a fuller tonal and sonal value, and the line movement to be more measured.”

He also explains how the comma should work: “a pause ensues after each comma, but a pause not as long as that commanded by its prose use: for this reason the usual space after the comma is omitted. The result is a lineal pace of dignity and movement.”

(Please note: unfortunately, the default spacing here on Blogger, as well as the spacing used for the comma poems used in The Anchored Angel, the fantastic 1999 book of selected Garcia Villa writings edited by Eileen Tabios, cheat Garcia Villa’s poems. In the New Directions Volume Two, while the space after the comma is omitted, the comma between each word has a touch of independent space on each side, and thus the poems there appear far less crowded than they do here on Blogger or in The Anchored Angel.)

Garcia Villa in the prefatory note also writes that his method “may be compared to Seurat’s architectonic and measured pointillism,” in which the points of color are both medium and technique:

Despite these claims, some readers will find Garcia Villa’s commas distracting, maybe even a blunder, or at the least a failure in the sense that they do not live up to the bold claims he makes for their use. There has been plenty of criticism along those lines.

However,I,like,the,commas. I like the slight but distinct pauses between each word. The commas do indeed create a pace, a majestic march. It can trend toward the metronomic, but that’s sometimes avoided because while the comma-pauses are uniform, the words between the commas are of varying lengths and of course vary phonetically too.

I also like the commas because they tend to foreground each word as an object in and of itself. The words are not just a part of structured syntactical arrangement, but independent things as well.

Because, of,the,commas,each,word,to,quote,from,the,poem,set,out,above,is,a,Solitary,Unit.

Garcia Villa’s commas do work better in some poems than others. Most of what he calls “Divine Poems,” heavy with religiousness, don’t work that well, even when I manage to get my faith groove working. To me, the short aphorism-poems work better, and in some of those the comma-technique and poem’s subject matter are almost perfectly matched. Consider the synergy of style and content in the following untitled objectivist gem:

That,little,beetle,
Is,a,circumnavigator,of,
Cantaloupes.

It’s marvelous, yes, the way, the slow and stop-and-start journeying of the beetle around the melons, is shown by the commas, which cleverly reflect (if the commas are given the slight pause Garcia Villa suggests) the pace of the process as it really happens. Also nice is the way the two big words (“circumnavigator” and “cantaloupes”) balance out the shorter words and the comma-pauses of the poem, and the way the disparity between the two larger words and the smaller elements (words and commas) mirrors that between the insect and the fruits (or the insect and length of its travels).

Here’s another aphorism-comma-poem that seems to work especially well:

Between,two,points,to,find,
Not,the,easy,straight,line –
But,the,Coil,of,Eternity!

Yes, there’s a dash in there, but you gotta agree, it’s a perfect addition here.

The last aphorism-poem I’ll share has but three words. It probably was written as a direct allusion to the story of Jesus. But the religious dimension can be considered just a starting point, after which the poem can be read as a kind of enigmatic thought or half-thought about most any ordeal. But what the heck am I doing here? I’ve just written about 50 words about a three word poem! Enough! Here’s Garcia Villa:

That,Trial,Because.

Now that's concise!

Ultimately, I like Garcia Villa’s commas, even when they don’t work that well, because in using them, he just went for it. It’s, a, ,crazy, , , a most unusual, experiment, one that still seems unique. I salute the veer, the slant, the curved approach of Volume Two. Here from the book is the tippy-top example of Garcia Villa’s fun, a work which until further notice earns the prize for the comma-ist poem ever (click image to enlarge on a new page, if you’d like):

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BART
Ron Silliman
(Hartford, CT: Potes & Poets Press, 1982)
--re-printed in--
The Age of Huts (compleat)
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)

BART is a prose poem of one long, very long, sentence. That sentence was written entirely over the course of about five hours on September 6, 1976, while Silliman rode on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, or waited for trains in BART stations. The book’s cover, depicted above, looks like an enlarged version of the electronic bar-coded ticket used to get in and out of the stations.

The poem’s single sentence has upwards of 500 (yes, five hundred) clauses, each of which is separated by a (do I even need to say it?) comma. Some of the clauses are just a few words, others longer. The following excerpt amounts to about one-quarter of page (the poem in this manner runs for 22 pages). The spacing here more-or-less mimics that of the original publication:

this world is foreign to me, an act of

description, old rail cars, I-beams, a school

or hospital off in the distance, we stop, a

woman gets on chewing blue gum, a yardful

of transformers, PG&E, old homes, weathered,

wooden, no lawns, just direct, these tracks con-

stantly bordered with cyclone fence topped

with barbed wire (and I only just noticed),

girl in a pink dress cries, a vacant lot, full

of refrigerators and stoves, South Hayward,

This kind of potent parade of particulars – observed details of the world and the poet’s own mind-thoughts – is Silliman’s poetic forte, or one of them. The commas are of course grammatically proper and necessary, buttressing the huge sentence as it tracks down and across page after page via clause after clause. But the commas, I believe, function as more than just appropriate punctuation.

To me, the poem-sentence’s series of clauses separated by commas echo Silliman’s day on BART, in which he experienced a series of movements (forgive me here) punctuated by brief stops at each station. It’s not an exact parallel – there are far more commas in the poem than there would be station stops on the trains, even over the course of a five hour ride. But the general echo of a pause (as at a station, where the train stops briefly as passengers exit and board) and movement (as in the train is underway) does exist, and the commas make that happen.

The sentence’s comma-separated clauses also seem to mimic the actual BART trains Silliman rode. The clauses can be seen as strings of train cars, with the comma and its following space the gap between cars common to trains. The clauses and commas also might be seen as a kind of written reflection of the distinctive “look” of the top half each BART car when seen from the side:

This is a bit far-fetched, but the windows and windowed doors of each car, separated by wider or narrower areas or strips of aluminum, can be “read” as a series of clauses, with the windows sometimes the clauses and the metal the comma, and sometimes vice-versa. The exteriors of BART cars do have a definite Morse Code-ish look that perhaps gives some basis for my fancy here.

In all these ways, the commas serve the poem, and BART is more true to the reality from which it was made because of those commas.

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“Lag”
Steve McCaffery
in
The Black Debt
(London, ONT: Nightwood Editions, 1989)

LAG is long: about one hundred ten pages, with each page filled side-to-side and top-to-bottom with comma-linked phrases. There are at least twenty phrases per page, meaning there are well over 2,000 commas in the poem, including the one that ends the poem (there’s no terminal period!).

Holy descendant of the virgula suspensiva, that’s a lot of commas!

