Contradictory Aphorisms (Contradicta)




Never reveal what makes you happy, or at least conceal some things, because unless you can be surprised, you will never be loved.


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Hidden hearts, like flowers in darkness, wilt quickly.


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One by one the finest philosophers concluded they should no longer try to tell us how to live. Imperceptibly, yet gradually, an immense sadness fell upon the world and the sadists took over.


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Think for yourself or go mad with everyone.



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Nota Bene


Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
-Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)



(thanks to Ray DiPalma for sending in this quote)
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Bachelard's *Dialectic of Duration*

is very interesting and I spent part of my morning reading its captivating phenomenological musings, mostly having to do with Bergson who I should read more of. Then I began considering why I've so frequently defended so-called "bad" poetry when I've heard poets gripe about it. I understood, in my Bachelardian reverie, why I prefer even boring poetry, philosophy or almost any intellectualizing to everyday complaining. I realized this must have happened because even the most trivial poetic or philosophical thinking is more interesting than thinking about my own complaints, even the "legitimate" ones; focusing for awhile on other people's objections to poetry or philosophy or blogging they don't like is still more enjoyable than those seemingly endless repetitious ruminations about everyday annoyances.

What led me to Bachelard? Probably the title of a blog I've been reading regulary lately: Bachelardette [click here]

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Contradict myself, very well then...

I've been thinking lately about contradictory aphorisms, and how they can both be true. Wasn't it Rousseau who said that if you don't talk about yourself you'll never say much at all; and who was it that said a boring conversationalist is one who talks about themselves, but an interesting one is one who talks about you?

Ensemble


Specific events or declarations (external) or particular insights or revelations (internal) are like notes and chords in melodies that are repeatedly heard and experienced but not quite yet identified or recognized for their irresistible and pursuasive social effects- until well after those infectious, catchy tunes- and the musicians who played and exulted in them- have exited the stage and become part of history. What you noticed, again and again, is that you were tapping your foot all the way home, that's all.

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He Who Laughs Apps

Guess what recent superbly hilarious performance inspired the little theoretical object you see above?

Gary Sulivan's performance at the Bowery Poetry Club this past Saturday is already legendary- but hopefully will be appearing soon on Penn Sound, as will, I might expect, Marshall Reese's excellently stirring reading.

(for an excellent evocation of the reading and oeuvres of the two readers, by Jack Kimball [click here])

Gary Sullivan dedicated his final work at the BPC on Saturday, a playlet featuring Jim Behrle and Sharon Mesmer, to Stan Apps.

Here, Oracular Vagina [click here] fluffs flarf. Standard Schaefer, author of *Nova* and *Water and Power* weighs in on googlism, via Lucipo.

While the powers that be barter our beings for a few quarts of oil, the least we can do is entertain ourselves with the flarf whirrs.


-a sunny Tuesday in February

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Slam poetics is back!
Read the latest round in Stan vs Stan, the flarf whirs:

Standard Schaefer's response with a response from Stan Apps [click here]

Tuesday afternoon- and still sunny!
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You're Toast in an Unquiet Grave

Tony Tost [click here]
has been embedded in the flarf whirs for awhirl now.

-sunset and tea time on Tuesday, Feb 7th.
(Warmest January on record in NY)

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger

We've always known that our freedom as bloggers could very well be ephemeral. Check out this urgent story.

Thanks to ever-vigilant Mark Woods for linking to this article of crucial important to every blogger - in fact, to everyone who uses the internet.


The End of The Intervet?: The Nation online [click here]

(via wood s lot [click here])

Inspiration: A Breathing In



from *Plausible Worlds* by Aaron Belz:

"MERYL STREEP

"Hard to believe your first movie
Came out in 1977-you are timeless,
Like a Dracula statue in the rain:
And now, as you rub my shoulders,
Wearing that flowered nightgown,
We hear actual rain, or is it wind..."

***********************
from *The First Hay(na)ku Anthology*
edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young

"Night
is language.
And I will."

(Tom Beckett, Eileen Tabios and Mark Young)************************

from *Stops* by Joel Sloman

"Modernism's dead.
A gloomy wand shimmies.
A blue lake among clouds, dizzies upside-down humans.
Our heads have been rattled, shattered, shivered.
It's just 20th-century stuff.
Some colorless remnants are shredded on branches,
a maroon sapling leans away from the future..."

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from *AN AUGUST DAYBOOK* by Ray DiPalma

"Words, parts of words, fragmentary phrases, lengthy and complex sentences-some of which were carefully punctuated-elaborate mathematical computations indicative of the application of careful procedures evolving into ever more detailed numeric and symbolic discernments- written everywhere, covering every surface in the hallway and all three rooms, covering the walls, the floors, doors, the drapes, blank pages in books, paintings, the bedding, shirts, trousers, the surfaces of appliances- every available space in the entire apartment..."

