Stevens Textplication 20: Earthy Anecdote

Imagine it’s 1923, and you’ve just picked up the first book by someone hailed in all the right literary salons as an emerging modernist poet, to be considered alongside Eliot’s existential men, Pound’s troubadour anti-heroes, and Yeats’ jaded dreamers. Among the techniques of the new poetry then developing in little magazines was strict attention to detail, use of exotic poetic forms, the rhythms of cities, machinery and daily speech, structures shaped by stream-of-consciousness and collage, linguistic play, allusive erudition, deep almost impenetrable thinking, the conviction that all was lost. Prepared for the strictest and most elegant practitioner of such effects, this is the very first poem you would confront from Wallace Stevens:

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

You have to hand it to Stevens to start off his first book with such a poem. "Earthy Anecdote" has no people, no drama, no believable situation, no recognizable form, its main character is wholly imaginary but not explained in any way, almost every word in it is repeated multiple times. It is like a nursery rhyme without the rhyme, or better yet a cartoon, the primitive kind one would see on movie screens in 1923. It makes perfect sense in fact as a cartoon, you can just see that funny firecat bristling and the poor clattering herd of bucks go veering away.

And just in case you have the idea that this is one big metaphor, Stevens himself wrote, by way of explanation to the editor of the Modern School journal that first published the poem, “there’s no symbolism in the ‘Earthy Anecdote’ (L 204)" ... "I intended something quite concrete: actual animals” (L 209). Except that there’s no such animal as a firecat. And even the biggest predatory cats will quietly stalk a herd of deer, not bristle at them as if they are dogs. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine a clattering of bucks stopping for anything, much less swerving in multiple directions as puppets of an angry feline.

Still readers feel that it makes sense, recognizing the dynamism expressed in it of irresistible force working out some kind of agreement with immovable object, of a social compact between hunter and hunted, of something resembling the human desire to if not control, at least reroute reality through force of will (or as Ryan Wetterling puts it “the cycle of pursuit, evasion, and repose upon the edges of the mind”). Thus this strange firecat has been allegorized as a cougar, lightning, a prairie fire, the sun, God actual or imagined by the bucks, the imagination, the female, Stevens himself, an oil well, a red panda (called a firecat in China), the color yellow – every one of these as symbol has some literal flaw, not the least of which is the scene doesn’t make literal sense in the first place. But then there’s that cartoon logic, which makes perfect sense.

Also bear in mind here that the word "bristle" has three distinct connotations:

1. strong, free-flowing movement ("the crowd bristled")
2. irritated response ("she bristled at the suggestion")
3. a shiny appearance ('the stars bristled")

Stevens the dictionary man has clearly found (with La Gioconda smile) a way to combine all three senses in the personage of the firecat, which already carries within it suggestions of uncontainable force, star-like gleaming, an outsized feline sensitivity to its surroundings. One might offer correlary suggestions about "clattering" and bucks, the more masculine equivalent, suitable for work, romance and any competitive endeavors. But as sharply as they are represented the abstraction is such one cannot see these figures as more than shadows. It is a stand-off between reader and writer, much like the perpetual stand-off between the archetypal animals. The only way to resolve the conflict is to free the interpretations to pure subjectivity, something Stevens throughout his life seemed to encourage.

I for one see in the firecat something of the Sisyphean plight of the individual, seen from the air ("over Oklahoma") and repeated endlessly. It could take the form of the writer redirecting but not capturing reality with his bright eyes and muse-powered will, or the boss with the power to "fire" herding his young bucks off in the right direction but not getting them exactly to follow orders, or the reader who can shape the words coming at him and interpret it left or right but can only end it by inscrutably going to sleep. One sees this dynamic in many human situations, how the negative will of the individual can influence the will of the group, but not in a way that satisfies either side or changes anything. Think of wars, protests, investment, religion, politics, anywhere the unresolved duality of life puts people at odds, there is always someone who can "play the players" to get them to swerve, but it is a limited power the individual has in the social realm, one of influence and not authentic independence.

Perhaps that is part of the key to the mystery why Stevens put this poem first in his introduction to the general public. Or maybe not. “There is a good deal of theory about it, but explanations spoil things,” Stevens wrote of the poem in the 1918 letter (L 204). Anecdote, personal account, from the Greek anekdota (unpublished items), also means “a secret or private, hitherto-unpublished narrative.” So, recognizing that this poem un-"earth"ed may be of something still buried from literal, literary or critical thought (at least mine), I will leave with, apropos of nothing, two interesting Summer anecdotes.

The Legend of the Fire Cat, from Florida Panther Net
In August of every year, according to the tribal legend of the Yakimas and Lummis in the Puget Sound area, a large puma appears as the Great Fire Cat, jumping from the Olympic Mountains to the Selkirks, to Baker, to Rainier, and back to the Olympics, setting fires. It is said that a long time ago a chief of the Lummi Indians on the islands in Puget Sound acquired great wealth and stored it in a huge cave. He captured a large female puma and trained her to live in the cave and guard his treasures. The chief told his two sons that if misfortune should come to them after his death, they should go with fifty men to the cave and tie a fawn at the entrance to lure the big cat out. They then could slay the animal and recover the riches stored inside the cave.

One of the sons grew greedy and gathered fifty warriors with him to steal the wealth. They followed the directions of the chief and killed the puma as it bounded out of the cave. In their greed and haste, they did not realize they killed a kitten of the big female. While rejoicing over the kill, the great guardian cat charged from the depths of the cave and killed the son of the chief with one swipe of her massive paw and then pursued the warriors into the timber, seeking them out one by one until she had killed them all. The beast was so enraged that she clawed the huge tree until the pitch burst into flames and the forests roared with fire. Since then, the great Fire Cat is supposed to return annually in all her fury to fire the mountains in August.

A hunting practice from Stevens' childhood, from Benton News
From June through September, Pennsylvania hunters would often "fire-hunt" deer. Deer would come to streams, rivers, or other bodies of water at night. Hunters would build a fire of yellow pitch pine in the middle of a canoe, and station a man in the stern to steer and one or two others in front to shoot the deer. When the deer or other animals were spotted, the canoe was steered to drift toward them. The deer would raise their heads and stare at the fire. If the deer finally decided to run, it would see its own shadow in the banks and thinking it was a dog or wolf would cry out and jump into the water, giving the hunters another few shots. In this manner, the early hunters could kill one to four in a location and three to ten deer a night.

Explosions on the Beach

“Patriotism,” Krishnamurti said, “is a disease,”
and the cops are out in force at Westport Beach
to quarantine those poor, unauthorized free,
and even the few they wave beyond the ropes
stagger under the weight of their medications:
the Budweiser keggers, Vilebrequin beach towels,
chairs with parasols, pop-up cabanas, tiki lanterns,
enough charcoal and kerosene for a winter,
enough steak to feed the Marines.

They’re here to see the puppet show of armaments.
The elders grab for alcohol in bags and white canteens
and think the Chinese lanterns high above are loaded drones,
while boys are mesmerized in front of fires in hollowed craters,
and little girls are buried, seashell glitter in their eyes, in sand,
and teenagers in uniform snap to sexualized attention
behind the chafing of their too-tight rubber bands.
All pass the time by talking of themselves in terms of war.

Then the phosphorescent locusts come,
the magic rabbits from the incandescent hats,
the Horatio Alger Hiss flak cracks and semaphoric blasts,
evanescent decorations of a city in the sky:
fire flowers, star fountains, bursting jewels, moving footballs, bleeding
ribbons;
mortars spell out U and S and A and then puff out
(just like this country now, in its afterburn of IR swaps),
while a city of yachts watches on the horizon,
and a city on the beach glows with sparklers, flares and lamps.

A storm of infantry blasts from the sea,
cannons shake the smoke-encrusted beach,
and the ghosts of ancient minutemen and sailors
come to settle once again their final scores,
and then the sky itself joins in, as lightning
bolts torpedo through the clouds, electric
thunder rocket ships explode, white
flashes more insistent than this pyrotechnic staging,
sonic booms far grander than this gunpowder report,
as if to say “how many people do I have to kill
to keep you humble?” As giant drops of rain begin to fall
people run, appropriately cowed, for any shelter.
A crane walks like a question mark, as before.

Triple Warmer Blues

As my design for the world falls away
so does my knowledge;
for what did I need it,
something better,
except my own sense of unworthiness?
The leaf hands always reach out to help me;
can I touch them, or must I stay alone
in my solitude?

Tuva Language Notes

I have always known you.
I look forward to meeting you.
The future is always the past we don't see.

