the Whales' Bones

2007-08-27T23:14:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many weeks it's been, but the Lexical Sweat has not really happened. Total failure. Lot's of beer owed. Poo.

2007-07-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

It's exercise time! Don't let those long hot summer days let you lose touch with the voice found in the cold abysmal that is winter! Too many Barbeques, beer and baseball games to distract the writer in all of us! (though the beer can stay, you know, to cool down) In order not to lose touch with skills (skills?) and practice I am starting writing exercises every week. One a week, posting due 6 days later, and to keep things accountable if nothing gets developed then I have to buy my good friend Jeff a picture of his favorite hop-malted beverage. I am using the exercises out of the reader that I have been commenting on in all of my previous posts. I encourage anybody reading this regularly to join in on all the aerobically prosaic fun!

This week’s assignment:
Pick any word at random (noun is easy): let mind play freely around it until a few ideas have passed through. Then seize on them, look at them, and record. Try this with a non-connatative word, like "so" etc.

Feel the burn!

No really, thank you for the surgery!

2007-06-14T17:22:00.000-07:00

Bay Area Prose

The real interesting sentence theory comes when Silliman starts ‘arguing’. The binary discourse, differentiating what poetry could be to linguistics and its relationship to fiction made sense. Poetry is wordplay and balances on the razor’s edge of image and symbology. So take that idea and combine it with what Silliman shared about the perception of literature as written. What can be said of poetry that is read aloud, or read along with? Silliman is being responsible to the many different cultures outside the west that employ story telling and verbal history. Sure, he might not directly be referring to such cultures, but he is opening up a door to what could be considered second rate art within a western context. Pointing out that prose was considered a second rate art further implies that all aesthetics can be included in literary and artistic dialogue with time.

Barthes’ lexias, in relation to Sarrasine, is the stuff of Silliman’s dreams. Real creative-like stuff. Breaking down sentences of what is a goliath of literature work and turning into a cipher.

When Silliman starts breaking down sentences into logistical formulas, it gets a little too fixation-y. I’ve taken Prakash’s Logic and Philosophy class, and to be honest it is really just overexertion to turn what is abstract into formula. Like various formulas to logic (‘modus ponens’ is the only name I can remember) there will be various forms to the sentence and with potential each object has in relation to the ideas. OH syntax, how you’ve snuck up on me!

scattering sentence-rubble haphazardly

Essentially, let language do what it wants through poking at it.

Some personal rhetoric: I love Lyn Hejinian. What she does with language, especially in terms of image in sentence and syntax in paragraph, really just tickles me pink. I hadn’t read her before this term, and anyone who was watching me when her poem was read in class would’ve seen a gaping mouth. She has something special with the way she points out what she’s doing, a taboo area of poetry. “These are the defamiliarization techniques with which we are so familiar.” Oh, and we both have quoted Paul Klee. But I digress…

Hejinian’s theory in relation to syntax has been the clearest to me. One must consider syntax in every breath of the word. Where one resides, how one reads, what the mind expects and one’s sentiment in regard to linguistics are sequences matching up to what syntax is able to achieve. The instant defines syntax.

Yet nothing is accomplished by generalizations and material deduction.

Hejinian’s says “Form does not necessarily achieve closure, nor does raw materiality provide openness.” Huoohkay, so, the “finished” or “completed” poem has never really ended, and the blank page instead of connoting openness is actually quite deliberate and conclusive. No polar bear nose in winter can truly be free. I get what she’s saying on a very superficial level; Poems can always be rewritten and read in new ways, and words must have some wordplay in order that definition will continue to be allusive.

Again, another corresponding idea: “Because we have language we find ourselves in a special place and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world.” Linguistics defines understanding. The “vastness of understanding” that we are presented with despite being sentient, intellectually-communicating beings, is bottomless. Yet art has, and continues to define everything around us. Poetry is imperative to the human experience because it describes the “vastness” and the everyday in its own language. Abstraction defined by abstractions, common defined by commonality.