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from *A February Sheaf* by Gerrit Lansing

"Boston, you were to me, after I left New York
hub of, haven,/
Would pile in exhausted from nights of pleasure /
to hear yr morning chatter,/
drink coffee, sometimes beer or wine./
You knew the Boston crevices, their histories, the rats,/
and marketplace..."

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from *The Letters of Gusav Flaubert 1830-1857*
selected, edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller

"Tobacco? My throat is raw from it. Alcohol? I am pickled in it. The only thing left is eating, and that I do for hours on end. As a result, my body is fatter but my mind emaciated. In the past I used to think, reflect, write, dash down on paper all the verve I felt in my heart. Now I no longer think, no longer reflect- even less write. Poetry has left me, too bored to stay. Poor angel, will you ever return? And yet I have a confused feeling of something stirring within me, I am in a period of transition, curious to see what the result will be, how I'll come out of it: I am moulting (in the intellectual sense). Will I be hairless, or magnificent? I wonder. We shall see. My thoughts are confused. I am unable to do any work requiring imagination, everything I produce is dry, labored, painful. I began a morality play two months ago- what I have done of it is absurd, absolutely empty of ideas. Perhaps I'll drop it. Too bad: at least I'll have had a glimpse of something sublime, but clouds came up and plunged me back into the inglorious commonplace. My life, in my dreams so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love, will be like everyone else's- monotonous, sensible, stupid. I'll attend Law School, be admitted to the bar, and end up as a respectable district attorney in a small provincial town, like Yvetot or Dieppe..."

(to Robert Chevalier, [Rouen, Sunday morning, February 24th, 1839]. Flaubert was 18 years old when he wrote this letter]

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from *How To Proceed in the Arts* by Gary Sullivan

"True or false: No matter how much intimacy remains today between the book and the writer, no matter how directly the author's figure, presence, and history are illuminated by the circumsances of publication- circumstances that are not accidental but that may be already slightly anachronistic- in spite of this, every reading in which consideration of the writer seems to play such a large role is an impeachment that obliterates him/her in order to give the work back to itself, to its anonymous presence, to the violent, impersonal affirmation that it is."

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from *Slush* by Marshall Reese

"The President reached under the table for my hand and squeezed it. He started speaking, looking off distantly, as if gazing into an imaginary teleprompter:

Herein lies the tragedy of the age, our images, those we paint have lost their power. How can their canvases beguile the mind, when words are without meaning? This is the algebra of our times, imperfect though it is.

He drew his hand in front of him and began to trace lines in the air of an ancient and bleak geometry. He made gestures of fantastic equations, calculations of soiled beds and mattresses drenched with blood. He pointed to integers of matted hair, and combined them with blood congealing around the nose. These he multiplied by a woman slumped in her chair to arrive at a constant divided by the coefficient of a hole in the head. Such formed a parabola, hand clutching blouse, triggered by the debris of a skirt over thighs and blood spilling out. Thus, our President spelled out his policy."

***********************************************

Aaron Belz, *Implausible Worlds*
(2005)
Observable Books
3734 Hartford Street
St Louis, Missouri 63116
http://www.observable.org

The First Hay(na)ku Anthology
edited by Jean Vengua and Mark Young
2005
Meritage Press
256 North Fork Crystal Springs Road
St. Helena, CA 94574
http://www.meritagepress.com

Joel Sloman, *Stops*
1997
Zoland Books
384 Huron Avenue
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Ray DiPalma, *AN AUGUST DAYBOOK*
2005
NYC

Gerrit Lansing, *A February Sheaf*
(2003)
Pressed Wafer
9 Columbus Square
Boston, MA 02116

The Letters of Gustav Flaubert 1830-1857
edited by Francis Steegmuller
(1979)
The Belknap Press
Harvard UP
Cambridge, Mass

Gary Sullivan, *How To Proceed In The Arts*
[dedicated to David Bromige]
(2001)
Faux Press
Cambridge, MA
http://www.fauxpress.com

Marshall Reese, *Slush*
(written 1992-1999)
Situations
NYC

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger



The process of becoming familiar with the characters in a novel cannot be directly compared with the complex sensations that flood the mind and body when relating to a living person. You open a book-perhaps it easily takes the mind along with its flow, and with some degree of confidence you are inevitably comfortable and intimate with its characters. Parallels include the awakening of a world of feeling and a rudimentary opening towards a course of judgement. Experience suggests that no two meetings are precisely alike. This is true for a number of reasons, including the circumstances of the contacts, and the time available for unravelling enigmas. In any case, people tend to find themselves compelled by an appetite for the related experiences of reaction and conjecture.

Most of us, of course, accept and expect a more or less continuous stream of such meetings in reality and in imaginative (re)enactment- including those presented by the omnipresent media where such dramas are routinely displayed for our absorption and our pleasurable, baffled or horrified consideration. These in turn engender mesmerizing speculations, and few can resist for long their fascinations, puzzles, their engrossing uncoverings, the spellbindng astonishments of a more or less steady diet of such quotidian perplexities. They impose themselves continuously in the course of a day. And yet so rarely we ask ourselves, in retrospect, what they were. Now and then a recurring observation or insight crystallizes on the periphery of currents of thought and worry- the only momentary shore and respite from the oncoming tide, the flux and undertow of curiously bewildering entanglements.