June's Translucent Moon - 12

“Roar” said the wind and the lion,
intangible vestige of parabolas
facing a wide-angled circumference
waging an eye on territories
nondescript. The owing you wager
in tents disengaging blows fabulous
for the squibs, the fire-laden embers
that crawl to the ceilings and make
the day-chasers crease. Rotund
in convexity all things spin to
gradual stuff, which flies up in fuzz
to be kissed by the nothingness
empty and hungry beyond believing;
the switch like a match and the stars
are lit up in patterns too subtle
to notice for those who can't stare
with infinite time at what never,
except for seeing, disappears. Death
springs to life, just like light burns
to dark, it's all one big wave
moving merrily across the patchboard
where your hands at play rehearse
the orchestra, for premieres of lights
when it's over, the learning, the constant
tight turning of screws where the
universe moves, the whole of all
shifting as your focus on what's
ever moving makes new conversations
as all you thought inanimate is alive,
talking, working in you at so many
levels you can only sit back and let
a little in as you only can trust it
a little - every detail carefully chosen,
every decision mapped in advance, it's
not what you choose but the way choice
is experienced, the choice in the way
you tend the unknown, to find what is
there when it's gone, to become
what you are as what you are not -
the rainbows and ribbons show at the edges
as something impossibly far,
not your heritage, your destiny,
the least you have earned
for enduring - you star child
bending and yearning as far as you can go,
your infinite power at bay
to deal with the discovery
of who you are, as something
other, a recognition that
seems an introduction, that
seems a goodbye, but
is only turning, in a
flash it's already turned,
made empirical, with room
for all, the particles you
are, part of your breathing,
there is nothing other, although
otherness surrounds you. Can
you know yourself? Can you know
others? Can you go peacefully but with
feeling, lovingly but with knowing,
harmoniously but with yearning for
oneness? The one way is found
all alone, forever pairing,
forever getting closer, growing away,
a glimpse at how wide you are,
growing to center, moving to stillness,
where you came from, in a moment
forever held. Impossible
the possible, unyielding
the yielding, impassable
the navigable, impenetrable
the penetrated, unfathomable
the understandable, unsolvable
the solved, irredeemable
the redeemed, unfixable
the fixed, unfashionable
the fashioned, unsellable
the sold, unbearable
the borne, uncontainable
the contained, uncontrollable
the controlled, unimpeachable
the impeached, unrelenting
the relenting, unbelonging
the belonging, unlovable
the loved, unbelievable
the believed, incredible
the credible, irreplaceable
the replaced, undefinable
the defined, irretrievable
the retrieved, irremediable
the healed, immutable
the solid, unbreakable
the broken, impermeable
the merged, insoluble
the melted, unrealizable
the realized - and so
goes the journey, into
the void, to be filled with
the light that is there.

Lyrics: Tupac

Tupac twirled his toothpick with a frown
“The only thing that matters now
In this godforsaken desert town
Is how to move these plow mules toward oblivion.”

Tupac from his hologram
Blessed the emerald valley
From Coachella all the way to Indio
And he went back to his friends in barren stone.

It was on Cathedral Street
When he dared to question Socrates
In a masked crusaders holy cape
At the May Day Communist parade
Where the girls with polka-dot skirts hypnotized
And the revolution wasn’t televised.

Tupac with his girls at Fascist Island
The sands of lunch got in his time
He shares soft-serve koans with blue smurf kids
Reads Blue Cliff Notes on tilt-a-whirling-gigs

It was on Cathedral Street
When he dared to question Socrates
As the May Day Communist parade
Left flowers on top of the Indian grave
And the Gang of Four played tunes for bouffant brides
And the revolution wasn’t televised.

The cannon fusillades could never clang
Not even flags that clapped a cartoon bang
The Gang of Four was never improvised
The Culture Revolution gave out prizes

Tupac, with everyone in pain
You stood there in the silence
Waited ‘til you finally passed away
To save a world not ready to be saved

It was on Cathedral Street
When he dared to question Socrates
In a masked crusaders holy cape
At the May Day Communist parade
When the girls with polka-dot skirts hypnotized
And the revolution wasn’t televised.

Butcher's Hill Vignettes

I.
The view was like from Venice on the Domino Sugar island, the seagreen vapors of Baltimore harbor like looking to the Adriatic and then the Far East; and on the other side, from under the shadow of the impossibly large glissading sign, the darkest windows flare orange as the night sky.

II.
She was of a generation who regarded it as a failure of imagination to not pretend a certain duty and decorum, for they were not empowered and dignified as they are today and she would not simply drown her five children, or deal as a cat would with such a situation and eat them.

III.
Everything was fine until we got to Patterson Park, played some football, did cartwheels, ate hoagies like Dagwood's wet dreams; then all the horror started, for this was too much like the childhood I pretended, and I longed for beer-smeared bars and incinerator windows.

June's Translucent Moon - 11

Neptune! Uranus! Pluto! Wheeeeee!

Syncopated astronauts lost in dirigible diction spend gravitas stipends offered to mentors aching with querulous pleasantries, supercilious twists that bob like guitars, quiddity’s twin, a shut-in foisting its pressure-run centemes on Hallelujah themes, as the squirrel rides pantomime rails while dogs lick at hickory chicory ginseng & gypsum, the loblolly pines cast a red vacant crust on the fear iron threads of ravening heartstrings through thirsting daytime foundry jets, the fail of the sentence whirrs rimshot double entrances, traipses of non-fire to blue semaphoric protuberance neglects on a silver carnation plate – loquacious sonar tranquility – steadfast the orchids in sanguine repose where fresh hobbled kensingtons track Abigail’s wigwam and selenite dervish tails can boast cat spring capstones with fling-ready coffers, the tell is the mockingbird smell all ready for harbinger salad, the symptom of lilac-time pilfering, the crocodile insanity of incoherent rotograviturizing blanched in cannibal suction of camouflaged blandishments glazing the igneous clamor of motes relapsing to spin ridiculous in exorbitant obscuritas the quell of the boutonnieres, the finish handkerchiefs aimed at the prow of semblance misfits whose sacrilege moats nears a gavel of rolodex scrimshawed and scud-timed in foam of rotisserie steerage, for the surgeon of necessity flounders at stations where airplanes relay common genuflects hog-tied and horror-nosed in sumptuous passages where time is a waif coping eloquent in white manner corduroy stilled to an artifact of glamour held to some innocent inversion where pinkies go souping and catalogues redeploy synchronized myths in parses of staggering barnacle trunks of steam-driven continentals governed by insects in cavernous igloos where dead deals are plucked and the stupendous milestones of ambidextrous malfeasance leaves clover-zinged inkblots for spite, a colonnade of counter-suits fathoming jalopies gone ear-bell in condoms of flight that sears the evening cuticle with ambient centers, the comatose ringers whose mountains remember the soldiers of pith in homage not meant for necessities, the blur they create is unheated to clear past reluctances and canopy the gnaws like green shards of delight that renovate innertubes caught in the traction of feel-good foolhardyhood spun down ambiguous, the locks seldom caterwaul at joystick spiff n’ tact like cubes on the authorized line irrigation, like spies on new plankton the reveille goes nuclear on bon-bon shop circulars living in a vestibule of insubstantial reverie the trial comes at cost when other lodges need assuaging, it’s always pine in the waging past the monument stylus to chaste mercenaries of vigilance cleft like two wildebeests in theory, a blast they called the trade dilemma, a humdinger chocolate pulp maintenance of sordid sentience gauged to intersect scrumptious rapscallions at random pulpits in whose ramparts are configured the bitterness internal derivation spears the suds.

Midtown Vignettes

I.
The stone finials in Central Park
alone in the blur of people
might as well be the pyramids
the builders are gone.

II.
The big Apple store is right next to ABC
which is across the street from the Mormon Church
which is across the street from Julliard
which is across the street from Brooks Brothers –
it’s all one projection screen this reality
as far as the eye can see.
Everyone looks to the sky at 1:19.
I better go quick to unknowing.

III.
“Papyrus” is next to the poetry muse
winging her lyre through Rockefeller Center.
There’s no one even close but Mallarme
glistening too far away.

Premonition

The rain takes us out like a boat at sea
With sirens at daybreak, as if loose from moorings,
The electrical flare fills the low pressure sky
With freedom’s wide gallop, across the void.

And it seems like it might be the end now
- Nerve endings are throbbing with pain
Like beasts have come into our ghostly bodies,
Our consciousness wanes, our touch is less feeling,

The rain blocks all vents and all drains
As we’re breathing; there are so many things one can die of
- Add lightning from fast-moving skies to the list
With ulcers and ruptures and motorcycle accidents –

In this rain there’s no past and no future
Just something you have to sit still through
- A clatter of pearls on the roof – in panic:
Will the body give way? Is it there to betray me?