I got very involved, to the point of joining the National Speleological Society

Coolidge’s voice is accessible. Instead of waffling around the idea of syntax he outright says that he considers it as arrangement over “composition” or “structure”. Everything that is implied in other essays, Coolidge just comes out and points to. Saying that art is very particular, yet when discussing it we want to use concrete and precise terms, but difficulty persists because we can only work word for word.

The time and effort he takes in describing his geological endeavors is of course not without significance. Is it possibly a metaphor for his process when creating? It certainly gives meaning to some of his work because of the additional disclosure of his background and informal education. Especially principal is his description of the dollar box he used for mineral categorization and new sparked interest in learning rock names. The rocks are the elements of linguistics and the dollar box the structure of poetics, or visa versa.

Resistance is also important to consider, and Coolidge brings it up in reference to the ‘few-word’ poems he wrote. Words that don’t go together are important, not grammatically, but in terms of their weight. Certain phrases and parings can make the words electric or dark or whatever is more viscerally potent. Pound certainly employed this strategy in his short prose poems. Yet Fagin, so trancelike, interjects and points out that the singular words in entirety are less powerful due to their “lack of relationship with anything else.” The shortness must not be replaced by the writer’s ability to describe completely the object or place. It certainly is not wordplay with limitations on the length or breath; it looks more like experiments with what defamiliarization happens with such little context. I didn’t even pick up on the presentation of the noun, then having the noun turn into a verb within two words; trilobite trilobites. Double super sweet.

Whap-bop-aloo-bop-ah-Watten BAM BOOM! or The illusory babels of language

Watten has really tied all the ideas together in his discussion of composition and syntax through the approach of art in a post-modern surrealist world, via sculpture. The theory of pure mental projection, most particular to modern artist, really just takes the form of syntax theory in poetics, when the intentions of poetics are to defamiliarize and instigate analysis of language. The sculptors Watten discusses use these same concepts in their work. By breaking down enjoyable aesthetics, memory light, pre-concept of structure and place, the artist enhances progress of the medium. Watten likens Coolidge, Silliman and Benson to the sculptors he discusses. These modern artists, writers or sculptors, choose to use syntax of form and image as the vessel of change in language regarding their art. Is that a chiasm? Watten mentions static artistic–language, and that seemed to be Smithson’s main aim at change within fine art. Again, like Coolidge said, it is about arrangement. I am surprised, though I’m not sure when this essay was written, that the work of Damian Hurst was not mentioned. A personal favorite, Hurst is most famous for the sheep, pig, great white shark “industrial canning” he creates. These pieces are syntactical wonders. Hurst framed the bodies of these animals in multiple rectangular glass cases, probably full of a formaldehyde based solution, with a blue tint. Between each case, the viewer is able to see the innards of the various animals ever so slightly. The animals are out of context, yet intact. Dead, yet they only look frozen in an ordinary motion. A phrase mentioned in Watten essay is appropriate to Hurst’s work, but also the big picture of the fore-mentioned poets and theory; object status. Object status is how syntax matters to the piece of work. It is the answer to all the questions who, what, when, where and why. Time, place and arrangement are significant to how the piece will be viewed. Context is the cornerstone of what is happening with the image. If the total syntax of the words is arranged effectively then some amazing progress can happen with contemporary language, whatever the timeframe. That is what makes the different poetry schools unique or when certain poets mix everyone’s shit up, the shift comes from progress due to placement of the object. Total syntax is the components of everything in relation and including the work.

How I feel now that this is done (University &Poetry):

2007-06-14T12:24:00.001-07:00

2007-05-31T16:24:00.000-07:00

Yes. Oh yes. A still from the new Wes Anderson film "The Darjeeling Limited." I am so excited.

"Just an unnecessary name of something! What does a comma do?"

