the archipelago

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Sail before the morning breeze
The Sporads through and Cyclades
They look like isles of absentees—
                              Gone whither?

You bless Apollo’s cheering ray,
But Delos, his own isle, today
Not e’en a Selkirk there to pray
                              God friend me!

Scarse lone this groups, scarse lone and bare
When Theseus roved a Raleigh there
Each isle a small Virginia fair—
                              Unravished.

Nor less through havoc fell they rue,
They still retain in outline true
Their grace of form when earth was new
                              And primal.

But beauty clear, the frame’s as wey
Never shall make one quite forget
Thy picture, Pan, therein once set—
                              Life’s revel!

‘Til Polynesis reft of palms,
Seaward no valley breathes her balms—
Not such as musk thy rings of calms,
                              Marquesas!

(Melville, from Timoleon, 1891.)

eccentricity

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“The commonest phrase overheard at an English club or dinner-table was that So-and-So ‘is quite mad.’ It was no offence to So-and-So; it hardly distinguished him from his fellows; and when applied to a public man, like Gladstone, it was qualified by epithets much more forcible. Eccentricity was so general as to become hereditary distinction. It made the chief charm of English society as well as its chief terror.”

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, chapter XIII, “Eccentricity”.)

the complete introductory lectures on poetry

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“To Ted Berrigan

It was when the words on the covers of books,
titles as true as false leaves led me to believe
in inviting the ultimate speculation of love –
that I could learn all of the subject –
that I first began to entertain what is sublime.

Like a moth I thought by reading Jokes and
Their Relation to the Unconscious or Beyond
the Pleasure Principle or Eat the Weeds or 
The Origin of the Species or even a book on 
Coup d’Etats or The Problem of Anxiety I 
could accomplish all the knowledge the titles implied.

Science that there is often more
in the notes on the back of a discarded envelope,
grammar in the shadows slanted on the wall
of the too bright night to verify the city light

and then awakening, babies, to turn and make notes
on the dream’s public epigrams and one’s own
weaknesses, self that’s prone to epigrammatic ridicule

and to meditate on fears of all the animal dangers
plus memories of reptilian appellations for all
our stages of learning to swim at a past day camp

It is to think this or that might include all
or enough to entertain all those who already know
that in this century of private apartments
though knowledge might be coveted hardly anything
is shared except penurious poetry, she or he
who still tends to titles as if all of us
are reading a new book called THE NEW LIFE.”

(Bernadette Mayer, pp. 20–21 in Onward: contemporary poetry and poetics, ed. Peter Baker.)

magnificent stomachs

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“Whether we like it or not, our eyes gobble squares, circles, and all manner of fabricated forms, wires on poles, triangles on poles, circles on levers, cylinders, balls, domes, tubes, more or less distinct or in elaborate relationships. The eye consumes these things and conveys them to some stomach that is tough or delicate. People who eat anything and everything do seem to have the advantage of their magnificent stomachs.”

(Paul Klee, from The Thinking Eye, quoted in Lyn Hejinian’s “The Rejection of Closure” (1984).)

wooden buildings

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The tests are good. You need a million of them.
You’d die laughing as I write to you
Through leaves and articulations, yes, laughing
Myself silly too. The funniest little thing . . .

That’s how it all began. Looking back on it,
I wonder now if it could have been on some day
Findable in an old calendar? But no,
It wasn’t out of history, but inside it.
That’s the thing. One whatever day we came
To a small house built just above the water,
You had to step over to see inside the attic window.
Someone had judged the height to be just right
The way the light came in, and they are
Giving that party, to turn on that dishwasher
And we may be led, then, upward through more
Powerful forms of poetry, past columns
With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference.
Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms
Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.

(John Ashbery, from Houseboat Days.)

prepositions

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“We say: to write about a subject, to write on a subject, to write of something; also to write for and against something or someone; also to write by a certain light, and with the implement of our choice, and to our correspondents. About, on, of, for, against, by, with, to: is there a logic in this set of prepositions, or a logic in the set of missing ones, like around, in, into, at, inside, outside? Would it be possible, and if so what would it be like, to write around, or in, or into – to write around politics, write in compost preparation, write into love, write at fiction, write inside the genesis of the universe, write outside a friend? (Is there yet another logic or consistency in the set of prepositions that I haven’t been able to think of at this moment?) Writing around a subject or a person seems a promising possibility. The subject or addressee would play a role like the letter e in La Disparition – never appearing and at the same time figuring as an object or unrelenting attention, staring us in the face all the harder for never being named. Writing in might require participation in the subject at the moment of writing – in the case of compost preparation, here I am knee-deep in mulch. (All writing would be an act of writing in writing.) Writing into: discovery, aggressive curiosity. Writing at: against, or towards, or in haphazard approach. And writing inside – inside the genesis of the universe: where else can one be? It’s all so easy then. (Forget belief.) And writing outside: out of a context larger than the subject, so that we can at last see it whole, as if we had only five minutes left to live, or five seconds.

Wainscott, 7/21/83″

(Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day, p. 46.)

the language

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Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full
of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.

(Robert Creeley)

autoisolation

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“In Thomas More’s Utopia separation was the founding gesture: Utopus Rex commanded a trench be dug to cut Utopia off from the mainland. A friend of Erasmus, reviewing Moore’s Utopia, described this in a dedicatory poem:

Me, once a peninsula,
Utopus Rex made an island.
Alone among all nations,
without complex abstraction
I set the philosophical city
before the human reader.

I give freely;
and if you have better ideas

I’m all ears.

Erasmus and friends were perpetuating a hoax – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were suggesting one – refusing to dispel the thought formed by some naifs that Utopia was a real place.”

(Bob Perelman, pp. 117–118 in The Grand Piano, part 4.)

there are times

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“There are times when every act, no matter how private or unconscious, becomes political. Whom you live with, how you wear your hair, whether you marry, whether you insist that your child take piano lessons, what are the brand names on your shelf; all these become political decisions. At other times, no act – no campaign or tract, statement or rampage – has any political charge at all. People with the least sense of which times are, and which are not, political are usually most avid about politics. At six one morning Will went out in jeans and frayed sweater to buy a quart of milk. A tourist bus went by. The megaphone was directed at him. ‘There’s one,’ it said. That was in the 1960’s. Ever since, he’s wondered. There’s one what?”

(Renata Adler, Speedboat, pp. 36–37.)