Here’s a page from near the “Lag”’s middle (click to enlarge in a new window):

There’s much fun stuff to read here, so long as you’re comfortable with the paratactic shifts each phrase brings (the comma-linked phrases, in McCaffery’s words, “do not connect in order to narrate but to decentre and scatter”). There’s a pun or two (“phallus in wonder gland far back in thyme”), wordplay (“obsolete absolute . . . ), the comic or absurd (“drunk clowns at a bullfight”), the quasi-surreal (“olives escaping via eggs”), the intellectual/literary (“Pindar as a nihilist), mysterious numeric code-like segments (“fifty thirty twenty twenty three six sixteen”), and . . . well, you get the idea.

McCaffery has explained that he used critical theories of Jean-François Lyotard and Giles Deleuze to model and forumulate his poem. With regard to the commas, McCaffery’s explanation of how Deleuze’s notion of “becoming” helped him formulate the poem seems very relevant:

I wanted ‘Lag’’s incessant rhythm of propulsion, brevity, instant happening and anullment to suggest a constant ‘becoming-meaning’ and to shift from a ‘logic’ to a ‘physics’ and ‘kinetics’ of reading.

The commas are key to all this happening. Indeed, without them “Lag” couldn’t have been the poem McCaffery wanted. Sentences with terminal periods are far less kinetic than, and typically not nearly as propulsive as, comma-linked segments. Ditto with regard to the brevity and instant here-now, now-gone-ness of the segments. Sentences with periods, even short ones, would seem engraved in stone. The commas allow the poem to flicker phrase or clause after phrase or clause, each phrase or clause thus becoming a kind of film frame run through the projector of our minds, for page after page, after page.

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6799
Kenneth Goldsmith
(New York: zingmagazine press, 2000)

6799 lists, alphabetically by artist and then alphabetically by title within the artist’s name, all the albums (LPs and CDs) owned by Kenneth Goldsmith at the time of writing. The poem’s title refers to the year (‘67) he began collecting the listed albums, and the final year (‘99) covered by the list. The poem/list is presented as one long sentence that ends with a period. The only other punctuation in the poem’s 92 pages are commas, which are used to separate each entry. Given that there are about 60 albums listed per page, there are upwards of 5,400 commas in the poem.

Holy virgule dropped in the 16th century to the bottom of the line and curved, that’s really, really, really a lot of commas!

Here’s an excerpt, about one-quarter of a page, that lists some of the artists whose last names begin with the letters “Ni” (and a few that begin with “No”) (click on image to enlarge in a new window, if you please):

6799 includes as a preface an e-mail exchange between Goldsmith and A.S. Bessa, and lo and behold the first exchange concerns, you guessed it, the comma. Bessa states that when looking at Goldsmith’s drawings about punctuation marks he’s reminded of how Mallarme would re-work prose poems to among other things, add commas so as to slow down the reading act. Goldsmith agrees.

In 6799 itself comma both regulates the pace of reading and serves in its more traditional role of separating things (here, artist names and album titles). Interesting, and an indication of the importance of the comma to this work, the question of which punctuation mark to use was probably one of the only elements that Goldsmith had to affirmatively decide upon when he made this conceptual poem. Almost everything else in the work – all the albums listed, and the order in which they are listed – was based entirely on what was in his music collection when the poem was made and the alphabetizing ordering principle.

However, once Goldsmith decided to present the albums in 6799 not as a traditional list, with one item per line, but in a block of text, he then must have faced the choice of how to separate each entry. Lots of options were available: semi-colons, backslashes, sentences with periods (one album per sentence), or even nothing at all (i.e. just a space between each listed album). He chose, and he chose the comma. It does the heavy work without intruding greatly. I applaud Goldsmith’s choice, if for no other reason than it gave me a chance to re-visit here a fun conceptual work.

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Sea Lyrics
Lisa Jarnot
(n.p. [New York]: n.p. [Situations Press], 1996)
--re-printed in--
Ring of Fire
(Cambridge, MA, 2001)
and
(Cambridge, England: Salt Publishing, 2003)

Sea Lyrics is a chapbook of thirty prose poems. With one exception, each poem is a single sentence. The sentences are comprised of groups of clauses, phrases, or segments (I’ll call them clauses), separated by, yep, and yes, commas. Most of these sentences have anywhere from a half-dozen up to twenty or so clauses.

A two sentence definition of California from a 1768 encyclopedia serves as the epigraph to Sea Lyrics. The definition’s first sentence identifies California as a “large country of the West Indies” and gives the longitude and latitude. The second sentence states, “It is uncertain whether it is a large peninsula or island.”

To me the key word there is “uncertain.” I read Sea Lyrics as Jarnot’s own multi-faceted or un-fixed definition of California – focusing mostly on the Bay Area Northern California. More precisely, perhaps, Sea Lyrics is Jarnot’s accounting of California as it existed within and without her, personally and collectively, in fact and poetically, with all the perceptual and anagogic angles and ambiguity that such entails.

The most common way for a clause to begin in the thirty poems is “I am . . .”. Some of these phrases seem autobiographical, in a very specific and personal way: “I am stuck in traffic by the mudflats on the bay,” for example, or “I am waiting to buy coffee near the docks upon the square, . . . ”. Others clauses seem autobiographical in a more collective way: “I am the empty grain silos of Bernal Heights and god, and I am you on the back of a motorcycle crossing Dolores in the pineapple groves of Elvis Costello,” for example and “I am the tiny specks of detritus and metal that flake in the streets, I am the stray opossum at the undersides of highways, I am the screaming man at midnight in the lot.”

Obviously, Jarnot’s California is far different than a dictionary definition or encyclopedia description. Hers is a more personal than objective explication, more connotative than denotative, ever-shifting and layered, not set and linear. The nature of California, in Jarnot’s Sea Lyrics, is as uncertain as the land’s geographic nature – “large island or peninsula” – was for those in the Eighteenth century.

Related to the layering and ever-shifting nature of Sea Lyrics is the fact that many words or images recur or echo within and across the poems. Some of those words are: waterfront, avocado(s), dawn, fish, tattoos, dreams, the ocean and matters related thereto, eucalyptus, lagoons, opossum, Lucretius, the bridge, fog. Some obviously are directly germane to any depiction of Northern California; some are idiosyncratic to Jarnot’s experience, and some are relevant to the human experience, no matter the geographic location.

Because of the way that words recur or echo through the poems, presenting excerpts from Sea Lyrics is dicey: doing so shortchanges the overall effect. Still, you should have some idea how it goes. Here are two of the thirty prose poems in the book:

Both sea lions and sea leopards cough in the halls of our
sleep while we play pinball, I am ebbing in and out, I am
dreaming dreams I hardly know and have tattoos, I am
dreaming dreams outside of dreams and fish tanks and
the spanishest of music.