2007-05-16T20:34:00.000-07:00

And ol’ Steiny rolls in her grave.

So Gertrude has gone off the old hook on this one. Punctuation, adjectives and the all encompassing noun, she’s not letting one get away before she can rub its figurative face in the dirt. Nouns are “just an unnecessary name of something” in her terms. THINGS ARE, without having a name associated with them. Punctuation is understood autonomous to their textual symbols; there is no need to write a question mark. And adjectives are simply the common hors d’oeuvres to an unsatisfying meal called noun.
I enjoyed what she had to say about slang, being the progressive state of nouns and by people creating slang they keep language alive. Nas la mean?
Her ideas related to nouns reminded me of this book I started reading last year called “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea” by Charles Seife, about the history and danger of zero. Mesopotamians were the first to have used the concept of zero. Before then it had never really came into the frame of mathematics, due to the fact that zero has little to do with everyday life. When I leave the room we say to ourselves “Christian isn’t here” not “There is zero Christian here.” Without its mathematical relevance zero is useless. But zero does exist, dangerously lurking in the void God talks about in the first couple lines of Genesis. Stein somehow is saying the same thing related to the nouns. Whether we are going to recognize the names of things relevant to our concepts of reality, or not, names of things can be obsolete. Or "uninteresting" in her termage. But I found myself only agreeing with this until I came to the end of the essay.
The best example she shared was the impression Shakespeare had on her after describing the forest without mentioning anything having to do with a forest. That’s it. Describe something without describing it. That’s why Homer was the dopest poet ever. Blind! Booyah. Another nugget of gold was “…yet poetry being poetry nouns are nouns.” All that effort to denounce nouns and now there’s no way of getting around them. So what is it? Stein acknowledges naming elements of our reality -vibrating sounds out our throats>categorization>language>understanding- but then relates it back to the poetic reference. “…the noun must be replaced not by inner balance but by the thing itself and that will eventually lead to everything,” meaning poem comes close, but doesn’t touch the thing. It took me a while after cutting through her molasses thick vernacular.

minor unit of sincerity

2007-04-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

Zukofsky reiterates the point that poetics is a "thing" that can only be defined by many elements instead of one simple idea. Musicality, time, process, intention, blah blah blah alot of stuff right? It's an organic being, comprised of many parts, adaptability building on complexity, feeding off our consciousness. This time around I wasn’t that interested in taking on their ideas as a waterfall of knowledge, near impossible to capture between my hands. Instead I asked myself what does all this have to do with syntax. What I’m thinkin’ is the syntax relates to the many elements of poetry through their relation to each other, not just the syntactical elements of word, meter and language use. The age in which the poem is composed, the elements of meaning expressed through speech, the energy transferred.
At the end of ‘Objective’ Zukofsky says that poetry acts on particulars. It has impacts on history and depends on little for renditions, only it’s existence in a physical form. Poetry is a working cog in a machine running the consciousness we call existence. What is important to note is that it has an actual form, however allusive and indefinable. Poetry is and is not. Zukofsky says it is the image, sound and interplay of concepts. These things can be found on the elephant that everyone is touching and describing, called poetics. Casually almost, he calls for some symmetry in the arts, and we can find it in poems.
Like those leaves we tried telling Paul about, delicate, and fractured between symmetrical veins.