***

Backstage

We are dismayed to immediately understand what incited the work of an artist or a writer. To be impelled to ponder what might have motivated their efforts is one of the main sources of our pleasure- and their pain.


***

Magician Magnifique

Sarcasm, the greatest contemporary conjuror: one hat, infinite rabbits.

Look Again: Richard Tuttle at the Whitney

This superb show closes on February 5th. Toni and I went to see it on January 6th. I've been fascinated by this artist's work ever since I began noticing it in galleries decades ago. Lucky for me Tuttle and I shared a space in a group show a few years back, curated by Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders. But I had already known Tuttle for awhile, as his wife, the poet Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge is a close friend of publisher James Sherry, who published my collection of essays, The Boundary of Blur, back in 1993. Tuttle is interested in poetry and philosophy, and in the video accompanying the show makes the point that "some people characterize my work as visual poetry." Tuttle doesn't seem to mind the characterization, as he is the diametric opposite of the stereotype of the hyper-masculine sculptor who measures the importance of work in terms of physical mass and monumentality. Over the years I've always had the sense that Tuttle has a lot in common with the surrealists who espoused the use of materials to be found right at hand, or collected for reasons otherwise hard to explain. Perhaps my own earliest works of art consisted of sitting and thinking in the basement of my parents' house on Bay Ridge Parkway in Bay Ridge in the 50's. My parents fortunately never bothered to throw out the huge collection of obsolete technology down there. The ambience was one of science -fiction at the boundary point of present, past and future. In reality, I was watching my childhood disappear and also trying to hold on to it at the same time.

For those interested in the artist as cultural heavyweight, Tuttle's work must be a true puzzle, even a disappointment or a bit anxiety-provoking. He has never seemed interested in playing this role, though perhaps in his mid sixties this is becoming more tempting, yet, knowing Tuttle, fame probably won't dazzle him for all that long, since he's too much of a philosopher to totally give way to that temptation. In his piece Title 16, gouache, graphite and paper are folded crossways in the simplistic way any grade school child might think of in an art class. The paper is painted red and brown and attached to the wall with a piece of black paper. This was one of my favorite works in the show. No grand settings, no heavy duty trucking or delivery bills. A gesture: fragile, evanescent, yet, paradoxically, definitive, memorable. A significant part of his ongoing projects consists of collaborations with poets including works of book art and some of these are included in this necessarily abbreviated retrospective as well. Tuttle became well known to a much wider circle in 1975 when the Whitney sponsored a now famous show of his work curated by Marcia Tucker who left the Whitney shortly after. His understated works created quite a stir, though in retrospect seem perfectly in tune with the conceptual tenor of many art works earning a following at that point in time.

Some of the pieces from the 80's are anything but timeless. The materials insist on the denial of permanancy. The "no's" outweight the "musts" a hundred to one. This is protest art in the same way Dylan insists that all his songs are protest art. The are themselves, not representations, no less, no more. No problem with nearly any one of these works passing muster with the Dada group- Arp particularly, but also Schwitters, Duchamp, Andre Breton. Toni describes Tuttle's works as "art in the disguise of everyday materials." Toni also enjoyed the enigma that a piece may be viewed as both a framed drawing and a sculpture of a framed drawing.

Of any artist working today, Tuttle's work most sucessfully establishes a Grand Unified Theory of contemporary art. This is true, even beyond the fact that his spare wire sculptures well preceded the triumph of string theory in contemporary physics. Tuttle's work reestablishes the primacy for the artist of paradox and the central importance of uncovering other dimensions. With Tuttle's work you realize you were standing at the edge all the while: with a gentle nudge, his work tumbles your imagination down the rabbit hole. Of course, admiring critics are quick to follow these somewhat obvious points by assuring us (and his collectors) of their visual beauty and retinal value, and this is quite true; in this regard I particulary enjoyed the assemblages of the 80's which are clearly exquisitely collectible, in addition to sustaining the implacable presence of Tuttle's artistic convictions. Oh yes, convictions: remember those? No, they didn't necessarily disappear with the end of the 60's and the gradual waning of the impact of the 70's conceptual art revolution.

In the video accompanying the show, there is an extensive, excellent interview with Tuttle I recommend, along with urging you to try not to miss this provocative, hauntingly, achingly beautiful assemblage of art works. Tuttle says in the video interview that probably only 1 in 10 of what might be the audience for this work will "get it." Tuttle's art subliminally urges the viewer to look- and think- again and again.

Book Party 1988

Book Party 1988
Originally uploaded by fait accompli.