I am bludgeoned by this most exotic ocean, currently, I
am in the post office with the prison cells and tides, I
am with the fires in the eucalyptus fog, I am clearing
and the colors are all changing, I am changing colors in
the lift of fog, I am almost to Japan, I am circles and the
squirrels revolve, I am missing plastic pets, I am
predictions of the sounds of tides and this.

I cherry-picked these two, I must admit. The explicit mentions of and imagery redolent of the sea in these two – “ebbing” and “tides,” for example – permit me to more easily mention why I think Jarnot uses comma-separated clauses in Sea Lyrics: waves. Waves of thought, waves of perception. Waves of words, on the page, waves, from and in the poet’s mind, waves. Waves of words in which, as with the water of the sea, and thoughts in the mind, there is intermixing, back and forthing. Until the terminal period of each poem, and because of the commas, waves of clauses roll, swells of words surge, to the shores of the eyes.

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“What In Fire, Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?”
Lisa Jarnot
– included in –
Heliopolis
(Cambridge, England: rem press, 1998)
– reprinted in –
Ring of Fire
(Cambridge, MA, 2001)
and
(Cambridge, England: Salt Publishing, 2003)

Jarnot’s collection Ring of Fire includes, in addition to the Sea Lyrics set, another half-dozen or so prose poems that consist of a longish blocks of text full of comma-separated clauses. Among these, “The Age of Velocipede,”a three-pager with some 150 clauses, has been rightly called a “tour-de-force.”

However, another of the book’s comma-laden prose poems, “What In Fire, Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?,” is my favorite. Heck, even it’s title has a lot of commas, relatively speaking. In addition, the poem, because of how it differs from its model with respect to punctuation, gives me a chance to further consider the particular power of the comma.

Jarnot’s poem, as its title indicates, recounts what she loves about fire. It includes both personal memories and more universal matters. The poem runs for a bit more than a page. Here are the first several clauses of “What in Fire Did I . . . Love?,” followed by those clauses with which the poem ends:

The glow of it in early winter, the barn that Eric Bartlett
and Ronnie Burke burned down on Sturgeon Point Road
in 1981 and not on purpose, the coils of voluminous
smoking snake pellets set off in the driveway and on the
porch steps with the neighbors kids, the activity of Jim in
finding the biggest log outside the house to put into the
fire, the burning things upon the beach–paper cups, straws,
tires, and also driftwood, the building of all such things to a
cone of six feet high on or near the night of the fourth of July,
             [ . . . ]
                                                                                         . . ., the fire
in the fennel stalk and also then Prometheus, all general ideas
of warmth and glowingness the variety of foods that can be
cooked with it, the use of it to see when there’s no electricity,
its ability to melt wax, the way it starts from broken glass
reflections, the way it melts sand into useful glass,
the way it can be used to shape things into glass-shaped
swans and also other birds.

Jarnot’s poem is patterned on a passage from the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the narrator provides a lengthy catalog-list answer to the question, “What in water did [Leopold] Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?” Here are the first several parts of the dozens of things that Bloom admires in water:

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in
seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its
umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding
8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting
in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: . . . .

Note the differences between Jarnot’s and Joyce’s punctuation. What’s the colon do, that the comma doesn’t? And vice-versa? Exact answers here are hard to pinpoint, and the differences probably aren’t vast. However, Joyce’s segments seem more punctuated, to come less freely, than Jarnot’s comma separated clauses. The colon seems to provide a greater pause, a greater separation between the clauses. This probably derives from the colon’s traditional and primary functions as a punctuation mark: to introduce a logical consequence or effect that follows from a fact stated before, and to introduce a description that makes explicit the elements of a set.

In contrast, Jarnot’s clauses marked off by commas – even with that punctuation and resulting pause – come quicker, and seem to blend more. And that, I think, is a good thing in a prose poem such as Jarnot’s . “What In Fire, Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?” is not a math equation of units rigidly calculated, or a deductive exercise. It’s a knitted work, in which each clause is hooked to those that precede and follow it, that proceeds via association. The comma, I submit, facilitates that action.

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Vertical Rainbow Climber
Will Alexander
(Aptos, CA: Jazz Press, 1987)

Will Alexander’s first book, Vertical Rainbow Climber, was published in 1987. By any measure, this book is rare. Only eight libraries have a copy, according to WorldCat, and it almost never shows up for sale.

Of Vertical Rainbow Climber’s twenty-three poems, nineteen are in prose. All but two of those prose poems are lengthy one sentence poems, with the sentence made up of numerous clauses separated by commas. These single-sentence prose poems are mostly a page or longer: clause, after clause, after clause, just like that except, of course, the clauses vary from a single or a few words to more complex quasi-sentences.

Among Vertical Rainbow Climber’s comma-laden prose poems is “Mountain Slope Swimming In Detroit.” It happens to be – and this is especially noteworthy for the bibliographically inclined – the very first poem Alexander ever published. The poem appeared in the magazine River Styx in 1979, eight years before it was collected in the book.

“Mountain Slope Swimming In Detroit” includes numerous references to that city (e.g., “the Penobscot,” a high-rise architectural landmark) and in general has condemnatory tone toward it. The energy of Alexander’s words and phrases, a burning rush of language, sears the page. Here are four excerpts, including the poem’s first three lines (comprised of a half-dozen comma-separated clauses), then passages from further along in the poem. Please notice how the focus, language, and subject matter jump and leap and flow:

Falling from the Penobscot, rising up an incline treatise, locked in outward
forms of gravity, flag pole speech in broken Esperanto, nocturnal grease
rockets, fluvial expressways humming solipsistic cowardice, . . .

                                                                                                                   . . ., on
the John Lodge expressway there are boats the size of wind whipped
martinis, cars are stripped to their essence, taken to Chicago as recycled
horse paint, in the projects wind is pure as death, a needle the length of a
lamp vein, sticking through the heart, freezing the heart with cocaine ice
cubes smoking in ditches, Detroit, father of chrome and fire, . . .

                                                                 . . ., the miraculous miasma of Martian
sun storm saddles twisting through heartbeats, mountains obscured by
bygone goats’ brains turning on rods the length of a diamond, mountains
with spectacular shirtsleeves shining, all confused by Martian crowbar
systems, . . .