When I ask that question, then and only then
Do I see it’s the earth’s way of healing, the summer squalls
And fearful diseases are its’ kindest ways of speaking
To ears waxed with lack of understanding;

Life and death rides above, a matter of electricity
That says "no" for us and listens in return, and in that drum,
In that silence, then, and then only
The storm lifts to a blue morning shine.

Solstice Fire

The fire is the fire
and the music is the music
and they dance together
before my open senses.
Then all at once
the fire is the music
and the music is the fire
and I know that nothing ever can be lost.

Notes from a "Brand Journey"

"Words are the liquid power of an organization, and we’re all empowered to author the brand every day..." - Paola

Yes stocks come with shocks and bonds can’t wave wands and straddles are for cattle and discovery creep for sheep and the Dow is a cow and the S&P is asleep and money markets are funny carpets and derivatives are recidivive and callable swaps are pops to the chops and assets are grass hits with portable tits and puts are sluts and debt is wet and gold is cold and leverage is a beverage and triple witching is a bitch for pitching and ditching and calls are falls whether covered or naked you still will get ra-ked by markets that bargain and buckets of jargon and margins like hard-ons for algorithm jizm on hedge fund fudge runs, all you alpha salivators and beta data dumpsters and delta gay day traders and buried librarian contrarians who adopt your options and abort your shorts for the long song haul, for a rising tide lifts all yachts but high rates take lobsters from pots, and sharks never change their spot trades, and whalewatching is too much like slots nowadays, so grab your inflation rations from the commodity squeeze freezer in the GDP eatery where earnings are burning and dividends are toast and bacon’s in the making and eggs are all in one basket to roost, as they boast in unemployment toilets where imports are snorted and exports deported, that dollars holler and foller the tape you should cry when you buy but don’t yell when you sell if you shape your escape at the closing bell shake-down hosing hell hoe-down just take a flier on the buyer if inquiring to aspire to pump the slump and dump the jump for you subsidize the risk when you bask in the ask and authorize a frisk when you rid the bid so just camouflage your arbitrage for proxies taste the toxic waste and junk is just not fungible and crown jewels are not paste and bubbles are trouble and Ponzi schemes are conmen’s dreams and pyramids are beer run bids to doom your boom and bust your lust, just bullshit and bear it from uptick to downgrade ‘til the fed eats your homework and your credit fork has had it, for you can’t clone the euro zone or phone in a loan on your own dialtone or wedge in a hedge when you’re pledged to the ledge to perverted serves of inverted curves, bargain malls of margin calls, the something fetid in synthetic credit, save your shells for the dumbbells, Windex the index before you back up the truck or your fucked, take cramdowns on bagel town before you book at par for mounting with cookie jar accounting, are the black swans game changers can we really socialize the dangers?

June's Translucent Moon - 10

It's the longest day. Can we make this short?

No. There is too little time before time disappears.
Your pulling away from the hair ropes of others
is only to see that you are them inside
but unrealized, like everything else in this wide
and realizing universe. We the guides learn
as we are called by the students - one good turn
creates another - in the spinning swirl,
the soul-conserving whirling spiral.
Convivial to all you share flesh of all
as you are consumed in ways unknowable,
but you as illusion must cede to the law
by breaking, and breaking, you must have a flaw
to join in perfection with something to add,
the things that you lack are the things you call bad,
the darkness is what overcomes you the most
because you don't know how to influence ghosts,
so the ghosts have you, instead of you teaching them
who they are, part of you, to share in the hymn.
You are the little boy lost always found,
that's how you align with the sound,
the loving and longing and far-away feel
will make what you call life - inevitably - real.

So light's not all it's cracked up to be...

Domestic

Irascible broom

                           incontestable

unrepentantly memorable

            steely malfeasance merrily jacked

it sweeps you

                      to roll-away cottages

                             from vagabond bridges

            you clean up the messes

    but there's no cleaning up what you see.

Corseted mop

                       sneeringly puckers

               paints with clear water

     squeezes the brown from the tube

picture goes muddy - what's lifted and deposited

                                                       confused.

Featherdustbrush

                             scours off the surface of the world

                      light into particles

           taking the gray off the wood and the mantles

                 makes them older somehow.

Impossible vacuum

                                 vanquishing nose hair

                 bashing the leg on the lounge chair

   making the building shake

                     ungluing the cat.

And the trash collecting

                                       never stops

                            it's not even who they are

                                the ugly them, in a box

                     but what is foreign.

Soapsuds in the basement

                                           scum lines on the wall

                the wheel keeps turning endless like TV

                            the baskets always full

                                   the ghost sits on a stool

                                                      forever laughing.

Acid & elbows

                         acid & knees

                                               and water

         hands for the sake of debris
                                                      window-streaked rainbows

                      of some cloudy other side

                                                               other people's toilet bowls

                    don't say a thing about them

     you don't already know.

You wax the floor poetic

                                          scraping tarnish off the day
                  the shine off of the grease

          leaving only the nothing of love behind.  

The Drummers of Summer

A heart beats alone
                                   in the center of
                                                              the circle

              the other drummers pound
                                                              around its cue

                       and soon it disappears
                                                              in the swirl

                            of Persian dancers
                                       red bonfires
                                     flying dreads.


A person's only ever wholly a person
                                                             in the whole

                         completely dissolved.

Aesthetic

Review of recent National Book Award poetry winners.

Any poem that can't go up in smoke
is not worth being written.
If it's not like bear shit in the woods
it's just a scam.
If it doesn't bring the darkness you'd pay any price not to face
you can't say it's worth the trees that it would fell.
If it doesn't make you regret your life & your 15 shots last Friday night
then it's just a crossword puzzle parlor game.
If it has to rhyme, it's wrong, if it must cohere, it's false,
if it gives you more than one detail, it's only the ego speaking.
If it mourns some childhood memory and wonders why it thinks of it
it just might then be dangerously corrupt.
If it makes your mind go crazy trying to make of it some sense,
then it clearly doesn't have a beating heart.
If it confuses popes and poodles for the fun of it
you can tell it to the king in case he's hiring a new fool.
If it talks about undressing, sucking cocks or licking pussy
it's probably a cover for that killer called a Poet.

If it fails to say the one thing that it started out to do,
if it fails to find a few words that are true,
if it doesn't know of artists, facts or inhumanities,
if it can't say what it means in any acceptable tone of voice,
if it can't even crawl, much less walk, much less dance, much less beat a
rhythm stick,
it just might have a chance
at breathing,
at surviving the first night,
at earning being lifted to oblivion.

William Bronk in My Living Room

"...even we, who whisper together now closely, as though we were two, as children do ... making believe, even as we believe, that another is there." - from "Not My Loneliness, But Ours" (The World, The Wordless)

Birdsong scrapes its pattern in my head
—like you, my dear, like you,
the sounds are all I have to know
the pain that I call yours

In the back and forth of thoughts 

       all of them my own,      

all stolen from the sky

       without the codes.

Where I live,

       behind this layering of lies

everything, even the baby saying "hi"
over and over and over again

makes sense.

