Several people seemed to appreciate my rumba guaguancó today outside of the building where I work. Tomorrow you might just hear some mozambique or bembe.

It takes a while just to make a rhythm feel good. If it doesn't feel good to me it certainly won't feel good to anyone else. If your muscles are tense your groove will be tense too. I played cajón out there once but someone said he preferred my "real drum." You'd be surprized by how many people call my conga drum a "bongo."

I'm very invested in my poetic work as work, but very little invested in it as a "body of work," or as something demonstrating that I'm a poet. I don't want the ego of a poet, or the self-definition. The narcisissism of it all. Who needs that.


I ruined your make up
You left my notebook out in the rain
You sanded down the head of my snare drum
I left coffee grounds on the counter

You derived pleasure
I ate your stale leftovers
I derided your niece
You saw “Throne of Blood” without me

I gave your parents a wilted houseplant
You ate my soup without giving thanks
You forgot to fulfill my dreams
I risked the life of your friends

I was a lazy child

I lived only for poetry and masturbation

I was asthmatic; my father was arthritic

my grandfather would come over to do our yard work



We cut down an enormous fig tree--my grandfather and I

I dreaded his visits--the yardwork and asthma attacks

he would come over with a chain saw

we cut interminable logs of fig



You can't burn green wood in your fireplace

the wood of the fig tree is worthless

we built interminable fires of fig

I lived only for poetry and arthritis

The way "the body" or "the voice" or "the material" become just metaphors and thus disembodied, dematerialized. Not really anybody's body, but "the body." The way "forms of feeling" seem to lose the form part. The way culture starts to mean everything that isn't culture, the non-cultural part of culture, in other words. There's the culture of culture, and the non-culture of culture, and cultural studies wants to always move to the second. It's all studies and no culture.

The way the least interesting parts of literary studies are held over into cultural studies. For example, the lack of interest in anything real and tangible, the use of the "cultural" or "literary" product as grist for the critical argument, the positioning of oneself in a particular critical debate.

The way the interdisciplinary doesn't really involve any other real discipline, just gestures in the direction of other disciplines.

All this by way of my anxiety. Would it work to do my approach to questions of culture, in a setting where I am bucking against this tendency? Can I even articulate what I'm doing in a way comprehensible to those who would want to take the course.

In the email last night:

Dear Uncle Jonathan,

I can't figure out a topic for a poem. Do you have any suggestions about how to choose a topic? I like writing poems about nature. I wrote other poems at school, but I want to do something different. So I'm going to write some poems about nature.
Please write back.

Sincerely,

Sarah Mayhew, age 7

I read Harmatan this evening. It's an interresting book written in Nigeria in 1966-67 with lots of sharply observed detail. There is some overwriting, like section 49 "Foliage burgeoning in summer rain." It would be easy to isolate passages of good or indifferent writing, nothing really bad. If I had to choose my favorite it would be poem 48, the penultimate section of the book:

Somewhere the rivers are slowing down,
are less and less deep every year
and will soon be shallow enough to lay on
and let the water pour over you as you sleep;
the birds don't panic at dawn
and walk more than they fly; the ocean
sends one less wave ashore every day,
one more thought of sleep.
Fine dust above the goat paths
suspended in the sunlight
then drifting upward
as though the ground were raining on the sky.
The network of goat paths lining the ridges
and mounds which were once the city wall of Kano.
Sunlight, the memory of it, entering
the arid space of a demolished building in New York.
Dreamy movements of light and dust.
A slow shadow revolving at the center
of flattened miles,
one ant dancing with a dead ant in the sand.

The conceits are clever without being too clever: A river so dry you could sleep in it without fear. The ground raining on the sky. Birds weighted down by a general mood of slowness so that they prefer to walk rather than fly. Mounds that were once a city wall. The energy of an ocean dissipating so that is sends one less wave each day to the shore. The last line is beautiful too! Everything is communicated indirectly, but without obscurity. There is nothing labored about the writing itself, no word or phrase that sounds forced or out of place.

Violi's not a poet I know at all well. This book was published 30 years ago and I had never heard of it. I am its first owner (of this particular copy I mean) for all I can see. The copy is pristine, odorless, with no names of previous owners in it. Published by Sun in 1977, in a series that included Ponge, Padgett, Knott, Towle, Lopate. Roussel, Economou, Ely. Whenever I see a book published by Sun in the 70s, I pick it up.