                . . ., Detroit with whalebone teeth locked in the foot of an organ
grinder’s stomach, negative abrasions tearing down castles, car door
jockeys hitting themselves with man centered bricks from the universe of
death, fumes from nuclear tom cats unwind tendons, sets the
heartbeat free, oblivion is reached, borrowed birds breaking through
shadows, brocaded coffee marks sifted from prisons, liberation of the
mind, the eye, the spirit, . . .

In the twenty plus years since Vertical Rainbow Climber, Alexander has published only a few single-sentence comma-laden prose poems. Most of the poetry he’s published has been lineated verse (with no punctuation whatsoever!). His prose – short and longer fiction, philosophical speculations, and topical essays – mostly takes the traditional form of multiple sentences in multiple paragraphs.

But Alexander has published two or three comma-laden single sentence prose poems, though none have been collected in a book. One of these comma-laden single sentence prose poems – a wondrous four-pager published in 2001 – is a personal favorite, so much so that I’ve collaged up a “cover” for it:

“The Cryptographic Ocelot”
Will Alexander
in
Tripwire: A Journal of Poetics, # 5 (Fall 2001)

“The Cryptographic Ocelot,” as with a number of Alexander’s poems, has a “voice” that’s decentered – somewhat – from the poet himself (there’s more than a little Alexander, I think, in all his poems written from the voice of something or someone else). The “voice” here – the “I” of the poem – is an ocelot, who addresses a water owl (itself an imagined creature) who is considered a friend. No question about it, that is one funky-good imaginative starting point!

Alexander’s ocelot blisters the “daily plutonic comedy indebted to delusion,” to quote but one of many opprobriums stated in the poem about human existence, or at least much of it. The ocelot is a magnificent, vital, empowered force; perhaps a model or inspiration for us all. Here are a few excerpts, and again, remember: the poem here proceeds in the voice of the ocelot:

                                                                  . . . , I am armed with the crucial
invective, with the clipped tornado rejoinder, a mirage who squares
his knights & his bishops within this cultural esplanade of panic,
within this dizzying economic abradant, because I am the permanent
heteroclite, the resistant heteroecious demon, who always carries in
his eyes the glazed look of infinity, a tonic with mingled lightning
persona, with the cycadaceous viral totemics, . . .

                                                                       . . . , I live by means of green
beryllium adjustment, because you must admit that we are living
amidst the ruins of broken dimensional timing, invaded by detritus
from the more insidious realms, . . .

                                          . . . , from my secretive selvas I am a fiery radium
expunger, a riverine Cagliostro, capable of gristle berries or smoking
caviar russets, you see my friend, the human race exists annulled as a
super-luminal pornography, a human zone wasted in an ornament of haze & psychological destruction, a haze in which the sleight of hand
dimension takes on the concrete draught of daily existence, full of
corroded pantomime maneuvers & juggling & God games, one must
always build dazzling lacunae, false exterior puzzles, in order to feel
the pulse of the seismic, . . .

                                                             . . . , as for sentiment, let me call out the
dog hackers, let me call out the messengers from cinematic snuff bal-
lets, because I have no sympathy for beleaguerment, no sympathy for
the pus stained consumer’s dollies, for mechanically approved rhetori-
cal engagement, I’ve obliterated counting, . . .

So, okay, why are the poems full of comma-laden clauses? What was, and is, Alexander doing when he takes this approach, including in almost all of his first published poems?

I think the clauses separated by commas relate to certain fundamentals in Alexander’s poetics: the way he, his imagination, and the world come together in words. I’m going to let Alexander himself explain this, sort of. You see, to my knowledge Alexander’s never written about his comma-laden poems. So I’ve had to improvise.

Specifically, I’ve read through everything I could get my hands on that Alexander has published: poems, essays, fiction, and interviews. In these sources I identified certain phrases that seem to directly relate to Alexander’s poetics, at least insofar as that concerns his long single-sentence prose poems. I then stitched those phrases together, using – natch – commas, into a paragraphic super-sentence which I set out below.

I admit this mode of explication is unconventional. Alexander wasn’t writing (or talking) about his comma-full poems in the phrases below: I’m projecting a relation to his poetics from fragments. Yet I’m convinced, strongly, that my jury-rigged hodgepodge accurately reflects Alexander’s approach to language and writing, particularly as that undergirds his long single-sentence, comma-filled prose poems.

Here it is, and remember the following (with two minor exceptions indicated by brackets) are Alexander’s own words, lifted and arranged:

I’m joining in the creation of the universe, but in my own particular way, which is opening and opening and opening and opening, creation [that] always probes, is a kinetic diorama, is a movement of encounter with forces, the fluidic motion of the sidereal, mesmeric, an unbroken motion of consciousness, [a] river of poetry, where wild fire ignites from a river, the perpetuity of energy, expansiveness, sumptuous musical cross-hatching, a broken density of leptons, of fevers, of mimes, of flaming interior squalls, the constant rotation of immensity, the blending of halts and motions, like the vertical equilibria of fire, transmitted by surges, waves of oneiric potions, erupting transfunctional plasma, magic intensification of multiples, not the language of pedestrian exchange, but language charged as a means for moving the consciousness to the zone of “interior liberation,” the magical movement of language as it flows, a burning integral flow, which spawns the vertical numerology of trance, rushing like beautifully irradiated vipers across a drawbridge of air whistling the original nightmare incandescence of heaven, the tumbling of words, constellations of unforeseen combinations, a-connected compounds always at odds with discursive elaboration, convulsed in deeply layered expression, flood of words, alchemically cooking away, the language . . . constantly swarming, as it flows I flow, . . . .

Isn’t that something?! (The sources for each or any, yes, each or any, clause above are available on request set out below, by request, in an appendix that follows the end notes!)

The key words from collage above are: opening and opening, movement, motion, river, fire, perpetuity, expansiveness, constant rotation, surges, waves, rushing, tumbling, a-connected, deeply layered, flood, flows. None of this action, in the prose poem format, would work nearly as well if Alexander used traditional sentences (with periods that stop thought) and paragraphs (with their explicit shifting of focus). Given what Alexander values in writing – and again, I believe the collage above accurately reflects his essential poetics – his poems with long comma-laden sentences, I believe, are perfectly suited for his singular adventure.

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Conclusion

That’s all, folks! Thanks, thanks much, for sticking with this. Any grand summations or over-arching conclusions, I, leave, to, you. Please see the note immediately below for a bit more information about the poets. And if you know of other comma crazy poems, please leave a comment. As for me, I’m already thinking of poems with lots of ellipses, colons, dashes, hyphens, etc. etc. . . . .

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Notes on the Poets

José Garcia Villa died in 1997. Books currently in print include Doveglion: Collected Poems (Penguin Classics, 2008) and The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by José Garcia Villa (Kaya/Muae, 1999).