Commonly Asked Questions

Why does chocolate kill dogs?
Why does light make you sneeze?
Why does God allow suffering?
Why does Quebec want to secede?
Why does Broly hate Goku?
Why does hair turn gray?
Why does scratching feel good?
Why does it hurt when I pee?
Why does the internet love cats?
Why does love have to be so sad?
Why does fiber make you fart?
Why does warm air rise?
Why does a broom stay upright?
Why does career advice suck?
Why does everybody love Brian Scalabrine?
Why does my phone say 4g?
Why does the Catholic Church believe in Purgatory?
Why does Scotch smell like Band-Aids?
Why does airline food taste bad?
Why does squid taste like bicycle tires?
Why does asparagus make my pee smell funny?
Why does garlic turn blue?
Why does poop turn green?
Why does salt melt slugs?
Why does Queen Latifah wear a key?
Why does the kkk burn crosses?
Why does Netflix suck?
Why does duct tape kill warts?
Why does it always rain on me?
Why does your life suck?
Why does Victoria Beckham never smile?
Why does your nose get stuffy one nostril at a time?
Why does DHS need 450 million hollow point rounds?
Why does oversleeping make you tired?
Why does my singing sound so great in the shower?
Why does Bolivia have two capitals?
Why does Gatsby reach out to the water?
Why does music give me goose bumps?
Why does rigor mortis occur?
Why does everything suck?
Why does art have to be mainstream to be significant?
Why does Johnny Depp have an accent?
Why does a black light make scorpions and cat urine glow?
Why does daydreaming get such a bad rap?
Why does watering a plant too much kill it?
Why does the moon during a lunar eclipse look red?
Why does the US spend more on health care than any other country on
the planet?
Why does alcohol make you drunk?
Why does helium change your voice?
Why does James Hardin have a beard?
Why does Joss Whedon always kill the characters we love?
Why does grapefruit mess with your medicine?
Why does lb stand for pound?
Why does the pool turn blond hair green?
Why does Zeus give Persephone to Hades?
Why does my water smell like rotten eggs?
Why does weed make your eyes red?
Why does religion still exist?
Why does Twitter hate me?
Why does time fly by as you get older?
Why does fog after sunrise disappear?
Why does Beyonce’s baby need a TM after her name?
Why does your nose run when you cry?
Why does Kenny always die?
Why does your period stop in water?
Why does it matter if you plagiarize?
Why does everyone hate Nickelback?
Why does everyone hate me?
Why does life suck?
Why does love hurt?
Why does Lincoln face right on the penny?
Why does ice float?
Why does Sirius twinkle?
Why does Monsanto sue farmers who save seeds?
Why do people say Jesus H. Christ?
Why does my cat lick me?
Why does guacamole turn brown?
Why does God hate me?
Why do some people taste words?
Why does Swiss cheese have holes?
Why does dehydration cause headaches?
Why does UPS take so long?
Why does getting married make you fat?
Why does Kevin Durant have a backpack?
Why does blood taste like metal?
Why does the cinnamon challenge hurt?
Why does salt cause high blood pressure?
Why is xo hugs and kisses?
Why does chopping an onion make you cry?
Why does my eye twitch?
Why does pepper make you sneeze?
Why does my stomach growl?
Why does Voldemort have no nose?
Why does my life suck?
Why does work start at 9?
Why does the caged bird sing?
Why does the sun shine?
Why does steam come out of my vagina?
Why does using Facebook feel so good?
Why does life exist?
Why do cats purr?
Why does the letter J keep appearing in my email messages?
Why does Anthony Davis have a unibrow?
Why does my baby hiccough so much?
Why does the mainstream media totally ignore the Bilderberger Group?
Why does poop float?
Why does rain smell?
Why does my belly button smell?
Why do people yawn?
Why does sex ruin a friendship?
Why does Saturn have rings?

June's Translucent Moon - 9

"Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem." - Paul Celan

Truth is a girl not a cave-wall
That blurs at its endings with froth.
We rise to real only when the heat of our vapor dissipates.
Commerce with stars is the ink gift of Thoth.

Ecrivain - effacement - vraiment comme-ca?
Record for the Lord the turnip yields
Save your blood for your own plot,
The always target moving farther fields.

Boxes to be opened, like winter solstice packages,
Mind's toys with gears that hold the stones of years
Our ticking clocks to make us feel alive
And make our peace with all that disappears.

Like vampyres before a funhouse mirror
We are the minotaurs of our own labyrinths
Collecting all we love inside our pyramids
So we can let it go like any prince

When kingdoms come like wormholes to jump in.
That varnished limitation - you call yourself - a victim,
It hurts to know you put that version there
To learn the depths of surface from the skim.

You'll enter any room, inhabit any day,
Make remote controllers bow before your will,
Appear in precious seconds as the light you really are
—And all of it just patterns held until

You learn that you're a verb and not a noun,
There is no truth but you inside your hands,
The eyes that watch you always are your own,
You are your one and only biggest fan.

Song: Last Diner

Down the mountain in May / grass as high as a cat
Factories from the fifties / trees grown out of their stacks
There were jokes in the nightclubs / where these old trailers stand
Now the pines in the forest / give the cues to the band
Up ahead there’s a restaurant / smoked eel on the grill
A blue plate in the heyday / they still eat in here still
But they don’t talk to strangers / they just stare into space
Ancient songs on the jukebox / I saw some horses race

This is the last diner ‘til the border
It’s the last best hope / for the highest slope
Mark up your map and push it to the floor where
Every meal is free / with the scenery

People eating garbage / cleaning off their plate
People only smiling / at the worse off with hate
I don’t know how to help them / I am one of them too
I broke every rule to get mine / now there’s nothing I can do
So I paid up and walked out / to a beautiful haze
I wanted only to get back / to my old familiar maze
Where they still have the horses / for the harness race
Thought they ran up in heaven / not this broken down place

This is the last diner ‘til the border
It’s the last best hope / it’s the dopest dope
Ring up your prayers and find them made to order
Where every meal is free / for eternity

The Weed Hill Improvement Association

Lights! Camera! Reality!

decorous doorknobs

                               birthday surrealism

      pineapples but

unresolved tool sheds

                                     blond wood curls

purple Galaxie 500’s barnacled with rust

               

stonework with green filling

                kids already pushing

                                                    every edge –

       the thirst for infinite regress

                                in the blue of fading address

weeds grow from rock walls like

                                                    family trees

                up from a gravestone

                                all the milky secrets

                        out in the open

spurious sawgrass groans

                at the spring chassis

                                                teeth machines

                that grin with green filth

                                                in their mouths

the pulp of a million

                dandelions scattered

                                as salts beside the drains

     with desiccated baby’s breath

                forget-me-nots neglected

                                day lilies hung out on the nod

while dogs smile at crotches

                vines like cartoon octopi

     hang like petticoats

                                a thistle glistening

                      roller-coaster ride

long grass like feather quill

                pens clasped in their cases

                                gone to seed

                    but quivering with ideas

cheek-colored clover

                centers the bees

     as they whizz through the vortex

                missing bullseyes

the squirrels are finally caught red-handed

           they protest in stillness for a moment

     but then they fly

                                they know

                they’ve stolen everything

Stevens Textplication 19: Anecdote of the Jar

“God is a Circle, whose Circumference is nowhere and whose Centre is everywhere.” As if to stretch that hermetic maxim to its earthly limits, Stevens takes the humblest of ready-made objects, an actual mason fruit jar identified by the great scholar Roy Harvey Pearce as a "Dominion Wide Mouth Special” widely distributed in the United States from 1913 to the present, (i.e. when notable fruit-lover Stevens was in fact traveling in Tennessee (April and May 1918)),¹ and he sees what happens when he places it on the ground. The result has stunned readers and puzzled scholars for almost 100 years. Here is the poem:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

The poem’s basic dynamic is well-expressed by Donald Gutierrez:

Being placed on top of a hill gives the jar an apex of human purpose through nature...It is the design of a created object embodying a human, cultural purpose. Further, the roundness is the symbolic design of purpose placed in nature, which in itself lacks purpose or order. The jar's roundness, exerting a centripetal force on the "slovenly wilderness," endows the wilderness (including the hill) with the order of a center. All the natural disorderliness of the wilderness acquires a purposive spatial character through "centering," and is given a figurative order in the way "rounded" and rounding human purpose shapes significance into the raw matter of earthly phenomena. Accordingly, human circularity, human centralization, civilizes "wilderness," not only the wild, that is, but chaos, nullity, meaninglessness, by providing it structure. This governing force is so powerful that even in its plainest, simplest representations ("grey and bare") the jar compels a "surrounding."²

I’m reminded of a proper British lady I once saw in Barbados, surrounded by an overwhelming miasma of vine and bloom, calmly snipping at some hibiscus with her garden trimmer, with just a few strokes keeping all of nature in check. John Vernon takes that thought one step further:

In "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" [Stevens] asserts that each person sees in the pineapple a "tangent of himself," and that "the fruit so seen" is also "a part of the nature that he contemplates." In "Connoisseur of Chaos" he says that "the pensive man ... sees that eagle float / For which the intricate Alps are a single nest." The point of both poems is that the wholeness of the world is composed by a single object that opens upon it, the pineapple or eagle, and this unity of object and world in turn passes through the perspective that opens upon it, the someone who puts the pineapple together or "the pensive man" who sees the eagle.

This is why the jar in "Anecdote of the Jar" can "Make the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill." And it is why such an object as the jar couldn't possibly be an inert thing enclosed in its shape; it reaches out for the eyes of whoever is watching and with those eyes arranges the world around it.³

The wikipedia entry on this poem gives an interesting account of some of the different ways Anecdote has been "plausibly" interpreted. There are the cultural critics who see the dominion jar as a symbol of industrialization, mass-production, homogenization and other deleterious effects of capitalism, and the feminist critics who view the clear round jar as a symbol of the male that has subdued the natural female to take "dominion." The common thread of both of these readings is the control of the small jar over everything else, and that's the root of the problem with these approaches. The jar (apologies to Freud) is just a jar. It's absurd in any literal reading to think of an empty mason jar taking control over all of Tennessee as described (unless we feel Stevens is susceptible to awkward, paint-by-numbers symbolism). It's more the absurdity (and impossibility) of the jar's prominence in the larger world that is the interest to the poet here.