Book party for my Sun and Moon book *Poems*, 1988
Clockwise: Toni Simon, Deborah Thomas, James Sherry, Charles Bernstein, me, Hannah Weiner, Tessie Davies

20 Years Ago- *Under The Bridge*

20 Years Ago- *Under The Bridge*
Originally uploaded by fait accompli.

The inscription reads:
"Hi Nick

Your talk was
a great occasion for
languages to intermingle.
So now it's 1986.

Love,
Carla"

Carla Harryman signed this copy of *Under The Bridge*, her beautiful book of prose poems published
by *This* (Barrett Watten) in 1980. The occasion was a talk I gave titled *Subject to Change* at Intersection in San Francisco, later published as an essay in my collection *The Boundary of Blur*

We Apologize for the Delay in Programming

In February, 2006, ::fait accompli:: will celebrate its third year of publication; in a few days we will reach our 100,000th visit; we have also received over 130, 000 "page views" (whatever they are). As always, we appreciate and enjoy your patronage immensely and apologize for the recent delay in programming; right now we are just taking a much needed breather. We promise to return as soon as possible with new content!

Meanwhile, do check out MiPoesias, Volume 20 issue 1 [click here]

**
Also, Croissant Factory [click here] makes the point we need to hear more from Carla Harryman and ::fait accompli::couldn't agree more!

Bubble Bubble Wash Away Your Lexical Trouble

with a shiny, squeaky new
Shampoo [click here]

Wow! Tom Beckett interviews

Jean Vengua [click here] on
e-x v-a-l. This excellent interview
by one of blogworld's favorite
bloggers covers a range of topics
including Jean's poetics, her haunted dreams,
many of her beautiful poems, her terrific blogs,
her experiences with music, and
much more.
Jean is the editor, with Mark Young
of the recent *The First Hay(na)ku
Anthology*

"Nothing
Adds up.
Love isn't math"

(Dan Waber).
**


You have but 30 days to see

Fra Angelico at the Met [click here]

Toni and I went to see these superb 15th century paintings with Gary and Nada on Friday night, who were very likely not quite as enthused about these thematically Christian paintings as we were (Toni's third visit). As Gary writes in his How to Proceed in the Arts (Faux Press) he is a *third generation* atheist and clearly an enthusiast of Elsewhere cultures; so, Gary and Nada seemed to appreciate the Spirit Photography show and the Indian and the Mayan art more than they liked the Fra Angelico. However, if you enjoy 15th century painting as much as we do, make sure to get over to the Met by the January 29th.

Although I rarely mention movies on ::fait accompli:: I have to mention the movie Nada brought us to: Narnia. Although I generally don't appeciate Tolkien-like movies (this movie is based on books by CS Lewis) it is right up there with King Kong for fascinating special effects; and returns you to childhood in a way I have rarely experienced in movies; next time you get depressed about the state of the world, find a kid or a kid at heart to go with and do check out these incredible feats of animation and special effects. We're lucky to have a vintage movie theatre in walking distance and starting with the transit strike we have been steadily checking out some of the latest feats of commercial filmaking. From Syriana to *Pride and Prejudice* to the aforementioned fantasy world movies, there's some hard work ahead for the Academy Award committees this year. Also, the word is out that the new Woody Allen movie is one of his best in years.

young friends

young friends
Originally uploaded by fait accompli.

Although I thought this photo was taken in the early 80's near Central Park, I showed it to Charles tonight and he was sure it was taken no later than 1978 and possibly as far back as 1976 or 1977. Since I was living in Park Slope between 1977 and 1980, this photo may have been taken in Prospect Park.

Happy Holidays from Toni and Nick

Happy Holidays from Toni and Nick
Originally uploaded by fait accompli.

Sebastopol, 1990

Sebastopol, 1990
Originally uploaded by fait accompli.

Left to right:
Cydney Chadwick, Norman Fischer, Steve Benson,
David Bromige

Sebastopol, CA 1990

Short Listed!

Thanks to Kevin Andre Elliot whose blog

Slant Truth [click here] listed ::fait accompli:: in its top ten favorites.

On the "Maudlin Art Cohones of Self-Destruction"

Lavamatique [click here] puts some thoughts on bohemia (almost wrote: bohernia) on spin cycle...

TL of the LDB, part II, The Boho Awards
La Vie de Boheme-ery and the Capital of
Pain

Pantaloons presents the
awards, with the usual panache
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Odalisqued on La Vie de Boheme-ery
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Some Like It Ravishing

Shadows Within Shadows
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The Capital of Pain

Equanimity [click here] connects the dots

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The Boomer Hath Spoken

Bachelardette [click here} picks up the gauntlet

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger


I've been wondering for awhile now what it would take to awaken me from a recent respite from blogging. It comes as no surprise that what would do it would be a comment from blogger Jordan Davis, who writes regularly for the interesting online journal The Constant Critic. He writes (of Alice Notley):

“She goes on to make the very arguable claim that self-destruction is a necessary by-product of making art, in fact, that 'if you're a poet and you aren’t somewhat ravaged' then 'there's probably something wrong with your poetry.' To use some negatives (it's contagious): No, no, and no. Or let's hope not.”