Ron Silliman continues to write and publish. In addition to The Age of Huts (compleat) – cited above – his longpoem the Alphabet (University of Alabama, 2008) is in print. Silliman is at work on Universe, another longpoem project, although to my knowledge none of that work has been published.

Steve McCaffery continues to write and publish. Among his recent books are Every Way Oakley (Book Thug 2008), a homolinguistic translation of Tender Buttons, and Slightly Left of Thinking (Chax Press 2008), a collection of poems and texts.

Kenneth Goldsmith continues to write and publish. His poetry, conceptual and otherwise, is available almost in its entirety on the web for all to see, read, and enjoy (click here to go, if you please (scroll down just a bit on the linked-to page)).

Lisa Jarnot continues to write and publish. Her most recent collection of poems is Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008). Her biography of Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, is scheduled for publication in early 2011.

Will Alexander continues to write and publish. Just a few months ago, uploads featuring Alexander reciting his work while accompanied by music, described as “recorded recently in Amsterdam,” were made to YouTube (click here to go to one). The Amazon.com website indicates that New Directions will publish Alexander’s Sri Lankan Loxodrome in September.

Appendix – The Annotated Will Alexander collaged “quotation”

I’m joining in the creation of the universe , but in my own particular way, which is opening and opening and opening and opening [“Will Alexander: A Profound Investigation (interview with Marcella Durand),” The Poetry Project Newsletter, No. 202 (February/March 2005) at 15], creation [that] always probes, is a kinetic diorama, is a movement of encounter with forces [“Transgression of Genre As Vitality,” Chain 3-1], the fluidic motion of the sidereal [“My Interior Vita,” Callaloo 22:2 (1999) at 371], mesmeric [Id.], an unbroken motion of consciousness [Id. at 373], [a] river of poetry [“Hauling Up Gold From The Abyss: An Interview with Will Alexander,” Callaloo 22:2 (1999) at 405], where wild fire ignites from a river [Sunrise in Armageddon at 190], the perpetuity of energy [Interview in Rain Taxi, Vol 11, No. 2 (Summer 2006) at 29], expansiveness [“Hauling Up Gold From The Abyss: An Interview with Will Alexander,” Callaloo 22:2 (1999) at 406], sumptuous musical cross-hatching [“Poetry: Alchemical Anguish and Fire,” Oblek 12-1 (Spring/Fall 1993) at 17], a broken density of leptons, of fevers, of mimes, of flaming interior squalls [“Within The Scope of the Post-Mortem Imam,” in Towards The Primeval Lightning Field at 20], the constant rotation of immensity [Id. at 30], the blending of halts and motions, like the vertical equilibria of fire [“The Whirling King in the Runic Psychic Theatre,” in Towards The Primeval Lightning Field at 51], transmitted by surges [Id. at 58], waves of oneiric potions [Id.], erupting transfunctional plasma [“Language: Leap As Inscrutable Physic,” in Towards The Primeval Lightning Field at 75], magic intensification of multiples [Id.], not the language of pedestrian exchange, but language charged as a means for moving the consciousness to the zone of “interior liberation” [Id. at 82], the magical movement of language as it flows [Id. at 84], a burning integral flow [“Isolation and Gold,” in Towards The Primeval Lightning Field at 111], which spawns the vertical numerology of trance [Id.], rushing like beautifully irradiated vipers across a drawbridge of air whistling the original nightmare incandescence of heaven [“from The Black Speech of Angel,” Hambone 7 (Fall 1987) at 164], the tumbling of words [Id.], constellations of unforeseen combinations [Id.], a-connected compounds always at odds with discursive elaboration [Sunrise in Armageddon at 130], convulsed in deeply layered expression [“from The Black Speech of Angel,” Hambone 7 (Fall 1987) at 169], flood of words [Id.], alchemically cooking away [Id. at 165-166], the language . . . constantly swarming [Id.], as it flows I flow [Id.], . . .

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We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited equi-distant, that they are endured by their Creditor with cervical unanswerable rims, that among these are lightning, lice, and the pushcart of harakiri. That to seduce these rims, graces are insulated among manatees, descanting their juvenile pragmatism from the consistency of the graced. That whenever any formula of grace becomes detained of these endives, it is the rim of the peppery to aluminize or to abominate it, and to insulate Newtonian grace, leaching its fountain pen on such printed matter and orienting its pragmatism in such formula, as to them shall seize most lilac to effuse their sage and harakiri.

-- Rosmarie Waldrop
“Shorter American Memory
of the Declaration of Independence”
from
shorter american memory
(Providence, R.I.: Paradigm Press, 1988)

more on . . . poets on reading . . .

Stephen Ratcliffe
Listening to Reading
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000)

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Ron Padgett
Creative Reading:
What It Is, How to Do It, and Why
(Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997)

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This post follows on John Olson’s essay “Extreme Reading,” posted here last week. After the essay went up, Olson himself e-mailed me, reminding me of two books that ought to be read and remembered by all extreme readers. This present post, then, serves both as a kind of supplement to “Extreme Reading,” and my shout-out for two books, each by a contemporary poet, that present terrific takes on reading.

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Stephen Ratcliffe
Listening to Reading
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000)

Listening to Reading is a collection of essays on particular books by contemporary poets. There are two kinds of essays. The first type, which Ratcliffe calls “analytic close readings,” are a very familiar type, at least in intent: their purpose is to explain the poetry which is written about. The second kind of essay is remarkably non-traditional: called by Ratcliffe “reading-as-writing-itself,” their purpose is “to perform /demonstrate that writing by doing/enacting it.” As Ratcliffe puts it, this is “writing that in listening to reading engages its subject on, and in, its own terms.”

For those who like extreme reading, and particularly for those (I’m raising my hand here) who enjoy doing that with poetry, Ratcliffe’s book is a primary source. It includes key advice about how to read or engage with a text, and maybe even more serves as an inspiration: all the essays – and especially the performative pieces – serve as object lessons in the wonders a focused and deep reader can bring about.

With regard to advice about how to read, Ratcliffe asserts two main points. The first is embodied in the book’s title: Listening to Reading. Ratcliffe insists that words are only fully present when they enter through the ear, that poems have an acoustic dimension (a sound/shape) and meaning does not exist separately from that. If the poem is read silently, it must be read not only with the eyes, but also the ears. We must listen to reading.

The other key piece of advice concerns attention. Attention is all, Ratcliffe says, borrowing in part on this (with direct acknowledgement) from Ezra Pound. Ratcliffe advises:

read[] the poem closely, with the same act of attention – focused at both micro- and wide-angle range – to the surface, tilt, and interior thrust of a particular structure in words that the scientist brings to his study of observable (or supposed) phenomena.

