I found, in an old computer file, a recipe for a series of poems. Each poem would contain the following references, in successive lines: 1. mental disease, personality disorder ; 2. jazz musician; 3. occasion of domestic dispute; 4. generalization or stereotype; 5. solecism or grammatical error; 6. plagiarized line; 7. non-sequitur or logical fallacy; 8. free line; 9. gambling, odds or probability; 10. invented aphorism or proberb; 11. reference to a system of government or political philosophy; 12. idiotic idea; 13. autobographical detail; 14. sexual fetish or perversion. I also found fragments of the beginning of several poems written according to this formula. I think that I had planned to write 10, fourteen-line poems, with the elements in this order. Each line of each poem would be interchangeable, on the model of Queneau's "Cent mille millards de poèmes." I think it is 10 to the fourteenth power? I am going to work on these poems until they are all complete. I never got further than line 9 of any one of them. How could I have abandoned such a brilliant project? I will be publishing the poems on this blog as I complete them.

What bothered me about the recent "Frida" movie, I realize now two weeks after seeing it, is how it converts the visual images of Kahlo's paintings into Kitsch. The paintings you see in the film are designed to be assimilated into the visual look of the film itself (as opposed to modelling the look of the flim after the paintings). The film is visually clever, inventive even, but in an ultimately cartoonish way. Contrast the surrealist film effects in Buñuel's "Tristana"--or even Hitchcock.

I have read Paul Auster's novels with some degree of satisfaction in the past. I feel, though, that I know his sources too well to accord him much originality. If I hadn't read Kafka and Beckett, Celan, etc... then Auster would be an extremely original writer.

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The extraordinary second half of Beckett's "Molloy." Moran, in this alternate universe where almost everyone's last name seems to start with M, makes preparations to go on a secret mission, on foot, to find Molloy, whose name might be Mollose. He must bring with him his fourteen-year old son, whom he views with an odd mixture of contempt and tenderness. Everything great about the Beckett of this period is in this 60 pages or so. I'm going to have to read it in French.

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What is the point of my series of comments on slips of paper found in books? I honestly don't know. I once sold off a large number of books to a used book store, some of which my friend Bob Basil subsequently bought. Imagine his surprise bringing home a copy of Pound's Cantos and finding my name in it. Of course, I regret selling these books now.

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Ron Silliman's blog, found on this same site (ronsilliman.blogspot.com) is a wonderful source of information and insight. I wonder, though, why it is so darned earnest in tone--in contrast, of course, to the humor of his poetry. In Columbus, Ohio, where I was teaching in the early 1990s, there was a bookstore across from campus on High Street where I would buy books of LANGUAGE poetry. I have never seen a book of Ron Silliman in any other bookstore before or since, but I would walk over there quite often and acquire a new letter of the "Alphabet." Or did I order most these books from Segue or Roof after getting a catalogue in the mail? My memory is fuzzy. I will never forget the line "Teaching Reagan to count backwards by sevens." Or is it eights?

A slip of paper pasted to a copy of James Merrill's "Braving the Elements" (Atheneum: New York, 1972). Inside front cover. A woodblock print of a student apparently fallen asleep at a library desk. Above the picture THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY. Below, NEWARK CAMPUS LIBRARY. Running on the left, down to up, CENTRAL OHIO TECHNICAL COLLEGE. In the left hand corner, very small, THE GREAT SEAL OF THE STATE OF OHIO. Diagonally, across the shoulder of the sleeping student, the word WITHDRAWN. Various ink stamps on different parts of the book, some stamped over with the word WITHDRAWN. On the front of the book is a call number label: "NWK PS3525E692B7C.2.

Pasted to back cover, a library slip, printed by the GAYLORD company, with the words DATE DUE at the top. Noone had ever checked out this book, apparently, although they had two copies.

Written in a used copy of James Merrill's "Braving the Elements"

What elements are braved here
O garrulous one?

What would Kafka say?

Newark Campus (Ohio) Library
discarded this book.

William Bronk has an allegorical mode and a symbolic mode. The allegorical mode starts with an analogy and draws a conclusion. Something like "We suited up for the baseball game / and kept score until it was over. / We kept records of the scores in books / and even cared years later who had won and lost. / In the end, losers and winners were the same. It won." (My invented example.) The symbolic mode begins with a specific insight, a luminous flash. Romantic theory would tell us to prefer the symbolic to the allegorical, and indeed I do prefer Bronk's symbolic poems to his allegories, where often it is too obvious from the onset that the baseball game (or whatever) is unimportant. Can this distinction be maintained? A third mode might be the purely abstract poem, in which there is neither symbol nor allegory per se.

I began to read Bronk seriously in the late 1980s and continued to buy all of his books until his fairly recent death. I still return to him from time to time.

The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams. A receipt from Books at Gayles, in Davis, dated 28 AUG 77. The book cost me $12.95, plus 90 cents in tax. This would have been four days after my 17th birthday. Not a cheap book for that date. I remember that I had to special-order this book, and that when they called me the woman said "a book ABOUT William Carlos Williams."

I am starting a series on slips of paper found in books. Stay tuned.


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Growing up in Davis, California, the New York poets represented for me a sort of alternate universe. I did see Kenneth Koch read his poetry once, and had him sign some of his books, which I still have today. "Ko," "The Pleasures of Peace," and "The Art of Love." I told him, semi-incoherently, why I admired his poetry.