When Jordan writes, “No, no, and no. Or let’s hope not…” you realize that, although Notley’s thesis is an easy one to disagree with, it is not such an easy one to disprove. This must be because there is at least an element of truth in this disturbing assertion.

An argument could be made for the preeminence, among poets, of Baudelaire’s conception of the poet’s lifestyle, a conscious or unconscious idealization of bohemianism, even when the artist or poet's actual lifestyle mostly opposes this point of view in everyday practice. This sanctimonious conception of the overarching dedication demanded of the artist's life is barely distinguishable in many instances from a philosophy of self-sacrifice, or even martyrdom. The foremost poet to counter this point of view in life and art, in the twentieth century-in the US, anyway- was, of course, Wallace Stevens, who wrote, in his famous poem *Sunday Morning*:

“Who should give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?…
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch…”

In discussing one of Ted Berrigan’s most quoted sonnets that begins with the line: “It’s 8:54 a.m. in Brooklyn it’s the 28th of July…” in *Career Moves*, Libbie Rifkin writes:

“The tone is bemused, speculative, not rueful: the humor lies in the realization that Brooklyn, an unglamorous land of professionals, low crime rates, and reformed bohemians, is a strangely comfortable place to be.”

I have to admit this sentence stung a bit when I read it; after all, I am a professional, I now live in Brooklyn and could easily be characterized as a “reformed bohemian”, though in my case I was, perhaps, never other than an ambivalent bohemian. Awakening one morning, in the very early 70’s, in my roach-infested apartment on E. 8th Street, I realized that I didn’t any longer fit in as a resident in that neighborhood, though I loved, (-and still love) so much about it, particularly living around the corner from St Mark’s Church. That was the day my long experiment in bohemian living ended. I was 32 years old, broke, miserably alone (except for my dog Whimsey) and reading Rilke- or Berrigan or Notley for that matter- wasn’t uplifting me one bit. But it was the day, a few months later, after I had already returned to living on the Upper West Side, when, lingering more than a few minutes longer in a supermarket than I should have, shopping to prepare dinner for myself and a guest, that my beloved dog Whimsey, who was tied to a gate on a leash outside, was stolen. In a single moment, my conscious, determined attachment to adolescence, and thus the last vestiges of my personal attachment to bohemianism, vanished.

To the extent that being an artist is destructive (the romantic idea that one can be self-destructive without being other-destructive is a self-deception), I am not at all interested in being an artist, and am, in fact, ambivalent about the whole affair. The error comes in not acknowledging the price one pays for things. There are, in fact, innumerable qualities to love and enjoy about life besides art and poetry, and, for me, an over-involvement in the artist's life to the point of obsession and over-professionalism is unattractive. Surely the artist's mysterious access to transcendent pleasures in the process of pefecting works, so contrasted to the crude, the rough and ready modes and manners of materialism and commercialism, need not condemn her to a hellish life of needless physical and emotional suffering, deprivation and isolation.

How narrow and frustrating- how unartistic and unpoetic in fact, to go through life thinking only, or even mainly, of art and poetry. For me, when one thing becomes all of life, there is, in fact, no life, only mechanical repetition, a vast mirror reflecting mostly what the mirror has already reflected countless times before, self feeding on self, art feeding on art: which is little except emptiness. How sad to see the vibrant tree of art languish and grow dull for lack of light and sun and air -the sustenance of experience that is an end in itself.

***
Saturday, 12/17

Jack Kimball, in his inimitable witty and charming way, has responded to this post on his blog by awarding himself the honorary title of bohemian and stands ready to award it to other professionals of his acquaintance. This is fine, and I applaud the gesture. But the bohemianism I was picturing includes the description offered so tellingly by Alice Notley: "if you're a poet and aren't somewhat ravaged" then"there's probably something wrong with your poetry.' Doubtlessly every poet Jack is thinking of feels ravaged. But I don't think Alice is writing only about how poets feel. In the age of Bush and 9-11 every responsive, sensitive person deserves the right to feel ravaged. Very likely, the poets Alice is describing are or were much more desperate life-wise, at all moments, than the people Jack is thinking about. Now, of course, we'll get into it about the word "desperate." When I say desperate, I mean those artists who have put virtually all of their life chips into their creative work life to the point of anguished and unending economic risk.

**
Saturday, 12/17 afternoon

Jack Kimball and I have knocked this particular tennis ball back and forth a couple of times now. What is it about bloggers like Jack, Jordan- and a few others of my acquaintance-who have the ability to disagree with you, even prove you wrong, yet put a big smile on your face at the same time?