This advice fits right in with any notion of extreme reading, I think. Last week, I used an image of a man peering into a microscope to illustrate Olson’s essay, and Ratcliffe’s insistence on scientist-like attention when reading certainly is consistent with that. But remember, Ratcliffe calls for not just visual, but auditory attention:

Look – no, strike that – LISTEN (sorry to shout, but I do so to emphasize Ratciliffe’s fervor regarding the sound/shape of poems): I can’t say enough about the richness of Ratcliffe’s book. If you like contemporary poetry, and extreme reading, this is a book to read, and read again.

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Ron Padgett
Creative Reading:
What It Is, How to Do It, and Why
(Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997)

Remember the following couplet from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (also used by Allen Ginsberg as an epigraph on the title page of Howl and Other Poems)?

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Of course you do! Well, that’s precisely the kind of rebellious freedom that Ron Padgett advocates in Creative Reading. Padgett’s basic thesis is that the reader – to really have fun – needs to get “aggressive” (his word) and do what s/he wants with the text (italics below as in the original):

. . . the book is there for you to use as you see fit. It may have content you want to extract, it may be in a writing style you want to learn, it may lend itself to self-parody, or it may invite radical revision, rearrangement, or complete transformation. In all these cases, the book is raw material for you to shape. When you come to it ready to take it apart and put it back together, it has lost its inviolability, its implied claim to immutability, its intimidating authority. You become the new author. You assume authority.

In the key chapter of his book, Padgett lists and describes almost twenty creative reading techniques. It’s a tour-de-force. It begins with suggestions about changing single words in a text and reading alternate lines. It progresses to a discussion of reading a page repeatedly, “column confusion,” “fold-ins,” “day-toning,” “night-toning,” stencils and much else. It’s an extreme libertine reading primer like no other.

Padgett also has a chapter entitled “Reading in Unusual Situations.” Remember those images I used last week to illustrate John Olson’s essay, showing a person reading on a city street, in a humongous chair outdoors, or while jammed upside down between the walls in hallway? Well, Padgett in a few lucid paragraphs not only discusses similar situations, but explains why you feel the way you do when you see somebody else reading like that.

Padgett’s book is geared towards teachers, so sometimes it can trend toward the obvious and the exhaustive. But outweighing all that, and outweighing it by about two dozen complete sets of the O.E.D., are the many anecdotes or references Padgett puts into the book based on his experiences as a poet, writer, deep reader, and engaged member of the human race.

The book’s index (and hooray for an index!) includes dozens and dozens of proper names. And it’s not just the relatively well-known (Tristan Tzara, for example, and his recipe for dada cut-up poems) that turn up. Admittedly, I probably don’t get out of the house as much as I should, but new to me were names such as Marc Sapporo, author of a 1962 French novel that came in a box, with pages unbound and unnumbered, and John Waldman, a speed reading specialist who as a WWII soldier managed to get two trashy mystery novels for the price of one by reading only the odd-numbered pages of a book the first time through it, and then the second time, a few weeks later, reading through only the even-numbered pages.

My favorite anecdote in the book involves Padgett himself and concerns the creative reading technique he calls “typing.” To explain this particular technique, I’m going to type the opening paragraph of Padgett’s section on it, an explicative approach (as you may have already figured out) that is exactly perfect for this particular subject:

Typing. In the early 1960s, I learned that one of the best ways
to read an author was to type up his or her work at some length. I had
typed up brief selections from other people’s work – individual poems or
paragraphs, bits of dialogue, extracts from an essay – but it wasn’t until I
typed an entire collection of poems (the 66 poems in the first edition of
Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets) that I understood how close you can get to an-
other’s work by this means.

That’s a heck of a parenthetical tidbit, ain’t it?!! I’d forgotten or not known that Padgett -- I think this is how the story goes -- typed up the Berrigan masterwork for its first mimeoed publication. Think how fun that must have been! Padgett in the section from which the passage above is excerpted concisely explains what typing Sonnets taught him about Berrigan’s emphasis on single words, which kind of words he favored, the role of vowels, and other matters, including the poems’ line breaks, which he was able to focus on because (think here of the “old-fashioned” manual typewriter) he had to use the carriage return at the end of each line.

Typing out a poem: it’s a beautiful creative reading technique, a wonderful way to get in a little extreme reading.

Adventures in the Pharmakon . . .

EXTREME READING

An Essay

by

John Olson

Introductory Note: In response to my post a few weeks ago on Rae Armantrout’s “Sway,” Seattle poet John Olson wrote, “Holy cow. That is a vigorous reading . . . . I’m coining a phrase, based on ‘extreme sports.’ Extreme Reading.” About ten days ago, Olson wrote me again: “I was inspired to write a prose poem about Extreme Reading. But then the prose poem evolved into an essay. I was wondering if you might want to see it and possibly post it at your blog?” Needless to say, I answered “yes!” and am thrilled to present here the first publication of Olson’s essay.

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Extreme Reading

Extreme reading is the opposite of speed reading. Words are not animals killed and stuffed for exhibition. Words are alive. Words are giants and angels. There has to be a certain suppleness of mind for a description of wool to become real wool, or a mosquito drawing blood through a proboscis on a shore near Rockstone, Guyana.

What happens when we read? Things and people that are absent become present. Images develop in the mind. An image is a drop of thought in the form of ink. A timeless vapor spun out of silk. The mind can go as deep as it wants into a word or string of words. Linger there as the world turns and the saga moves forward.

An alphabet is dead until the eyes bring the letters light and life. The harmonica is fulfilled when there is air blowing through it. Letters enter the eyes and become fireworks. A white lotus in a blue bowl. A cherry of juicy cognition. Gold embedded in sand. A pound of air fastened to a sheet of paper. A spectacle in which Montmarte and its smells and sounds are vivid and sexual. And the sky is encased in a walnut. And the spirit is awakened to the meaning of glass. Objects on a table. Sheer sugar bouncing through paradise in a borrowed jeep.

Focus is essential. One must be scrupulously idle. Open the book. Bend forward. Dive into it.

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Reading is delicate, like surgery. The ribcage has been opened. There is a large red organ beating in spasmodic rhythms. Our thoughts turn toward a milieu of intellectual endeavor. Syllables rooted in glitter. The water has been disturbed. Sunlight fractures and flickers. The oars drift idly. The mouth opens to say what it is to feel one’s illusions shattered. Meanwhile the fetus of a new idea evolves into a series of convolutions immediate as skin.