Somewhat closer are the more traditional “new criticism” readings that approach the Tennessee jar akin to Keats' Grecian urn, a symbol of art (or poetry), more specifically for the way it shapes reality by framing it, by transforming the wilderness with the human touch. The “slovenly” surrounds the jar, the “sprawl” goes around it. There are difficulties of course with this comparison; a mass-produced jar is not the same thing as a Grecian Urn, and the “gray and bare” found object does not inspire in the poet the reveries of Keats towards the urn's meaning and beauty. One could suggest this is an ironic take on the modernist revolution, where the jar replaces the urn like photography replaced painting, but how then does one reconcile this stringent irony with the idea of the jar standing in for all art? Whatever the aesthetic arguments for or against the jar, the poem does have something to do with the will to see the jar as all-encompassing, to look through art (imagination) and find an absurd dominion over, well, life itself. As Joseph Carroll writes, Stevens “transfers his own imaginative activity to an inhuman medium.”⁴

A related reading would be what I would term the anti-Romantic interpretation, where the poem rejects the easy interplay between humans and nature in spirit that was cultivated by the Romantic poets as the rapture that illuminates God (although in reality the interplay was very problematic, see Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” for example). In Anecdote the jar and nature have nothing in common, they relate as in a dysfunctional marriage between reality and the imagination, no melding of souls, just some bending of wills perhaps. The jar is “clear,” so presumably it mirrors the scene around it, but it is not the “transparent eye” Emerson proposed that in utter emptiness finds its being by filling in spirit with the world around it. What’s missing of course is consciousness. It is the “I” and not the jar with sentience. The jar can’t stand in for the stereotypical Romantic poet, again it’s the will to see it in this way that makes the différance.

Which brings us to the Deconstructionist reading (albeit one I’ve never actually read), which would have the poem turn on the last two lines: “It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee.” In this view, the jar becomes the reader, thus it is an invisible (“clear”) intruder on the scene, that takes “dominion” over the “text” by resisting it, by not giving in to the natural expression of the work of the art because it is separate, and secondary. This unwillingness or inability to “read” controls the meaning of the text, making the reader not the creator the driving force, the “winner” so to speak. (An expensive college education didn’t go to waste on me!)

In reality, the so-called post-structuralist critics are too circumspect to take it this far, they simply say, from J. Hillis Miller to Harold Bloom and on, that the poem is incoherent in structure and epistemologically meaningless, so the reader can make anything they want of it, and thereby betray their own agendas of reading. This fits in nicely with their agenda, which is to paint Stevens as a poet who can’t be explained or resolved because he hasn’t reconciled two seemingly contradictory propositions: “reality is imagination” and “imagination is reality.” Thus poems like “Anecdote of a Jar” are seen as resistant to all attempts to explain them, that in fact it plays “gotcha” on critics for trying to put words Stevens’ wisely stayed away from using on insolvable puzzles of doubt in the mind’s ability to know.⁵

To me this is a dereliction of duty on the part of the critic to understand what the words are actually saying. In Stevens’ world, reality exists, but it is continually made problematic by the imagination, the subjective or non-material side of being that quickly gets caught in the nether world between what is and what appears. The point is not that Stevens’ continuous efforts to separate out the subject from the object, the imagined from the real, from continual interpenetration are impossible. Of course they are impossible (Montaigne and any number of classic thinkers could have told them that).⁶ What gives significance to this effort of creating a “fiction” out of the real through a back and forth examining of how things get abraded away on either side of self and world, is the way that process of perception leads to a fuller understanding of the numinal, the sublime, the metaphysic. This means specifically the role of the imagination in creating and fulfilling our spiritual being, in identifying what is most genuine about us (“the voice that is great within us”)⁷—even if it is not “real.” That Stevens is fundamentally a mystical writer seems lost on so many critics, but if one looks at his subject as one of intellect at war with itself I suppose it resembles only a lost cause, to the critic at least if not to the poet.

Most of the approaches I’ve surveyed here miss something essential about the structure of this poem, that it is not the jar that is important but the “I” that places it. This may be because the I immediately drops out of the “picture” after setting down the jar. There is a kind of transference of consciousness into the jar through the process of letting the imaginative feel of the scene take over. The order out of chaos in other words takes over the one who orders it. It is here we finally get a glimpse at how this poem ties into Stevens’ central concern: how easily and inextricably the real becomes the imagined. One becomes the things surrounding one, but at the same time ineluctably separate. Human subjectivity transforms the sharpness of life to a blur, the truth to a lie, but that's where “all the magic happens,” the self is found.

The convexity of the round jar causes the appearance of the wilderness to surround it in a reflection. Look at the jar for its capacity to contain and reflect light. “Round it was,” not the jar (see picture above), but the beam of light created in its refraction (from, say, late afternoon sun upon it).

This light “made the slovenly wilderness / surround that hill.” Do I have to spell out the Christian iconography here? “The wilderness rose up to it, and it sprawled around, no longer wild.” Like any heathen, it was saved. The jar was “tall and of a port in the air.” Isn’t that how Jesus is described? “It took dominion everywhere” as reflected light, or as The Light.

Yet “the jar was gray and bare” – it was merely a container for light. The real is only the place from where the imagination takes off, to find the truth of one’s spiritual nature (as the Eastern sages say “we are not bodies having a spiritual experience, but spirits having a bodily experience”). “It did not give of bird or bush,” its gift was not that of nature or the material world, it was “like nothing else in Tennessee.” The Baptist, anti-Baptist, Pentecostal, Adventist, et al churches that seem to infest Tennessee like no other U.S. state cannot quite, in their hallowed rituals and sanctified buildings, capture the singularity of light the empty mason jar brings to the all-seeing eye of the observer.


Notes:
1. Roy Harvey Pearce, "’Anecdote of the Jar’": An Iconological Note," The Wallace Stevens Journal 1:2 (Summer 1977), 65.
2. From "Circular Art: Round Poems of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams." Concerning Poetry 14:1 (Spring 1981).
3. From The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973.
4. From Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987.
5. For more on this see Tim Morris. Wallace Stevens: Poetry and Criticism. Cambridge UK: Salt Publishing, 2006. Pp. xi-xxvi.
6. This essay is indebted to the work of Paul de Man, whose radical approach to texts is exemplified in essays like “Montaigne and Transcendence” (1953). Unfortunately de Man never wrote about Stevens, so the speculations here can’t be more directly linked to his great interpretative work.
7. A line from “Evening Without Angels” from Stevens’ Ideas of Order collection (1935).

Flowers for the Reader

All art is but a butterfly
Roams larger than our sights
Shows our minds how inconceivable
We are, how far behind.

We chase like lepidopterists leaping
Some trace of fallen grace.
The poets hold our hopes in keeping as a thought
If not a place.

Still its hollows we inhabit
As a bubble yet to burst,
We bring our fevers and our fancies to it,
Virgins to its birth.

But it never calms our raptures
What lives so far away
In worlds where myths are freshly fractured,
Nets can't capture prey

Where the sun in evening grandeur
Will glaze transcending hills
That speak as an eternal candle
Music of the real

While we, in death's embracing stillness
Mourn what never was—
What calls across the mortal distance,
Words that hear just us?

June's Translucent Moon - 8*

"From your first day at school you are cut off from life to make theories." - Taisen Deshimaru¹

Cyprus news² the benevolent fleck³
of insubstantial subsidized dreck⁴
to wallow in like timers⁵ in their time
—the realpoetic⁶ vicissitudes of rhyme⁷
intrude upon comeuppance schemes,⁷
the narrow-minded lip synch⁸ at the quarter beams,⁹
what egg on something fluffy¹⁰ in the dustbin lint remover¹¹
with the bastard tint of structures¹² doomed to be redeemable
gone to seed
gone to seed...¹³

The rimshot¹⁴ of a common law¹⁵
that strangles prayer and throttles raw
comes sneakily in canvasses turned green¹⁶ by stealth neglect
another virtue cigarette¹⁷ and the pins reset¹⁸ the net

It's all a gruesome company of manifolds¹⁹ and pinions²⁰
to make this bumper car avoid decisions.

It's this, not that, not that, but this, no, this²¹
twists to scattered utterance²² of piss²³
that sprays²⁴ out from the inside
always leaves foul nests alone²⁵
where blades are smoothed against rawhide²⁶
and moons are only there²⁷ to moan.