The poet's career- an endlessly faceted topic that continues to fascinate and draw me on- a glittering bauble I twist and turn over and over:- yet after I've put away, leaves me feeling I've witnessed only its surface attributes.
******
12/18

Reply to Odaliqued

Odalisqued [click here] staunchly defends bohemianism, with the reminder that in many cases alternatives to poverty might be unavailable, and that bohemianism can be embraced in addition to poverty, and not only as an alternative to affluence. I was thinking of how much an artist should be expected to continue to work exclusively on art projects at the cost of health and physical well-being. I didn't mean to put forth the idea that an artist who is poor ought to choose affluence instead. What I was opposing was the ideal of bohemianism that puts forth, as Notley puts it, being "ravaged" as a requirement. No doubt there are less harsh forms of bohemianism. But would these meet the Notley test of ravagement? Anne Boyer rings the changes on the word "ravagement." She is quite right to underline the ravagement of spiritual and emotional poverty. But I am quite sure this is not what Alice Notley had in mind. I am fairly sure she is thinking of severe physical and emotional self-sacrifice in the service of art. The fact is that artists and poets who choose not "affluence" as a goal, but two types of work and two careers as an option, are often viewed by those who consciously hold bohemian self-sacrifice as a necessary componant of an artists lifestyle as Sunday artists, dilettants or amateurs.
***
thanks to Suzanna Sirenic

who sent in the following info:


fascinating!!!!
looks like my "gypsy" and the "bohemian"
currently being bandied about
are well intertwined

bohemian "a gypsy of society," 1848, from Fr. bohemién (1559), from the country name, from M.Fr. Boheme "Bohemia," from L. Boiohaemum (Tacitus), from Boii, the Celtic people who settled in what is now Bohemia (and weredriven from it by the Gmc. Marcomans early 1c.). The modern sense is perhaps from the use of this country name since 15c. in Fr. for "gypsy" (they were believed falsely to have come from there, though their first appearance in W.Europe may have been from there), or from association with Bohemian heretics. It was
popularized by Henri Murger's 1845 story collection "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," the basis of Puccini's "La Bohème." Used in Eng. 1848 in Thackary's
"Vanity Fair.""The term 'Bohemian' has come to be verycommonly accepted in our day as the
description of a certain kind of literary gipsey, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits .... A Bohemian is simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from
conventionality in life and in art." ["Westminster Review," 1862]

The Unbearable Lightness of Berrigan

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it does it still fall? It doesn't take a blogger long to realize that only a few stalwart spirits read blogs on weekends, and even fewer on holiday weekends. Seeing my stats fall precipitously on weekends, just a few months after I started fait accompli in February of '03, was one of the reasons I initiated the blogger crush lists that brought some passing fame at that time to this modest endeavor. The last one having been posted over a year ago (November has often been my lucky month, another reason why I like Thanksgiving so much) I am way overdue, and I promise, another one is forthcoming soon, along with a long overdue updated Blog List for the Electronic Poetry Center. Whether or not those trees really fall, and whether or not a blog will bring any notice, let alone lasting fame to a writer, few of them having once tasted its pleasures of blogging can resist returning, even if they leave relatively decisively. Witness the recent return of Simon DeDeo. So, you quiet ex-blogger readers/lurkers I have a hunch you'll be back again to blogging, by and by.

So, if a tree fell in the forest...I was chatting with my friend Charles Borkhuis the other day at the Bowery Poetry Club about the fact that some writers are able to plow away at their work, and remain focused, regardless of notice. I greatly admire these writers, or you writers, whichever, God knows I am not one of them. Although I wrote tons of poetry when I was a lad and a dashing young man, putting together small collections in binders which I read and reread as excitedly as if they were published and famed, hoping to trigger or jump-start another sheaf of poems. But after I began to see some of my writing in print, I grew either impatient, or self-conscious about writing, I don't know which. And after I judged a couple of poetry awards a few years back (the winners of which were Standard Schaefer's superb *Nova* and Mark Wallace's terrfic Unemployed Worker Rides a Subway [whose long page-turner novel Dead Carnival from Avec Books-I've only just dipped into it, but I'm eagerlly looking foward to totally immersing myself in this fine book soon] one Sun and Moon, the other a recent Green Integer book,) I became much more hesitant, or perhaps selective in recognizing or accepting a putative idea as a possibility for a poem. But blogging? Ha! Now that I have your attention, dear readers, or at least some of it for now. the sound of that particular falling tree right now, dear reader, is good enough for me.