Someone has scribbled their name in the sand. But the last breaking wave has made feathers of it.

Speed reading is like riding in a car. The world whizzes by in a blur. We get to our destination without having noticed what brought us to our destination. Extreme reading is driving a car. Extreme reading is stopping a car and getting out to go for a walk.

Consider the sky. Fingers curled around the spine of a book. Affections, reflections, infections, inflections. Yellow and red. Voices echoing in a planetarium.

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Reading is a form of hallucination. The images and people we encounter among the letters are not there. The reality they acquire in our mind is equal to the effort we make in building them in our mind. Sufficient training will help understand the meaning of someone waving semaphores up and down but true reading requires something more of you than knowing how to spell or understanding the relationship between a sign and its referent. The letters invite a cooperation greater than the peremptory commands of a traffic light. Whoever came up with the idea of separating green from red with the happy ambiguity of yellow was clearly someone who enjoyed reading.

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Why is it always so hard to find time to read? Or a place to read.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry used to set the controls of his P-38 Lightning on automatic and circle Marseille while reading a book.

He was claimed to have been shot down by Horst Rippert, a Luftwaffe pilot who acknowledged himself to be a fan.

It is a good idea to choose a safe place to read, though I am frequently dazzled by people who walk down city streets while reading a book.

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Reading is like talking to a ghost. Picasso squeezing a tube of paint, wide-eyed in a yolk of gold.

The mind is silent like an aquarium. A brood of sounds and arbitrary signs lift themselves into color and being. Lambent designs maunder in undulation. A page is turned. A new paragraph begun. Einstein is disturbed to find that, according to the theory of relativity, the universe is not static, but either contracting or expanding. Starlight becomes deformed over long distances. The stratospheric irreality of huge numbers create new dimensions. Reading the universe, or a strand of DNA molecules, requires intuition, a feeling for combinatory forces and their tendency toward play.

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All reading is based on this question: why is there something instead of nothing? The quantum vacuum is never empty but roils with virtual particles. The particles represent not only what is, but what might be. The same can be said of letters. Or a string of words. They represent what is, but the reader’s mind may take them elsewhere. Reverie is unpredictable.

Was there a time when nothing existed? No time? No space? No particles? No Bohemia? No journeys? Nothing thin? Nothing thick? Nothing glowing? No beauty or butter?

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If you are reading this on a computer screen it is not so much a matter of proverbs as pixels. Proverbs belong to the formation of old religions. Pixels belong to the proverbs of lucidity. The light in the box. The light in the mind. The light coming out of the eyes.

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“There is a kind of novelist,” observes Anthony Burgess, “usually popular, sometimes wealthy, in whose work language is a zero quantity, transparent, unseductive, the overtones of connotation and ambiguity totally damped.” The aim of this novelist “can only properly be fulfilled when the narrated action is transformed into represented action: content being more important than style, the referents ache to be free of their words and to be presented directly as sense-data.” This is not reading. This is watching television on paper.

As for the other kind of novelist, and here we have James Joyce and Gertrude Stein and Edgar Allan Poe in mind, “it is important that the opacity of the language be exploited, so that the ambiguities, puns and centrifugal connotations are to be enjoyed rather than regretted, and whose books, made out of words as much as characters and incidents, lose a great deal when adapted to a visual medium.”

The word-intoxicated writer of opacity and centrifugal connotation to which Burgess refers requires true reading. Attentive reading. Fully absorbed reading. Creative reading. Alert and aware and alive and perceptive reading. Deep reading. Engaged reading. Extreme reading.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty, commenting on a statement by French linguist Antoine Meillet, that “linguistic events are qualitative” and that each language “forms a system,” and so entails a principle of internal organization, remarks that “to say that linguistic events are qualitative, is to say again that in their connection and their unrolling [déroulement] they require the mediation of consciousness.”

Language is a medium in the deepest sense, a membrane of sound and meaning in which light is diffused in that space between internal perception and external world.

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Think of the potential in a single word. It is like opening a box. A procession of people leaving imprints in clay. Each word has acquired multiple layers and flavors as it has traveled from mouth to mouth over centuries of use. Take the word ‘subtle’ for instance. Subtle comes from Latin subtilis, which itself is a conflation of two Latin words, sub, meaning under, and tilis, which comes from tela, meaning web, which is related to texere, to weave. So here we have a word making clear and direct reference to the fine art of weaving, combining threads in a pattern, work requiring skill, dexterity, focus, and loving attention. And who hasn’t entered a shed and felt the fine brushing of a web against the skin, and how fine and delicate that sensation happened to be, and the smells associated with it, and the sense of things present that were not altogether present.

One of my favorite uses of the word ‘subtle’ appears in Secreta secretorum (The Secret of Secrets), a Middle English prose translation of the work in French by James Yonge, which itself was a translation from the Arabic Kitab sirr al-asrar, which makes reference to the Book of the science of government, on the good ordering of statecraft, and takes the form of a letter supposedly from Aristotle to Alexander during his campaign in Persia. Yonge writes “Sutil and thyn spetil that descendyth… fro the Palete of the mouth to the tonge.” What a spectacular image!

A more recent example appears in John Tyndall’s Heat considered as a mode of motion: being a course of twelve lectures delivered at the Royal institution of Great Britain in the season of 1862. Tyndall, a romantic pantheist, wrote: “The material theory supposes heat to be… a subtle fluid stored up in the inter-atomic spaces of bodies.”

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There is no end to the associations drawn from disassembling a word. Lips are skin, finite and fixed, but the imagination is infinite.

Morning is beautiful because it travels on entertaining sticks. The sticks are letters. Some of them have curves. O is a fabric of dreams and snow. H gets expansion from kerosene rags lit by the i in a grapefruit.

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Making art with words is just plain silly. Because beauty is savage and alphabets are the product of civilization. And what is civilization except people figuring out how to live with one another without killing one another. The process is incomplete. The world needs readers.

Socrates was against reading because he believed it would weaken the memory and lead people astray with illusions instead of truths. Socrates was wrong. Reading is what you make of it. It’s true that writing doesn’t have the suppleness and spontaneity of speech because once an idea is committed to pixel or paper it becomes frozen in time. Even the sloppiest email message has something stiff and remote about it because it lacks the quick improvisations of the tongue. But speech, which is frequently erratic and muddled, does not convey the truth any better than writing. Writing is a craft. There is more time to cram and season it with thought. The kind of thought that mulls and maunders in the mind until it is ripe and swollen and ready to drive turbines.

