Language Log: Modification as social anxiety

I like what Kasey is doing with his close-readings, so I'll try my own for a while, see how it works out.

A poem by Clark Coolidge, from Solution Passage, one of my three or four favorite Coolidge books:


HPL

Those streets were not his
so he kept them in the dark to himself
knowing age for a solid pent in mind
he turned out volumes of locked domed hills

Penciled purples in the daylit dreams
wore wool humid and apology bright
letters in the doorway, arabic at the edges
the colors of science turned jagged at his cease

He was not Poe, he lived on a hill
dreamed afternoon and woke to write
icecream from ivory, an undersea
crystallized Providence cats broke
out of the past and Fomalhaut speaking

Fomalhaut, as everyone with google can discover in 10 seconds, is the 17th brightest star in the sky, in Southern Pisces. The name means "mouth of the fish" in Arabic, which perhaps explains the word "arabic" in this poem. I don't know who HPL is. An astronomer at Brown University? Nocturnal writer?

Coolidgisms in the poem: "a solid pent in mind" (adjective used as noun); "locked domed hills." (accented monosyllabic sequence). "turned jagged at his cease" (adj. as noun). A peculiar way of using prepositional phrases; syntactic hiccups that can eventually be scanned without too much trouble. A peculiar, wistful tone that I cannot locate in any particular device: the some of the parts.

Discursive coherence is relatively high: all the statements seem to refer to a single individual, the HPL of the title. A few phrases are more difficult to relate to the portrait that emerges: "icecream from ivory." Are we supposed to take this phrase as direct object of the verb "write" in previous line? Generally the lines have semantic/prosodic coherence. Sound is dense; metaphors rich and suggestive. Should they be interpreted? Should we translate, for example, "the colors of science turned jagged at his cease " as "At his death, science lost one its most subtle, colorful thinkers..." I think not, since this is only one possible construal of this line.

***

Update, five minutes later: I've got it: H.P. Lovecraft! He was interested in astronomy and used the Ladd observatory in Providence as a child.

Questions for a Hippopotamus

The Jim Behrle Show: The Jim Side: "From Experimental to Mainstream in 5 Easy Steps"

Here's a poem I wrote in the car driving back home to St. Louis. I transcribed today from memory, changing it as I went along.



The kid who comes to fix the plumbing is very likely a drummer in a metal band

He'll be more erudite than the professor whose plumbing he's come to fix

But who nevertheless transcribes Max Roach solos in his spare time

The translator of Homer is zen master (of a Korean school), an aficionado of billiards

The Arts-Administrator is a comic-book artist

He collects Bollywood movies and only listens to Lebanese and Egyptian pop-stars

Although he studied classical composition in his youth

He's married to Nada, a belly-dancer and extravagant poet

The car salesman, nevertheless, is only that: a car saleman

The same can be said for the lawyer, the cardiologist, the novelist

And myself? I am the waiter apiring to movie stardom, the shoe-shine boy sonero

The hit-man/professor, the psychologist golf-pro

I'm adding some content toPoemas con nombres propios, neglected for a very long time. My poetry in Spanish seemed to dry up suddenly. Now I've turned on the faucet again, with mixed results.

A goofy analysis of goofy WS poem "Jumbo". I remember looking at a book by Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens when I was in highschool. I wanted to see what Bloom would say about one of my favorite poems, "Sea Surface Filled with Clouds." Of course, Bloom dismissed the poem as rather unworthy of consideration, and I dismissed Bloom.

I'm in somewhat of a panic trying to decide which books I need to bring back with me for the summer--today on my last day in Kansas until early August. I don't know which books I'll need next week, let alone in late July.

Highlights of the academic year: the poetics seminar, featuring local and international luminairies like Jim McCrary, Jordan Davis, Jill Kuhnheim, and Joe Harrington. Jordan's visit: I had a dream last night I was visiting him in New York: I had to leave (wake up) before going to the Strand. The graduate theory course, in which I learned a great deal from teaching a wonderful group of students. The continual dialogue with my fifty closest blogger friends, whom I can't name for fear of leaving someone out. "What, I'm not one of your 50 closest friends!*&(+!!"

Meeting other bloggers in San Diego for the MLA. Especially Kasey, Bill Marsh.

Poetry readings at the City Museum, organized by Aaron Belz, where I got to meet Gabriel Gudding, David Hess, Susan Schultz, Kari Edwards, and the formidable Kent Johnson.

A writing experiment. Do you want to publish in a given magazine? Why not just write your poems in the margins of the magazine, with no possibility of rejection?

Written in the margins of Poetry, for no very good reason

A Heian novel
such as I usually like
yet it dulls me...


***

Wrinkle in that shirt

device for extracting ink
from ink well


later intelligible

***

graduating from Waterman to Mont Blanc

***

what font is that
to impose its will
over the landscape?

I could explain and
make you understand

***

I understand that fissure
I'd like to say I could reproduce it

***

If voice, no whisper
that's what I want to argue
if whisper, no voice.
How wrong I can be.

***

a suit of clothes designed to
function in absence of
its wearer

***

pass your eyes over and
rest them on these words

***

what now feels
cheap and plastic
in my hands

Language Log: A verbless post

Language Log: To post verblessly is so jejune!

I've just emailed everything I need to work on over the summer to myself. My last few days in Kansas. Trying to get the poetics seminar schedule done for the Fall semester. I've written a zillion emails today.

Read most of the Seidenstricker translation of the Monogatari Genji last night. I'm not sure I why I had never read this before.

So I've deleted comments.