I'm not going to get into the debate about the relative values of literary forms, no, I'm not going to go there. But I will touch on a related theme, the theme of the poet's career, as I mentioned on my last post, on that very recent Thanksgiving I enjoyed so much in Arlington. By the way, I said my suitcase was too stuffed to buy more books, but apparently that wasn't the case. I bit the bullet, risked pulling my back out (I didn't, much!) and bought a few more on our day trip to Gloucester. Unfortunately I did not have time to telephone Gerrit Lansing, but I did learn that his 80th birthday celebration is still being talked about, and included an appearance by Kenward Elmslie, whose famed 1975 Z Press book Tropicalism, as well as a signed copy of Gerrit Lansing's own recent -A Februray Sheaf- (Pressed Wafer) I bought in Gloucester in Bob Ritchie's Dogtown Book Shop. And I can't wait to immerse myself further in Joel Sloman's absorbing, haunting poetry in his 1997 *Stops* from Cambridge, Mass Zoland Books (I couldn't resist reading a few as soon as I got home) More on that excellent book soon ("Am I closer to thee, dotted world?/ In stillness, a resolving confusion/I throw myself out of bed with a martial arts grunt".) On that same brief visit to Bob Ritchie's rich and rewarding Dogtown Book Shop (write him at dogtown@cove.com) I also scored a copy of Gilbert Adair's *Surfing at the Zeitgeist* (Faber and Faber, 1997). I was pleased about this as Gilbert is someone I have spoken with a few times lately at the Bowery Poetry Club, but whose work was otherwise unknown to me. This is a book of brief prose pieces about various topics, a form I must admit I am inordinately fond of.

We also went to a bookstore owned by another Gloucester poet, a store called Mystery Train. If you get to Gloucester (and if you are a book collector, I am sure you will sometime after reading this, and apparently winter is a good time for sale prices -the most I paid for any of those books I bought from Bob Ritchie, believe it or not was $10), Mystery Train is a lot of fun as it has not only tons of books (now I wish I had bought that new book byJuliana Spahr I lread for awhile there-as my sister-in-law is shipping me a couple of last minute items I got at a final quick trip to McIntrye and Moore including the amazing Flaubert Correspondence which I have been enjoying so much. I had to go to the library yesterday to take it out it so I could get back to it right away- irresistable after reading Flaubert's-Sentimental Education- he must have intended that to mean also that the book itself an education, because you learn so much about 19th Century French history reading it-an excellent follow-up to All Men Are Mortal by Simone de Beauuvoir, a somewhat tedious novel by comparison but exceptionally rich in evoking European history, the gist of which is the main character is an immortal who is thus able to report on centuries of European history first hand!-by the way, if you haven't aleady read them, check out two masterpieces by Guy de Maupassant, Pierre et Jean and the incomparable Bel Ami, both of which I read lately and loved.) Anyway, Mystery Train is also excellently stocked in used vinyl albums -I've been listening to these lately, mosty classical, and used cd's. Mystery Train, by the way, even has free boxes of books and albums, so it is all the more difficult to pass it by. On this visit I also found a copy of *The Gods Hate Kansas* (a sci-fi pulp from the 60's) and Emile Zola's-The Masterpiece- which is about his friend Cezanne, (Last night Toni and I watched the 1937 -Life of Zola- starring Paul Muni-, which I also got out of the library, that mostly focuses on the Dreyfus case), Samuel Delany's classic *The Fall of the Towers* and-get this, the recently indicted assistant to Cheney, Lewis Libby's book *The Apprentice*, which my pal Ron Silliman wrote about on his blog as selling for over a hundred dollars. The price has come down now to about 25-40, but none of these books in MysteryTrain cost me over $4.50. But I'm saving the best for last: in an antique shop that my brother-in-law brought me to I found the book I've been dreaming of for months: a small leather-bound copy of La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, published in 1908, in fairly good condition, that set me back a mere $3.

I titled this edition of the blog -The Unbearable Lightness of Berrigan- because since reading Libby Rifkin's -Career Moves- I've been thinking a lot about Berrigan. November 15th is Berrigan's birthday and his recenty released collected works has gotten a lot of people thinking about this masterful poet. La Rochefoucauld's Maxim #147 states:-The fame of great men ought always be estimated by the means used to acquire it-. In -Career Moves- Rifkin manages to go even deeper than this. She seems to be searching for a way of cracking the code between a poet's intentions in their work and their intentions concerning the way they conduct their public lives as a poet. In exploring the lives and works of Olson and Creeley, two very public personas, and that of the relatively reticent Zukofsky, there is much to be learned and thought about. Good criticism gets you to want to explore the work more deeply and Rifkin's book does at least this. Just as Jerome McGann discovered correspondances between an author's intentions and the mannner in which their work is presented materially, Rifkin looks into literary career lifestyle as it relates to the literary style, the inspirations and aspirations of an author's work. Clearly the power of the ideas of the so-called New Critics is waning, who sought to find the truth of literary work only by examining and discussing the texts themselves. No doubt this had partly to do with the overarching influence of psychoanalysis in those days- these critics sought, probably rightly, to try to look at writing with less influence coming from Freud. But now a later generation is not so concerned with the weight of Freud's influence, so that psychological thinking can seek a reasonable purpose again in literary analysis. In any case, Rifkin is not worried about looking at biography as a source of insight into poetry, on the contrary.

The most moving of her explications has to do with the relationships between Berrigan's Sonnets and their revelations about his desire for a place in literary history, as well as his attitude towards death, at the tender age of 18, when the Sonnets began to be written. Sonnet II begins:

"Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
dear Berrigan. He died"

and ends:

"Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m.
fucked til 7 now she's late for work and I'm
18 so why are my hands shaking I should know better."