Neither speech nor writing can claim exemption from distorting the truth, or outright lying. But the written word is open to examination. It concentrates our attention. The extreme reader learns how to sift each phrase and sentence for nuggets of value and consequence. How to dwell in solitude. How to reflect. How to suspend judgment. How to drift in reverie. There is a sense of disembodiment when we read because we emerge from ourselves to occupy an imaginary domain, what Robin Blaser refers to as “an extreme ghostliness in language itself. It includes the sublime, the terrible and the uncanny…” Socrates feared that this “extreme ghostliness” would make people more vulnerable to noxious chimeras, phantom conceptions, Circean distortions. But the force of a skilled orator can be just as enchanting, just as misleading. Speech is no guarantor of integrity. Psychopaths have a notable tendency to be smooth, inviting, fascinating, and verbally facile.

Socrates was spot on when he said that language was a drug. He calls writing a Pharmakon, which can act either as a remedy or a poison. Socrates sees it acting as a poison because it not only weakens memory but lures us away from the truth with its inherently hallucinatory properties. “Operating through seduction,” observed Jacques Derrida in his essay on the subject, “the pharmakon makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws.” But what’s wrong with that? That sounds like a good thing to me. Reality isn’t tied down. It is constantly moving.

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Writing is governed by the ways of magic and not the laws of necessity. We are not in a domain of binoculars and sweat, as the explorer of a new terrain might be, but a jungle of letters whose horizon continually expands and everything is spectral as perfume.

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To go to an extreme in anything implies danger. Extreme reading is no different. The danger is that it puts our mind elsewhere, outside the usual parameters, where it is free to question the laws in which it resides. Derrida compares this to a desire for orphanhood, and patricidal subversion.

It would not be surprising, then, to discover that a number of outlaws happened to be avid readers. Frank James used to perform scenes from Shakespeare while he and his brother Jesse robbed trains.

One of the primary characteristics of the orphan is neediness. Writers who light a match and burn what they have written in order to preserve a purity of expression are rare. Most people, when they have written something they are pleased with, desire an audience. It is there that one hopes for an ideal responsiveness, an educated public. “Context,” observes Ron Silliman in his essay “The Political Economy of Poetry,” “determines the actual, real-life consumption of a literary product, without which communication of a message (formal, substantive, ideological) cannot occur.” It is here that the poet hopes fervently for that rare species, the extreme reader. Someone willing to immerse themselves in language. Someone with a real love of language. Silly language. Non-utilitarian language. Language without boundaries. Language that fuels wild speculations by a vigorous contiguity and artfully reveals the exquisite actuality of words in the spring of their creation. Which, surprisingly, antagonizes a lot of people.

Silliman writes elsewhere, in the mid-eighties, that the “widespread howling and derision which has greeted the tendency which has come to be characterized as ‘language poetry’ reflects precisely this taboo against transcending the known universe… the outcries of those poets and critics for whom the arrival of anything new in the field of writing is, literally, impossible is an index of just how painful the recognition of one’s own cultural borders can be.”

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Extreme reading, which encourages the reader to follow the subterranean laws of association rather than logic, offers incendiary salvation from a world that has ceased to be mulled or maundered but mauled into mall after mall after mall. Extreme reading is liberation by inebriation. Mania, marvel, and maze. An evocation, a walk up library steps in quest of a voyage.

-- John Olson

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Works Cited or Used in

Extreme Reading
An Essay by John Olson
(May-June, 2009):

Burgess, Anthony. Joysprick, An Introduction To The Language Of James Joyce. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sens et Non-Sens. Paris: Les Éditions Nagel, 1948. Translation by author.

Oxford English Dictionary. Online Edition.

Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof, 1987.

Blaser, Robin. “The Practice of Outside.” Essay included in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, edited by Robin Blaser. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980.

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Thanks again to John Olson.

Olson’s essay on the CERN large hadron collider will be appearing in American Scholar. His essay on aliteracy, titled “Gutenberg Blues,” was published last year here at the glade (click to go).

Olson’s prose poems this year have appeared in print in The Hat 8, New American Writing 27, Denver Quarterly (Volume 43, Number 3 (April 2009), and Bateau, Vol. 2, No. 2, and on-line at Alligatorzine. Additional poems are scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of American Poetry Review. His most recent collection is Backscatter: New and Selected Poems (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2008).

Olson’s novel, Souls of Wind, concerning the adventures of Arthur Rimbaud and Billy the Kid in the 19th Century American West, was published last year by Quale Press.

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The Sea! Water! Ulysses! Joyce! Yes!

BLOOMSDAY!

THE SEA!

Dublin Bay, Ireland
photo © Tom Hunter
(used with permission)
(click here for Tom Hunter’s website)

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Isn’t the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

– Buck Mulligan, in Chapter 1 of Ulysses

Notes:

“Algy” is a shorthand reference to Swinburne. “Epi oinopa ponton” is Greek for “the wine-dark sea,” a phrase used by, and thus here an allusion to, Homer in The Odyssey. “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The Sea!, The Sea!”), as Wikipedia concisely explains, is from a story by the Greek historian Xenophon, a contemporary of Socrates; it’s what was shouted by thousands of soldiers upon seeing the Black Sea after many days on land.

Swimmers at Forty Foot near Sandycove
Dublin Bay, Ireland
(near Martello Tower,
the location for the scene quoted above,
and where James Joyce swam regularly)
Associated Press photo, 2006

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˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜˜

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BLOOMSDAY!

WATER!

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What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

– from Ulysses, Chapter 17

Note: A great prose-poem, embedded in the novel. Incredible vocabulary, epic reach. At least two wonderful poems patterned after Joyce’s have been published over the decades. In the late 1920s, American expatriate Harry Crosby published “Madman”, a prose poem which recounts the characteristics of the sun in a manner very similar to how Joyce in the passage above sets forth various qualities of water. In the late 1990s, Lisa Jarnot published “What In Fire Did I, Firelover, Starter of Fires, Love?”, a prose poem in which she recounts, with a more personal perspective than either Joyce or Crosby, but in the same serial manner, certain qualities of fire.

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BLOOMSDAY!

Ulysses!



Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922
(the first edition)
the events of the novel
take place
on
June 16, 1904


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BLOOMSDAY!

JAMES JOYCE!

James Joyce
Paris: 1926 Photo by Berenice Abbott

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James Joyce
A Portrait by Constantin Brâncuşi
used as the frontispiece for
Tales Told of Shem and Shaun
(Paris: The Black Sun Press, 1929)

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BLOOMSDAY!

. . . yes I said yes I will Yes.

. . . yes I said yes I will Yes.

. . . yes I said yes I will Yes.

BLOOMSDAY!

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