The daft encumbrance²⁸ of the fool in stew
as the wooden²⁹ ladle stirs shit in the brew
to share as some strange ritual
a demitasse³⁰ of God
who never listens to their prayers
from choking on the cod
piece³¹ that the fool³² wore to appease
the ogres³³ unappeasable who into dinner sneeze.

Courtiers and sycophants using up their mind
on useless, useless trivia that storms the brick-backed³⁴ vine
to make cerebral sausage³⁵ packed with innuendo's curse
to smite³⁶ the site-shared property ³⁷from library's wet nurse

Collect, refine, regurgitate; there are no students here
just teenagers with self-esteem that comes like ghosts³⁸ with beer,
a dense machine of missile toss³⁹ to train new future death
mongerers whose in-tuition⁴⁰ pays to forget their breath⁴¹
and remember animosity in the pages of the past
the thing they have to say to prove they're worthy of what lasts
but there's no grand epiphany, no final festshrift blues
just twilight and the tolling⁴² of the dues.

And yes, we all believe in this, outside the ivy walls,
the place where dreams of intellect can prove we are not wrong
for making small decisions like a whore⁴³ to win the day,
for tuning out the rapt outsiders⁴⁴ song,
the theory of another, better way⁴⁵
—but facts are facts the worth we give to scholars who can't teach
is the debt⁴⁶ in the degrees, the slavery we can reach
in the threat of higher learning, the fear of steps behind,
that you could not explain yourself without a lambskin⁴⁷ rind⁴⁸

While Gracchus and Gawain await your every waking thought
they'll live in you without a grade⁴⁹ of what might get you bought
from knowing they are valuable, as if you need advice
to catapult millennia for the pearl⁵⁰ beyond a price.


* With Critical Apparatus

1. Quoted in Kubla Toledo. "Simplified Damage Madness." Comparative Consciousness 75 (1954). Vort Academy.
2. Reference to the headline in the New York Times on June 11, 2012 ("It's Cypress's turn for a debt crisis") homologous to that in the London Times on June 12, 1812 ("Cypress in debt ... again"). See Monica Structures. "Finding Intrinsic Grandchildren." Purloined Universe 10 (2010). Distance Hilaire.
3. Serbo-Croatian, from Dyskolos Pergolesi. "Towards Holographic Papyrologie." Byzantium Drummer 123 (1972). Serbian Hotel Institute. Reprinted in Racing Catharsis Yearbook
4. Yiddish "drek" (filth) vs. Old English "dik" (dyke). See Christ Rachewiltz. "Post-Symbolist Eros Masters." Multiple Meaning Apostle (1998). Johnson Lukács Antiquities. Reprinted in Annual Carlos Hebrew Food 2001
5.  Broken alarm clocks. For clarification, see Longinus Sartre. "Giroux Efficiency Restored." Calculator Experience 1:102 (1984). Political Bicycle Scholarship.
6. For detailed commentary on the reading protocols for the use of this pun as episteme of historicity, see Johnny Seam. "Hyperion Lingering: Another Urinandum Transtextual Death." Hermetic De-Facement Interior 1 (1976). Unsung Toasts Institute.
7. e.g. rime. See Fruman Merkelback. "Sonnet Trouble Again." Paranoid Poetry Navigation 15 (2004). Eros Dare - Reader. Reprinted in Fine Wordsworthing (2008)
8. For a detailed discussion of the scholarship/innocence conundrum in Finnegan's Wake and The Simpsons, see Matthew Britannica's dissertation "Bagging a Homer: The Cryptozoologosization and Deratiocination of Canonical Culture in Finnegan's Wake and The Simpsons." Reprinted as "Bourgeois Nonsense: The Dialectic of Dialects and Dioramas" in God Disguised as a Binky: Critical Essays on the Simpsons (2009). Murdoch's Last Odyssey Press.
9. "Ruby are my love's red lips..." See Eva Gadjo. "Paradox Mastery Mulch." Cool Epistemology 16 (2011). Surprised University.
10. For a numismatic reading see Primal Eliot. "Amazing Spoon Scrivening in Moral E Prose Objects." Tensegrity Cellist 1 (2001). Penguin Oppression Press.
11. A plurality of scholars gloss this as a reference to the ancient world's most troubling epistemological riddle: "fuzzy wuzzy was a bear / fuzzy wuzzy had no hair / fuzzy wuzzy wasn't fuzzy wuzzy." For background see Tiny Dudley. Problem Transcendence. Billings, Montana; Last Horse (1987).
12. Before swiffers, surface lint was removed by small pans with tapered ends, whereby a thick brush "swept" the dust into the pan for disposal. See Lowry Kees. "Frobenius TV Theorizing." Rational Illustrations Bulletin 23:147 (1947). Sign Almanac Idea Collecting.
13. "Bodleian hegemony convergence as destablizing bricolage  marks a shift from Althusserian structural totalities as theoretical temporality objects to one in which the contingent possibility of post-structuralist false parataxic epiphanies inaugurates a renewed conception of transgressive marginality bound up with facsimile contingent strategies for the rearticulation of patriarchal power sugar cookies." From Balloon Turner. "Vital Post-Poesque Censorship." Mythic Literary Revolutions 10 (1998). Carre Tombeau. Reprinted in Sharp Snobs 1787-1814: Feminist Calgary Anthology (2002).
14. See "Gene Krupa to the Butthole Surfers: from Polysemy to Ecofeminism," in Somnia Neant. "The Jargon Cabbages." Communication Cannibals 15 (2007). House of Rhetoric.
15. "Mauris iaculis eleifend dapibus. Cras eu libero id ligula molestie dapibus. Mauris euismod nulla eu odio ornare sed sodales ipsum lacinia. Nullam sagittis sapien ut erat malesuada tincidunt. Nulla facilisi.." Quoted from Sterne Partheneia. "Complete Spinoza Rounding Problems." Spinoza Quest 123 (1974). Reprinted in Spinoza Views Re-published (1974).
16. Rhymes with "player." See Henley Speculum. "Theorizing Space Friends." Euphoria Problems 17 (1948). Cyclops Checklist Library.
17. Copper-based pigments were common in paleolithic sites in Burma, but rare after ephrastik projectioning had been realized, suggesting a full stasis disruption in the sedimentary functionality of igneous gas deposits. Artaud Provender. "Distaff Rock Languages as Collideorscape Types Processing." Harvard Prehistoric Skull 192:1 (1957). Editorial Thermidor Foundation.
18. Jalououse, as argued in Floreal Tchelitchew. "Accompanying Plague Ambiguity." Uncle Yonder 1 (1982). Deconstructivist Americas. Reprinted in Sublimation Collecting (1994).
19. A reference to the Nietzschian concept of eternal recurrence. Bellow Herne. "Nineteenth-Century Danger Spells." Herakleitian Essence Revolutions 3 (1981). Mauve Thesaurus.
20. For a discussion of whether this is the intake or exhaust manifold, see Improved Poet Dog. "Factory Debate: Ornery Vermont Scorpion or Well-Tempered Boundary Airport." Indianapolis Genius 12 (1971). Chinese Vamp Gardens.
21. The smallest gear or the outermost wing of a bird, cited to enigmatize binary heterosexuality. See Cleanth Czar. "Rare Cartesian Battles." Uncommon Education Rhetoric 15 (1985). Contempt Season.
22. This line is a combination of Revelation 6:10 and The Devil in Miss Jones. See Annie Chapbook. "Annual Crane Limbo Romanticism." Balloon Languages 3 (1976). Every Greatness. Reprinted in Doomed Emma Essays (1981).
23. See note to Confusions Dowry. "Transgressive Cross-Referentiality in Dystopia: Dialogism Restored!" Assistant Scholars 101 (1994). Persuasion Notebooks.
24. ibid.
25. This reference was omitted from the final version published in the Buffalo Review, for fear of offending the sensibilities of native Buffaloneans. See Basil Braille. "Remembering Linguistic Amerika." Social Philology 102 (1987) (also in High-toned Epigraphik Statesman 4 (1987)). Cedar Top Languages.
26. Sadomasochistic envy, see Herman Mistakes. "Dialectical Gopherwood." Elsewhere Notes 15 (2003). Nude California Prose.
27. A physical impossibility, as pointed out in Lorine Hölderlin. "War After Rectitude." German Hidden Design 12 (1996). North Fearful Museum.
28. Cf. Stuart F Come Outside. "The Drummer in Gray Fields." Vegetal Voices 1 (2002). Radiant egiziani.
29. Proposed study questions: Why is the ladle wooden instead of metal? What do you think the author intended with this word choice? What emotional states are symbolized by wood, and what by metal?
30. Note the orthographic spelling here, cf. demitasse, quadrat, diener, hyssop, macédoine, basenji, numnah, chorion, nacarat, sinicize, hyphaeresis, taleggio, esclandre.
31. For a Rabelasian dynamism perspective, see Asilomar Bombazeen. "Satyricon This?" Today in Aristophanes 400:13 (1983). Unaware Paperbook.
32. See colloquium "Groot Case Harmonious Canons" in Anti-Selves Unmodern Formalist Navigation (Apron-String Narrative Conversion Special Issue) (2007). Shepherds Visiting School.
33. "The subsumption of feminism within a 'more comprehensive' field of gender studies, accompanied by the rise of a 'male feminist perspective that excludes women,' and the dominance within feminist thought of an 'anti-essentialism so radical that every use of the term 'woman,' however 'provisionally' it is adopted, is disallowed' (14-15). The two trends are linked because 'the rise of gender studies is linked to, and often depends for its justification on, the tendency within poststructuralist thought to dispute notions of identity and the subject' (15). These trends are troubling for Ms. Parnassus because she fears that, insofar as gender studies tend to decenter women as the subjects of feminism, they may be not a 'new phase' in feminism but rather feminism's 'phase-out.'" From Giorgio Manley. "Nutritious Lulu Leaves Cleansing." Sioux Grammatology 15 (1997). Damaged Americas. Reprinted in the Shoemaker Lectures (Pig Rag Maisie Writing).
34. A pun on brick-bat. See Cadmus Martin. 1960 Medusa Guidebook. Invisible Oxford Kentucky; Catharsis Global (1970).
35. For linkages to Upton Sinclair, see Shaker Terrell. "Hephaestus Preaching." Nazarene Absentee 10:2 (1974). Saddest Bibliographical Ideas.
36. Cf. Merry Wives of Windsor III, i, line 1326: "Well, I will smite his noddles. Pray you, follow." See Braque Wilbur. "On Commonplace Ghosts, Eye Keeping Mimes and Robot Ear Ambiguity: Some Invisible Avian Trivia in Shakespearean Darkness." Swahili Continuities 150:15 (1969). February Circle. Reprinted in Popular Morris Collecting (1971) and Shaxper Train Examiner (1972).
37. For a thorough discussion of Visigoth property law, see Griselda McLuhan. "Thoughts Post-Modern Ex Prefaces." Byzantium Labor 130:15 (1935). Italian Devil Letters.
38. Cf. Caspar the Friendly Ghost, who everyone loved at the end of every episode but everyone was afraid of at the beginning, suggesting something happened overnight that can't be disclosed on children's television. 
39. Cf. Bruce Cockburn "I Wish I Had Rocket-Launcher." Wouldn't that be so fucking awesome?.
40. Oh, in-tuition, for tuition, I get it. Har har.
41. Cf. The Sompnour’s Tale line 32,987 "We have this worlde’s lust all in despight / Lazar and Dives lived diversely, / And diverse guerdon hadde they thereby." See Jim Rectitude. "Kipling Resistance Professorship Manuscripts Investigation." Master Absentee 3 (1963). Team Jesus Fragments.
42. For further discussion, see Saussy Renault. "Teaching Spiritual Romance Careers: An Incommensurability Construction Cabala." Contemporary Hero 7 (1993). Ishmael Limbo Gallery. Also Usura Fergusson."The Severance Manifesto." Seuss Alternative Linguistics 17:10 (1995). Yoruba Historiography.
43. "That's a thing, right?" Liz Lemon.
44. Is anybody even reading this shit?
45. I am going to go to Starbuck's now to get a latte and that hot chick behind the counter's number.
46. How many more of these fucking citations are there? Dude, I got news, this fucking poem makes no sense at all.
47. Do you want to watch my goop box? It's trippy.
48. Do you want to play charades with my cat?
49. Could I bum a cigarette? A light?
50. Do you want to read some of my poems?