I was around 20 years old myself when I first heard Berrigan read that poem at the Poetry Project, and immediately went to the 42cd Street Library to copy out every one of his sonnets with a pencil on a lined pad. Reading Libby's book I can better understand why I was so moved over 40 years ago, and am just as moved today. Berrigan was able to touch on the heaviest issues in a poet's mind with tart yet warming humor, irony yet great compassion. Few indeed have since been able to straddle such emotions, and express them as well as Berrigan. Berrigan's intense lyricism mixed with his stinging wit creates a cocktail that is hard to resist. OK, he was a 60's victim, like icons Dylan and Lennon. But it is easily possible to see past this now, at almost 40 years distance. Berrigan's persona, as Rifkin makes so clear, was way larger than the 60's frame he can easily be placed in. Looking at his work now, I unite it with many of my other beloved diarists such as Ned Rorem, Cesare Pavese, Valery, Kafka and Samuel Butler. As a young poet I desperately needed models that I could depend on, but who I could look upon more as peers and contemporaries. Cummings, Stevens, Rilke, Eliot, Stein and the rest were inspiring, but of another era. But Berrigan, and later Bernadette Mayer's work and workshops helped define for me what a contemporary poet's life,in relation to their work, can be: difficult, demanding, obsessively dedicated, but nevertheless compatible with living in one's own era. Berrigan's Sonnets, then and now, helped to make a contemporary poet's life real, extremely challenging yet mostly stimulating and worthwhile, occasional hopeless depressions notwithstanding.

Reading Lifkin's book also brought back a number of vital memories of the Ted Berrigan workshop I attended, along with Carter Ratcliff and others, in 1967. He spoke about the "speed" of contemporary poetry. OK, we know about Berrigan's affection for the drug of the same name, but let's forget about the 60's flavorings for the moment. Berrigan was talking about the fact that when we read contemporary poetry there is an *electric* (instantaneous) quality to our contemporary way of reading that is unique to our era. He used Ashbery's Tennis Court Oath as an example. He was saying that we don't stop to think about each word the way we read poetry now. We engulf the pages instantaneously, ravenously. As he spoke about this, he kept pulling on the chord of the electric light hanging from the ceiling over and over turning excitedly turning it on and off. He made me realize that when we read poetry now we read with the speed of light, the speed of thought, so it should be written and presented with this factor in mind. His Sonnets helped make this an era of lightning fast poetry, He also spoke of the loss of nobility in poetry as well, so he was aware of the price that we might be paying for this type of insatiability. But I think he, and the New York School in general, did much to counter the mournful tones of so much 20th Century poetry: ("I grow old, I grow old, I will wear the bottom of my trousers rolled... I have seen them singing each to each...I do not think that they will sing to me")

The excitement of Berrigan's work- and much of the New York School- has to do with reveling in-and exploiting- the inexhaustible energy of the poet and poetry. Lifkin's book helped me realize that this awareness of inexhaustibility- (I think of Jordan Davis's Million Poems Blog in this context)- is tempered only, or mainly, by the admission of the reality of death (made briefly thinkable only by means of irony, humor and empathy-what a minute: I typed that first as "ampathy"- amplified empathy?-new word?). But superimposed on these realizations are the consolations- and the excitements- of remembering and being remembered

"...Back to books. I read
poems by Auden Spenser Pound Stevens and Frank O'Hara
I hate books..
I wonder if Jan or Helen or Babe
ever think about me. I wonder if Dave Bearden still
disliked me. I wonder if people talk about me
secretly I wonder if I'm too old. I wonder if I'm fooling
myself about pills. I wonder what's in the icebox. I wonder
if Ron or Pat bought any toilet paper this morning."

I remember listening to Berrigan's mid 60's reading of this poem at St Mark's-with that *shock of recognition*- as if it were yesterday. As Rifkin discusses it, this poetry overlays his reverence for the poetry of the present and the past, with anxieties about whether he is being remembered now, and by extention, if he will be remembered like these greats in the future. These youthful anxieties are made so much more approachable, so much more life-sized, ("be big" he used to say) by his joke about Ron or Pat remembering the toilet paper. The poem begins with the lines:

"I wake back aching from soft bed Pat/
gone to work Ron to class (I never heard a sound) it's my birthday"

- birthdays being days of acknowledging tthe whole of one's life, Rifkin ties this in with the idea of the poet's concerns with the value of their work, with career concerns about the future reception of a poet's life and art.


Rifkin makes it clear that by immersing themselves in discovering ways of presenting and preserving - keeping accessible, and comprehensible- the poetry of today and yesterday, poets and their frequently unsung supporters, the academics, are contributing significantly to the hard work of keeping contemporary poetry alive, relevant and, as Joel Lewis and Alice Notley titled their 1997 Talisman book of Ted Berrigan inteviews- On the Level Everyday-.