***

Could you imagine a poem like this being "workshopped," re-crafted into something better? I'm not saying that it's perfect, but that a few imperfections here and there make it breathe all the more. The line "the arid space of a demolished building of New York," for example, does not sound quite as elegant as the surrounding lines (possibly). Yet by correcting the "worst" line you might destroy the entire poem. The whole idea of having a workshop in which inexpert writers criticize each others' work seems profoundly stupid to me. Even a very good poet might ruin someone else's poem with a misplaced suggestion, so wouldn't even worse writers give even worse advice?

I'm not crazy (lately) about poetry that sounds too written, work that is with a willful quality that's like bad acting. Where the "craft" is visible as "fine writing" there is probably some overwriting there. "Craft" is something to be unlearned, in that sense. I prefer the Creeley approach where he doesn't feel the need to show you how good he is at every turn. It's kind of a hard lesson because everyone wants to stand out from the crowd with marvelous writing chops. It's hard to remember how deceptively simple some of the best writing is, in Lorca, in Creeley. It's not like it's not trying hard, but that is doesn't show visible signs of effort. I always pick up those signs, somehow; that is my misfortune in that I can't enjoy a lot of poetry that's well written and I'm sure better than anything I could ever come up with, because I simply can't take that overwritten Derek Walcott effect.

***

Picked up Paul Violi's Harmatan at the Dusty Bookshelf here in town. In other poetry new there was reading last week by Irby, Roitman, and Larkin. It was nice seeing and hearing Maryrose again.

***

Kagemusha was worse than I remembered it. Kurosawa was in decline at this point of his career. I should have rented "The Spirit of the Beehive" instead.

***

I love Lorca after all. Hah! I will accept my destiny--long postponed--as a full fledged lorquista. I didn't write about him ever for the same reason that any self respecting Spanish poet has to flee Lorca with both feet as fast as possible. I do hate bad lorquistas with a passion. Few have attracted as many crappy critics!

I have Nick P's new book, Fait Accompli, a book that I've read in its blog form almost complete. Piombino's writing on the blog stands up well in book form, and brings with it for me that special emotion of "I was there as this was being written." I wasn't physically present with Nick while he was writing, but I have met him a few times in New York and have been present as reader of the blog from the get go.

I've always wanted to do a book called Best of Bemsha Swing. When I go back in the archives I find my writing stands up pretty well too--some of it at least. I don't produce those marvelous Reginald Shepherd mini essays, but then again I am no Reginald Shepherd.

I'm pretty beat, having done an incredible amount of work including finishing a 5000 word article in Spanish. I still have an exam to give, a second meeting of the day, and another appointment at 5.

In Jasper Johns, the hand is a kind of voice. [David Shapiro]

And in David Shapiro, the eye is a kind of ear. There's a way of writing about art that makes the reader feel it.

Not a course on prosody, but a course on everything that you would have to know to begin to make prosody meaningful in the first place...

Robert Pinsky. Like Altoids, but "curiously bland" instead of "curiously strong." Rooting poetry in oral performance is a radical theory, but couched in such bland, middle-brow language it's not likely to have radical consequences.

I am developing a course for when I come back, a graduate seminar called "Ritmo, cante, voz." It's basically my "song studies" idea cast as a single course. I think it will work.

I was reading Barthes' essay "The Grain of the Voice" last night. I think that would be a good place to start. That along with García Lorca's "Juego y teoría del duende." What else would you put on the syllabus for theoretical texts, aside from obvious choices like Bernstein (ed.) Close Listening?

There was a breathless-toned pop book about the human voice I saw a few months ago. That kind of thing might be useful.

I never realized Rollins had a quartet for a short period in 1963 with Don Cherry, Henry Grimes, and Billy Higgins--a pianoless group similar to those of Ornette shortly before (Cherry and Higgins had of course played in Ornette's groups shortly before.)

(I knew some Rollins trio recordings with Elvin and Wilbur Ware--also pianoless.) I love the absence of piano because it allows for so much space in the music for the bass and drums. Cherry is in top form, a nice complement to Rollins as he was on Coltrane's The Avant-Garde, in another shadow-Ornette group (Ornette's musicians without Ornette himself). The Coltrane group with Cherry and Ed Blackwell, however, never quite comes together in satisfactory form.