Metaphor in quasi-geological strata

2007-04-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

I took Dr. Peggy Chang’s grammar class two years ago and we got her distracted by talking about languages and effectiveness. If you can imagine, she drew on the white board a piece of wet spaghetti and a dry piece of spaghetti. The first was curvy and twisted, while the other was simply a straight line. She said the first line was Chinese and the second was English. In essence Chinese brings the message about by going all over the place, while English is effective in getting the message across a space. Fenollosa talks about all truth being expressed through sentences, and all truth being transference of power. Chang’s metaphor can be applied in a special way. The use of English is effective in its path and simplicity. Small and powerful. While Chinese, though less direct, brings its power through imagery and ornate qualities of expression. Like comparing a Colt .45 handgun to the tradition of the Bushido (Japanese, I know). West: Small, direct, powerful, virtually universal. East: Intricate, extensive, arguably more powerful but limited to those who have been blessed with the passing of tradition.
The essay’s we’ve read have discussed language as poetry in and of itself. Fenollosa brings up the manifest example of Chinese by explaining the etymology of their word for is as “to snatch from the moon with the hand.” Chinese seems to be alive, an active process, whereas English is more commonly a tool. Fenollosa later brings up a possible basis for this perspective in that the western mind uses thought as a logical and categorical procedure as opposed to a direct imaginative process (p.376). Eastern thought is greater adept to bring imagination with its thought process than the Western practice of cataloging.
What is this? Is this a poem? Is this a good poem or a bad poem? Do I like it? Why do I like it?
as opposed to
This moves me.
I’m not necessarily saying the western mind can’t find the second point of view, but I do feel that the first is more standard.

The shortest passage in the Bible is “Jesus wept,” and some Christian’s argue that it is one the most powerful scriptures.

My favorite line in this essay: "... and life is pregnant with art."

2007-04-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

This is the beginning of a manifesto by my friend Hailey, Fashion Engineer and fellow adventurer. We lived together last year, so I'm the roommate. To be a part of someone's manifesto is one of my greatest accomplishments.
Here it is:

There was a mummy-man that my roommate last summer told me about. This mummy had the story of his life tattooed from his pinky finger, clear up his arm, and down his side, to his pinky toe. This roommate and I had lots of fun together; always making up stories, and pretending things. After work, we used to bike up to the reservoir sometimes and he would fish with a fishing pole he had fashioned from a cork and fishing line (fishing wasn’t allowed up there) and I would wander around and eat blackberries and flip off the rope swing. We were like hunters and gatherers. But it wasn’t until we had known each other many months that we ever even saw one another outside our kitchen. Before that our whole relationship was based on fantastic stories like the tattoo man. What exactly did the mummy man’s tattoos say? What would mine say?

stealing and giving odour.

2007-04-15T16:48:00.000-07:00

Olsen Olsen is the title of the first song by Sigur Ros I ever heard. The album on which Olsen Olsen is featured, Ágætis Byrjun or A Good Start, was mostly written in a language that the group had created. There are familiar words and phrases relating to their mother tongue of Icelandic, but is mostly unrecognizable without their translation.

I feel the same came from most of Charles Olsen’s essay.

Cryptic and coded in an insider’s language that maybe even scholars and cohorts might find murky and unnecessarily complicated. So my comments related to his perspective came from a few moments of clarity between his nonsensical tangents. Of course that is only my subjective perspective whereas it probably another’s fountain of refreshment. With a greater understanding of his historical relation to poetry and circumstances behind his zeal I probably wouldn’t be as hung up with the way this essay was written.

The first break-through was when he said “…USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem…” His passion has some transferable utility for me, because the points in which a poem must be written should all be considered important. Consider everything related -history, syntax, other’s writing style, your writing style, etc.- but don’t allow their dogma’s to control you. It is a dichotomy that we must face without letting it become our burden.

“Any slackness takes off attention, that crucial thing, from the job in hand, from the push of the line under hand at moment, under the reader’s eye, in his moment.”

This idea reminded me of a quote from Paul Klee, a Swiss painter:

“Drawing is like taking a line on a walk.”

The process of transcribing our ideas is important the whole way through. Like following a swing through completely when your bat has made contact with the baseball. Any slack will be noticeable by our parents in the stands, and most especially the fielders in the grass. The slack in the transcription is lost energy that can carry your concepts, or, “sap the going energy of the content towards its form.”