I Am Not I by Juan Ramón Jiménez

When I heard Gary Zukov reciting by heart my man Robert Bly's version of this classic poem to Oprah, I decided to offer my own version.

I am not I.
I am
What’s me without me knowing it
At my side at times I see
And sometimes forget.
Who stays, serene, when I speak,
Who when I hate, sweetly forgives,
Who walks where I am not,
Who when I pass away, still stands.


[Spanish original]:

Yo no soy yo.
Soy este
que va a mi lado sin yo verlo,
que, a veces, voy a ver,
y que, a veces olvido.
El que calla, sereno, cuando hablo,
el que perdona, dulce, cuando odio,
el que pasea por donde no estoy,
el que quedará en pie cuando yo muera.


[Bly's translation]:

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
the one who remains silent while I talk,
the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
the one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
the one who will remain standing when I die.

Addendum to Al Jolson in Blackface Singing Finnegan's Wake in its Entirety to a Prison Audience Somewhere in Michigan

Elveesta Proustley sweeps wit his muddah's fishnets
still wearin his strat straps and a badass pompadour,
he splayed a mean gutfuddle naymah Madaleene
blankateen the wine-dark see with escradrilles of funk
on the qu'est ce que c'est imperium of silence,
siren songs remembered for not be'un dere
like Bunk Johnson and Buddy Bolden
whose note we nevah hoyd
still haunts us from the g-string air,
das invenshun de da bloozes,
the flatted fit Leadbeller drank
like your rootabeggah milkshake
at the Memphisifto boogie jernt,
the great chain of bein' po headbongers boys and mosh
the toof will turnip doe'cha'no baggas can't be toobers
the nastyurchin dus mah blooms be wheezing da woof
from down on de parchiment firm, papyrus
of the pen-men in tunestiles booweeviladdled
oyning while they boyning, the HP
Floydcraft and Blind Blake Popemobile
who shoe'd nuff gnew each other's tails off wo back when
as cool, muddy howlang berrylee perceptigreatballsoffeefoofumfifosuh
gerontion greetonions of cool, Son House
of Common Placeyear bets at the still wife with white King
Biscuit and Blind Lime Watermelon
Tipperaree and Ticondewoga two
as the woof baynes moonly (alice) going fur-word.

Not even our own Sappho Smith
and her lesbyanest torchslongs
that drove mencattle crazy
in dem Storyville hovelles
primitif like Anakreon
with Umaygahd minacigarets and injun gizzards
and kitchin kinky straightener stench
went temporarity like Thomas Dylan
slumming like he Charley P on
Lady Montagu's pig farm.

Pre-Raphaelites and their mellotrons
conjure megamanic middle earth in
Arkestral Minervas in the Dork
axes n irish war pipes fifes and lambeg drums
straight from Egypt and Morocco
via Saturn and the Dog Star
laying down sum fuzzy Phrygian modes
of mystical gematria
as mariachi oompah bands
serve up jigs of irish bluegrass strains
and Samarvinotis Keats trills lonely
so sweetly that you'd think
he rilly fer rill didinna disappeared
before he so young died.

Old Squool they call it nah
but when Li'ul Richud and the Faerie Queeneries
traipsed through England fair back in the day
wearing the kick of war machinery pants
Satanic Jerusalem's pleasure Zeppelins
decreed a pleasing trobar by Cavalcanti
on snowblind Milton's Sabbath Black
who's red next the scriptures too literally
and the graduate axekicksers descended to madness
because they factoscrips have no rebop.

William Butler Morrison
bean from Belfast and all hated all the
Whiskey Irish Catlicks
and therefore all mankind
but still he brought like suds at dawn
the sound of Gawd a knocking
on our door with a brogue and tarot calling carob
a heavenly Primitif Baptist choir.

Percy Brian Jones he drowned
in a Cinqueterre swimming pool
after learning that the world
was not the way he wanted it to look
and even though he could be swiving
with any betty he laid his blond blue eyes upon
he was tortured for hizz suckexcessness
by the Olde Rich Young Mick Byron
and Keith Frankensteininscensed
who sold dey sools to the
process church to be immortalized in stones
jes' loyke the Bard o Liveopool
who ruled de commun tunguncheek
with rings of justice, blings of love
and Johnnie be Donne could lay down
deadly but not proud guitar
like unringing the bell and crossing
state lines with an angel in a rented
tuxedo blue sonnet cadillac.

