antonello’s jerome

Inside the baking kiln, after
the saint’s slid in, resides the bluesky
at the back you see twin vials of it
birds and bats included, and below
a window land, four square, for witness

Before, on ledge of neat cares, there is
the peacock pointed away, pride avoiding
copper of use

In case, Jerome reads, profiles the document
in fact is set up to be seen reading, learning
the lay of his robes, shades of his utensil
crannies, to atone, as shown

Below, spread marium of pavement too vast
for his use, he must be cupboarded, staged away
in view lit, from an angle sinistra
and beside step one of four his slipper

In all, this is miniature,
of oddments cased to be taken with you
a pocket display of a life used whole
for the reading, for the closing

(Clark Coolidge, p. 13 in Odes of Roba.)

january 19-january 24

Books

  • bpNichol, The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader, ed. Darren Wershler-Henry & Lori Emerson
  • Chrisopher Middleton, Torse 3: poems 1949–1961
  • Clark Coolidge, Odes of Roba

Exhibits

  • Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, Metropolitan Museum
  • Raphael to Renoir: Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna, Metropolitan Museum

ll. 1. f., among the angel’s / hierarchies:

“The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, already appears in its completion . . . ; that being who guarantees the recognition of a higher level of reality in the invisible.—Therefore ‘terrifying’ for us, because we, its lovers and transformers, still cling to the visible.”

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

(note on p. 317 of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. & trans. Stephen Mitchell.)

pointed boots

At three in the morning,
A quietness descends on central railway stations.

A mail van, or an ambulance, may be there;
A man in pointed boots, a Miss Carew.

Quietness keeps them apart,
The quietness that descends on central railway stations.

It is not meant for me.
It is not meant for you.

(Christopher Middleton, from Torse 3: Poems 1949–1961.)

the lake of zürich

(for Robert Walser, Swiss poet, in his madness)

Than sky, the lemon, dredged, more dark this liquid.
Fluminal violet, in a lockjaw littoral, swings
Wind-swathed, wind-cradled

                                             Asunder the scooped rays
With fanged spire sentinels at last unbend
Over slender moles, where pedalos are harnessed.

Dazed, mad or dumb unscented gaze, but ladies
Emit, by twos and threes, conspicuous shadows
In a suave star-acre, hum in the voids they leave.

Sickle through throats of cloud the moon drops rustling
Down, as for a day forgotten. Configures heaven,
Curved luminous, in concord, over this brain’s trim bed.

Loll, where the rat stalks, the gowned fish and breed.

Air glabrous, may taste of acid, beast uncoil
Cocked like an abandoned eyebrow over
All ease, dark arbour, armoured there, his tail.

Time runs thick as thieves this iron way of water.

(Christopher Middleton, from Torse 3: Poems 1949–1961.)

probable systems 24: physical contexts of human words

“In a number of the preceding PROBABLE SYSTEMS, we have been examining concepts like ‘the weight of speech,’ ‘the speed of thot,’ etc. What becomes increasingly apparent is the need for certain world standards when it comes to print. Something as simple as measuring the circumference of words is made meaningless by the virtual babel of type-faces and type-sizes.

If a world standard were adopted – something like, say, 10 pt, or 12 pt, Helvetica, Garamond or Futura – then numerous variables could be taken into account & meaningful discussions & research could begin to take place. For instance, a more accurate notation of pitch and volume variables would become possible.* It could also illuminate discussion of the justified paragraph versus the preferred typographic mode of ragged right. And, of course, that old question of the time it takes for the mind to get around certain old thinking would finally be answerable.

This is merely to point to the advantages of setting up such a standard. Those interested could begin by forming local study groups to discuss the problem and approaches to be taken in order to get their government to adopt the notion of a World Standard for Print Size & Style. We can only hope that this initiative does not go the way of Esperanto.

written: Spring 1978
additional research & final draft: Summer 1988


* As an instance of what i’m saying here: pitch could be tracked through gradated use of type-faces; similarly, volume could be indicated by gradated use of type-sizes.”

(bpNichol, from Art Facts, p. 312 in The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader.)

ghost ship

There must be many other such derelicts—
orphaned, abandoned, adrift for whatever reason—
but few have kept flying before the winds
of cyberspace so briskly as Drunk Driver
(the name of the site). Anonymous (the author)
signed his last entry years ago, and more years passed
before the Comments began to accrete
like barnacles on the hull of a ship
and then in ever-bifurcating chains
on each other. The old hulk became
the refuge of a certain shy sort
of visitor, like those trucks along the waterfront
haunted by lonely souls who could not bear
eye-witness encounters. They could leave
their missives in the crevices of this latter-day
Wailing Wall, returning at intervals
to see if someone had replied, clicking
their way down from the original message—

April 4. Another gray day. Can’t find the energy to get the laundry down to the laundry room. The sciatica just won’t go away.

—through the meanders and branchings
of the encrusted messages, the tenders
of love for a beloved who would never know herself
to have been desired, the cries of despair,
the silly whimsies and failed jokes, to where
the thread had last been snapped,
only to discover that no, no one had answered
the question posed. Because,
no doubt, there was no answer.
Is there an “answer” to the war
wherever the latest war is going on?
If one could get under the ship
and see all those barnacles clinging
to the keel, what a sight it would be.
Talk about biodiversity! But on deck,
so sad, always the same three skeletons,
the playing card nailed to the mast,
frayed and fluttering weakly, like some huge insect
the gods will not allow to die.

(Tom Disch, quoted by John Crowley here)

january 12–january 18

Exhibits

  • “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years 1926–1933”, Whitney Museum
  • “Artists Making Photographs: Chamberlain, Rauschenberg, Ruscha, Samaras, Warhol”, Whitney Museum

Books

  • Paul Maliszewski, Fakers: hoaxers, con artists, counterfeiters, and other great pretenders 
  • Samuel R. Delany, Equinox
  • Samuel R. Delany, Hogg