The following paragraphs were really engaging because I felt the language he used connected poetry with the science of physics. The terming is similar, like calling the whole poem a FIELD, whereas a similar idea is the PLAIN in which energy is observed. The former is the management of lines in relation to each other, while the latter is the nature and behavior of energy in certain circumstances. The syllable, line, image, sound and senses are the form of what energy is occurring, while the objects of reality that he is discussing comes through in a kinetic solidity, that is to say the description of ethereal in the event. The open poem is a divine lens in which obscure and mundane can be interpreted for participants.

2007-04-11T17:12:00.000-07:00

Here is the first draft of a poem I started this week. It is coming from all this talk about creation in class. It might turn into a series for my chap book. Maybe I will read it in class next time if the feedback is scarse here.
And:
If anyone knows how to expand the post area's width, I'd be grateful to know.

Grasp (In four parts)

Practice

Measuring nothing by the length of our hands,

by marks on bones, collection of triumphs over zero

make boxes through L’s and 7’s

with our fingers

man’s infinite reference to right angles

Children spelling numbers and letters, with their bodies in fields

Sport, the collections of bored,

masters of their own reality

diverging points over the imaginary goal

Becoming our entertainers, catching our eyes, gaining our subscriptions

Cause

Undulating what is remnant,

Stirred into perimeter known as shape,

A collection of mind, a volcano pushed between cupped hands

Saxons celebrated the equinox in hopes that the sun would rise again

While we celebrate ourselves today so that we might exist tomorrow

Like raising stone, we grasp the autograph of innovation to our senses

Focus

Oscillating lace, the modified fibers

Superfeilds streaming under it’s seem

Behind, a shimmering gambit,

Friction bound

In the clutches, edges, perimeters,

of supernova

Stunted we duck into common shortcuts

Pairing stratagems with instant breakfast powders

Skipping thousands of years

Of arranging carbon strands

Into perfect rope cutters

Results

In the same breath,

Bees swim

Making possible

Championship over mass

Again, how our entertainers triumph,

Again, We are wards to video cassette recorders

(Constancy of artificial light settling in our brain like quicksilver)

Familiarizing ourselves with greatness from their contribution to comfort

That being made whole what broken setback

Needed fixing

In this constellation of the human reach,

One can learn to breathe deeper,

It’s their choice to do it all the time

2007-04-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

By the sheets of glory

That we try and muster fireside,

Stone hearth steam

Wading in rafters

Amongst wooden pillars

joy’s balm tenders

to burnished labor’s company

In the dreams perched on branches

Of surrounding pines I

Can’t help but wonder what sorrows

Have been buried in the sand with oysters

And what births them both.

But a wonder it is to be child

In this play-pen called an inlet’s girth

Fjord fingers,

Beautiful depth,

Scores of quakes

Shaken to the cod and flounder's nests

A sea’s water is soothing to know

I’m doing something with my hands,

Feeding people

Which potters appreciate,

Purely poised

At the throwing wheel,

Vessel for provision.

This poem was written when I worked in Canada for a week.

Like a young lad I

2007-04-05T22:05:00.000-07:00

used my cache of poisonous names to conger a ghost. And whom did I receive none other then Paul Valery, the turn of the century polymath of French poetry, prose and drama scene. The francs he had in his pocket were made of gold, so he hocked them for food money after I washed off the ectoplasm. Ghost stuff. You know. Anyway, over burritos we got to talkin about poetry and I told him about our last class discussion when he just started going off about this lecture he did back in the day over in Oxford in 1939. ‘Bout poetry and abstract thought. So I’m like, Dude, Paul, you gotta write some of this down for me and he’s like, Oui, Je sais! So he gets introduced to the Sharpie and I start grabbing clutches of burrito napkins cause ol’ Pauly here can’t stop writing. Thus, here’s some borrowed thoughts about poets, poetry and the act of writing it.