Meanwhile in Amorica Thelonious Dickinson
with no cabaret club license to speak of
cleared the room
with hisher devil's intervals
heshe called them cool
til everybody knew enough
to keep the funk away
or maybe it was that all-white
porcupine pie hat that swayed as heshe flayed,
and good old Walt Waldo Zimmerman
who made his living out of chiseling
the devil at his own redemption game
saying black when it was white outside
and white when it was fashionably black
and even cheating death by motorcycle assassassignation
while saying sayings only Jeezuhs
could get away with saying, nome saying sore nuft,
and my homey Edgar Franz Costello
who never said anything straight-up
it had to esccollate rage all the ways to the top
to ambiguous post-god heaven
and thunder to earth back in ribbons of giggles
every word a lie or as Jolson said
thank you black america
when he was done.

June's Translucent Moon - 7

She walks through the rib-cage of academia
furioso with scribbles of vengeance
to right the inherent thrust of his argument
towards more appetites, less longings—

her spiderman backpack keeps inconvenient theories
of the origins of life and Dewey decimal system
from the triple zero stacks of the library,
the bibliographies of bibliographies.

There's a human at the end of her walk
perhaps with a cigarette, a leering cravat,
to disabuse her of her inhumanity
with predictable frailty, the listing for nuance
a sock to the jaw that no ipso facto gets back.

She's a student, so she doesn't have questions
just solutions, explanations, equivocations
for her interlocutor tired of the sermons,
the dotting of I's with the unexamined outside
like light through the stained glass arches
that can't stay away, merely yellow with intent.

The stacks hold illumitable manuscripts
and the bathrooms have porn cartoons,
these students change less that the texts, he found,
refusing to be subsumed - as the masters
in the monasteries before them refused,
changing words to the New Testament
countless times as it suited their status
as keepers of useless knowledge.

"Paint your own thing," the Buddhist priest said
to the art preservationist unable to reconstruct
what had dripped over time to the bowl in the earth
as if it had no better thing to do.

The lost is collected and stuffed into pipes
and blurred with prescriptions of unending night.

The cast of the play may wear pantsuits this season
and speak with the patois of dragonskinned gangs
but the story's the same
as every tale in every time,
predictable as a lawnmower,

frogthroat confusion dissected with prongs
for a sharp microscopic confusion,
called perplexity, tensegrity, high irony,
ambiguity, game or chaos theory, the ineluctable
pushing on the string, the drawing and quartering
of hairs, the splitting of straws,
the quibbling to bend the unknowable to dough
to begin again,

as if our own time
could rhyme with medieval,
as if we had ever stopped thinking that way,
as if these ideas weren't hospital curtains
to give privacy rights to our shame

—the ethereal is too real
we must track formulations
like blood on a dress
for clues to the murder of a hero
who never existed
except as we've re-created him
from cardboard and twine
and jealousy toward the divine.

Humanitas and its irrefutable reason,
Scientia and its endless capriciousness,
in this place where the adversarial truths lay hidden
under a thousand paving stones
—until the blocks themselves can't be truthful,
they must hold on to each others' sides
in hopes that the jewel long analyzed
will one day form.

In parlors of the night
hawks strum their talons
until the new light
makes the squirrel tails like rats',
waiting for the bleed of distant mercy
in a world where pride makes protection fact.

The creatures scurry to their dens
to don their robes and stroke their pipes,
the fires all aligned as if to symbolize,
then the stoking of the trivializing leaf.

The dancers will leap,
the ashes will keep.
The burn of censors
twirling round the pit
we have all jumped into from this.

June's Translucent Moon - 6

Are rules fools tools?

Yes when they can't be followed,
The real ones behind the hollows
Don't care if you know them or not.
What humans do is stay bought
Like it or don't that's the truth,
For the heart there's no substitute.

Why do I believe my own lies so easily?

That is the price to communicate.
You resent it in others, repudiate
What you resist, as if it's the real
That's discussed as you close a deal.
What if illusion was all that you had?
Would you think then that you're life was wasted?

How can I live my freedom?

Let it join you while you're away
In sleep, in silence, interstices of the day,
Hold to the lectern as off the notes fly,
Know it's not luck you're alive.
Learning is only forgetting,
Creation the sun that is setting.

How can I step into love?

Don't agonize what you walk away from,
See with closed eyes the unification,
Know that the visible lives to be still,
But you live electrified skeletal
Where things become one at the flash of a bulb,
Their distinction found in that moment and culled.

How does the sky walk in me?

Tether yourself to your own focused being,
Something must hold itself all down the streaming.
The real must get larger, you must let the gap
Grow past the structures you've made from the map.
Know people turn into your concepts and back
As the vapors you seize turn to facts.

How do I walk in the sky?

With tact and with reverence, innocent wise,
For there's not here a place for your eyes.
The feeling is consummate inside the chords.
The landscape grows straight from the words.
The time that you value so much you must waste
And space can't exist, nor anything not out of place.

June's Translucent Moon - 5

”Our Lady’s rare transit”

Immobilized while the sun moves eternal
Skekinah fields Venus green diurnal
Pick-me-up trumpets in reveille staining
Of stick-me-up scrum stock for inner entraining
In difficult big-wig hats

Eleusis you themed, Aloysius on the masthead,
A double-down transfer-edged cacophony ring
In stout circuit sentences grand in word prisons
The blest fingered furnaces pining rapt ash
Recoiled and recalled in the placement of sash
Sordid with monstrances shooting their tracks
Ever-bloomed moon, lilac moth-frequencies
Ill-conceived ill-stars to burgeon our plight
Man-dead and man-heavy dropped into sequences
Pistols from skirt curtains itched for a fight
The innumerable vestibules croaked into residues
Residual valences coiffed to a pitch
To cover the dashes that snitch

Surreal venereal cockpit of light
Finds eggs at vibrator dawn teemed with blight
Rascals and androids merrily vie
For umbrage at cost for the night
Releasing redemption in whorls of pink light
The folds always yield to the tremulous truth
That stiffens and flexes and holds down the shoot
Like jalopy calliopes bursting with loot
It’s stricken and struck-down and strunk out and fanned
The keys to obscenity purloined and banned
In woeful obliquity, morose regret,
The sanctions come facing like blocks
Come tumbles like quarters through sieves of good luck
Where books of immemorial debt go to town
To rupture and wind man around
Electric surveillance and bon vivant frowns
They pass through the current selection of crowns
To take scattered eyelashes down

Subterfuge of laughter, cool dressage of anger
Compromised squalor of incendiary desire
Hoopla the Barbarian knows the gist
That makes it a sin to enter and kiss
To puncture a view in essence
The cavalier player of pearls and incense
Lost antiquarians stacking the decalogues
Vying for virgins who strip to their flogs
Condemning the women who hold up like glue
Through the bastard hours and contemptuous views
Willing to sun-squat in outbursts of maize
The squirm and the slurry, the rage
Bilious casualty brimming with grief
At the dead-set-against-itself chastity thief
Roaring with sanctity ceremonial glee
Ravenous flowers and turbulent seas
And all of the graciousness stops at the freeze
We crawl to the urban terminal
Bilking innumerable charity pickings
That feebly emote the security ward prickings
Stick it to the woman who braves bare breast babies
And heeds all commands in the guise of the almighty
She ratchets away what she catches
But leaves some threads loose on the spool
There always is some blast to warn her
That she happily forfeits to be fooled

The rabbit of symphonies plays with the keys
And call cloudlines down for an encore of sleaze
Brandishing diplomats improper tongues
They bandy the worth of their crumbs
In sums with their lungs
The interlopes plea to stay in good graces
Of fleas and horse thiefs
The ignorant savages warning of beasts
To keep their own home-powder dry
Grandiloquent eye with the bantering fly-ointment
Trivializing terror and glee
It’s all what you do to get by at your job don’t you see?
The world’s oldest man in his red robes and locks
Contemplates suicide watching the clocks
He waves his new chalice through breast, eyes, lips, labia
Ordering pieces to size

Cheer the numinous wrath on the vine
Condemn the desperate desire you pine
A stopping from everything to be more kind
Resentment comes out in due time
The bells of the servants will chime
And hell will break loose in the blinds
Stealth ruination and popes who serve wine
To entwine the looters with scenery crime
No one knows who is right, what goes on in between
Is never apparently quite what it seems

Hostages shared and hostages freed
And taken away the endemic feed
Covered and cloistered and cowered and keyed
—Both sides of one crystal set to revolving
One more conundrum that’s almost worth solving
Running from innocent lies
Turned indecent sighs
Trusting the truth to a clamorous vestige
Of original real, the original feeling
The shame that we shared dealt and dealing in
Mastery over the Earth
That weeping mass of life now burdened
With our antagonized births,
The craving of excess, the natural deemed sin,
The whole disenfranchised disillusioned chemistry
That knows not its own responsibilities
To keep and to move like the sun in the sky
And the moon that returns every sigh

moonbow in Hawaii