I saw a series of poets read in my high school/undergraduate days: Stephen Spender, Richard Eberhart, Adrienne Rich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Bly, William Stafford, etc... I also saw Hillis Miller and Helen Vendler. Koch was the only New York school poet, and in fact the only one I have ever seen in person, which seems odd given my overwhelming devotion to these poets.

In my copy of Ashbery's "Some Trees" I found a receipt for the purchase of this book, dated 4 19 78. I was 17 years old, and paid $3.50 for it, plus 21 cents in tax. The edition was published in 1978 by the ECCO press. In the wake of the 1976 prizes awarded "Self-Portrait" all of Ashbery's previous books found themselves back into print.

I have always been more interested in translating away from my native language than into it, although this of course requires a much greater linguistic competence. I've done a few of Berrigan's sonnets and some Barbara Guest. Here is a version of a striking David Shapiro poem from "House, Blown Apart." One could imagine it as the lost original from which David translated his poem. The translation is noticeably "flatter" than the original. The phrase "pink bottomless barge," for example. Nevertheless, that dream-like quality, so often found in Shapiro's poetry, works well in Spanish. The proper names, Malcolm and Popeye, gain an exotic quality. Who is Malcom?

Otra versión de la nieve ligera

Se te cae un mapa de las manos
como una voz. O cae un mapa mientras suena una voz,
desde ahora en adelante procederás en la oscuridad. Ay, es cierto. Mapa
del único mundo en que se me permitía un nombre único.
Un nombre, una isla. Por otro lado,
"La sentimentalidad es peor aun que la muerte."
No sé. ¿De dónde procede la "lepsia"?
¿De dónde? ser tomado: el sueño; las ninfas;
o simplemente ser engañado. Como si hubiéramos dormido
cerca del libro escrito por Malcolm, donde todo lo que sabemos es que nos despertamos
para encontrar el mapa árido de Popeye en el buque rosado sin fondo:
"No lo sabemos y no lo sabremos nunca" en tinta minúscula.
Aunque sé adónde vas, por la influencia de la estrella lejana
pegada como una nota en la pared trasera de un aula.

After looking at some Joseph Cornell images on the internet, I suddenly remembered the image on the cover of Ashbery's "Hotel Lautréamont," a haunting collage by Cornell. I took it off my shelf to look at it again. I don't remember when I actually found out who Cornell was. I read New York school poetry quite a bit when I was very young and had no visual references for most of the painters whose names appear in poems and essays. I think of myself as someone of quite limited visual culture. Is this really true? I can't draw. I have been to museums and the like, of course, and am familiar with visual styles of many modern and contemporary painters. Yet I have some seroius gaps in my knowledge as well. Aside from an article on Tàpies (and Valente) I have not written on visual art either.

My translation course is inevitably the source of new insight. It is as though any problem relevant to my own intellectual pursuits can be approached via translation. Whether the students feel the same way is another matter entirely.

Borges has an essay on the "Superstitious ethics of the reader" (approximate title). The idea is that, by dint of repetition, a particular literary passage might come to seem inevitable "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme..." "Longtemps, je me suis couché à bonne heure." "Of man's first disobedience...." But the original author would not necessarily have thought of this language as sacred or immutable. For Cervantes (says Borges) the opening of the Quixote was nothing special. Borges's approach to translation, then, involves a questioning of the idea, found in theorists from Benjamin to Steiner, that the original is a sacred text.

The OuLiPo approach, exemplified by Harry Mathews, sees translation as a game with particular rule or constraints. Why translate with an artificial constraint, the prohibition of the letter "e"? The point is to become aware of the less visible constraints that govern translation.

In my copy of Barbara Guest's "Poems" of 1962, there is a hand written note on a pre-printed card that says "Compliments of Doubleday" and has the little anchor Doubleday logo. The card is written in blue fountain pen and says "Thank you, Ruth, for a most delightful evening--food and company. Love, Larry." I bought this book over the internet a few years ago, for the extravant price of $50.

***

I read a biography of Joseph Cornell over the weekend. It is obvious to me now that he is the link between Dada and Surrealism (Duchamp, Breton, Dalí, etc...) and Pop Art. The actor Tony Curtis would bring him over boxes that he (Curtis) had made, in an obviously derivative (of Cornell) style. This struck me as quite hilarious.

A poem by Octavio Paz dedicated to Cornell, which I saw in another book on Cornell, seemed to me transparently inadequate, in that it basically paid homage by listing typical elements one might find in a Cornell box and saying how wonderful all this was. The poem was, in a sense, a variety of Kitsch, in that it invited the reader to say, "yes, how wonderful of Paz to notice how wonderful Cornell is." Of course, my reaction was exactly the opposite. Has anyone noticed how obvious Paz can be? How much better is F.O'H's poem entitled simply "Joseph Cornell." I'm sure the first time I read it I had no idea who Joseph Cornell was.

Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones, Papa Jo Jones, Victor Lewis, Jack DeJohnette, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Cindy Blackman, Joe LaBarbera, Shadow Wilson, Shelly Manne, Mel Lewis, Kenny Clarke, Ed Blackwell, Billy Higgins, Roy Haynes, Billy Cobham, Jimmy Cobb.