Paul wrote, and I napkin quote:

“I maintain that we must be careful of a problem’s first contact with our minds. We should be careful of the first words a question utters in our mind… Without realizing it we desert our original problem, and in the end we shall come to believe that we have chosen an opinion wholly our own, forgetting that our choice was exercised only on a mass of opinions that are the more or less blind work of other men and of chance.”

So I’m like, Dude, Paul, so what you are saying is that as a writer of poetry I must be cautious of catching onto these random phrases and blips of inspiration, in order not to allow my true need to write to be mislead? Is poetry more that just the act of catching strings of words through the wind in our mind with our butterfly nets? Then there's no room for the act of drowning them in ether, and placing them upon cardboard, wings spread with a pin, to use the entomological metaphor for what’s called editing.

Paul’s responded with:

“Each and every word that enables us to leap so rapidly across the chasm of thought, and to follow the prompting of an idea that constructs its own expression, appears to me like one of those planks which one throws across a ditch or a mountain crevasse and which will bear a man crossing it rapidly. But he must pass without weighing on it, without stopping – above all, he must not take it into head to dance on the slender plank to test its resistance!”

Wow, you could have just said yes. But haven’t you had those moments where those random thoughts turned into something?

Paul continued to scribble:

“I have, then, noticed myself certain states which I may well call poetic, since some of them were finally realized in poems. They came about from no apparent cause, arising from some accident or other; they developed according to their own nature, and consequently I found myself for a time jolted out of my habitual state of mind. Then, the cycle completed, I returned to the rule of ordinary exchanges between my life and my thought. But meanwhile a poem had been made, and in completing itself the cycle left something behind. This closed cycle is the cycle of an act which has, as it were, aroused and given external form to a poetic power…”

But Pauly, what about the poet’s role? And that of poetry itself?

Napkin:

“This is to say that the state of poetry is completely irregular, in constant, involuntary, and fragile, and that we lose it, as we find it, by accident. But this state is not enough to make a poet, any more than it is enough to see a treasure in a dream to find it, on walking, sparkling and the foot of one’s own bed. A poet’s function – do not be startled by this remark –”

Aah! Sorry, I forgot you were a ghost.

He continued:

“is not to experience the poetic state: that is a private affair. His function is to create it in others. The poet is recognized – or at least everyone recognizes his own poet – by the simple fact that he causes his reader to become “inspired.” Positively speaking, inspiration is a graceful attribute with which the reader endows his poet: the reader sees in us the transcendent merits of virtues and graces that develop in him. He seeks and finds in us the wondrous cause of his own wonder.”

Well, that clears everything right up. Thanks Monsieur Valery. Want to hit the bars for a cognac?

“Oui.”

Oh Shelley

2007-04-04T18:07:00.000-07:00

“Therefore, I would rather be a swineherd out on Amager and be understood by swine than to be a poet and be misunderstood by people.”
-Soren Kirkegaard

“You can’t leave the room of corndogs.”
-Mike

I have to be cautious of the almost inherent anti-elitism that comes with being an American. Coming from a culture that too often frowns on intellectualism I feel I have to check myself when I experience (read or listen) subject matter like Shelley’s Defense of Poetry. I tend to refute claims categorizing and separating people based on social constructions. And when I started reading the essay I felt like Shelley was segregating people from becoming poets, yet reading on my feelings changed because I started to agree and understand further what he was saying.

Poets do have to view the world in a certain lens in order to have their craft be effective. Art is the expression of an idea into a concrete form, right? Effective art often is able to communicate these ideas in a way that others are effected by them some how. Whether it is through questioning or edifying their values, introducing new ideas or revamping old ones, Shelley is saying that the poet may hold certain keys to open particular doors through languages. Maybe the romantics used the beauty of their vernacular to hit the truth of the world. While contemporary American verse uses the truth with its grit and grime (“gutter” if you will) in order to understand the beauty in all things.

In reference to the poet’s language, I enjoy how he said “…it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension…” and how it is “vitally metaphorical.”

More later. My brain is full.