Emmanuel Chabrier - Twilight of an Old Régime

Emmanuel Chabrier [1841-1894] was a French classical composer and pianist. Today he is primarily known as the composer of a short rhapsodic piece entitled España, for full orchestra, or for piano reductions for solo or four hands. España is notable for its sprightly stylistic effects, which have been influential throughout the 20th Century, in "pop" classical compositions (in the music hall), as well as in programmatic music for the theater, the movies, etc. The music of Chabrier's which survives in today's classical repertory suggests the "French Country Folk" culture of the later 19th Century, though Chabrier was, in his time, better known as a composer of operas--a form which preoccupied many composers of his day. I often think that the desire of composers to make successful operas (during this period) is rather like the envy novelists and poets seem to feel for playwrights. How many failed operas and plays have been the result of this misplaced ambition! But perhaps I am not qualified to answer this question. Certainly Henry James, and W. Somerset Maugham--who are both remembered more today for their fictions, than for any success in the theater--were comparative failures as playwrights--at least compared to their fictional efforts. Before radio, amplified sound, television, etc., live theater and opera provided one of the few ways of imaginative transport for the general public. A playwright or composer who could command the approbation of large urban audiences with live performances probably craved this kind of confirmation far above a silent reading public. In the 20th Century, Hollywood lured many writers, in the same way, with its easy money and veneer of glamor and celebrity milieu. It seems odd, thinking about the twists and turns of art and commerce, that a serious French opera composer of the late 19th Century would write the kind of music which would one day be used to animate movies, another popular art medium.

Chabrier was admired by many Modernist composers, whose work he influenced, including Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Falla, Granados, Prokofiev, Les Six (Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger, Auric etc.). His work is "picturesque" and highly melodic, energetic and declamatory. His collection of piano pieces--Piéces Pittoresques--particularly the sprightly Scherzo-Valtz, and the Idylle, are still regularly performed. I've always like the Danse Villageoise, and Mauresque, too, from this set.

Chabrier is not nearly enough appreciated these days, despite his varied catalogue of genres. Before the advent of atonalism, and the many rationalist/synthetic forms of composition which were explored in the 20th Century, music was composed primarily to appeal through its seductive emotional aspect, so that in our jaded eyes, "romantic" music sounds gratefully free of the angst and despair of much of Modernist and Post-Modernist composition, though it also suffers a consequent neglect for being thought simple-minded or naive. The notion that a serious piece of music might reflect a sense of "difficulty" in its apprehension, or that it should wear its confusion or alienation on its sleeve--are similarly very Modernist ideas indeed. "Challenging" audiences with musical repugnance would not have occurred to a composer like Chabrier, which may excuse to some degree the character of his work. We think of work like this as being "merely" decorative or entertaining, as if the condescension that verdict implies, made our age superior to his. But of course that only reveals our own prejudicial regard. We expect a powerful emotional range from the composers we consider great. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Puccini, Stravinsky. A figure such as Saint-Saens--another 19th Century French composer [1835-1921] certainly fills out the picture of a serious classicist, dedicated to the dominant European traditions of big works with big ideas. But his work looks to the past, while the work of Chabrier, Debussy and Stravinsky is about the future.

Pissaro

This progressive view of the history of the development of artistic form(s) ignores works which don't fit into a proper historical order. I've observed that the work of the contemporary American poet Anthony Hecht [1923-2004], particularly his later rhymed works, probably belong more to the 18th Century than to the later 20th. If this constitutes some sort of dismissive indictment, then so be it. We're free to appreciate nearly any kind of art or entertainment we like (at least in the West), without having to invest in its political or aesthetic entitlement; and the reasons for our liking it are nobody's business. Chabrier was also associated with some of the leading writers and painters of his time, such as Monet, and Manet; and he collected Impressionist canvases before this became fashionable.

Other works of charm and effusive spirit are his Habanera, Bourrée Fantastique, Feuillet d'album, and the Fete polonaise and Nocturne (from Act II, and Act III, respectively, of his opera Le Roi malgré lui [The King in Spite of Himself]). As I've mentioned before, I'm not much of a pianist, but I loved once to play the Piéces Pittoreques. They're challenging even for the best of players, but they're so much fun you can't ignore them. It's hard to imagine anyone wanting to suffer through a piano work by Anton Webern, but cheerful compositions naturally draw you in.

Cezanne

Poetry - The Solitary Art

In previous times, Ron Silliman and I have had a debate about the "public character" of poetry, about its "communal" values. Ron believes in a poetry that reflects the predominant political and social realities and issues of its time, a poetry that "engages" and reflects the struggles of disparate communities and partisanships. It is true that poetry has always been a mirror to the times in which it was written. Despite themselves, poets will inevitably express problems and interests common to their societies, and the cultural presumptions which guide the spirit of their age.

There is doubtless much truth in this notion about the germination and significance of artistic enterprise, but it's not one that's ever appealed to my imagination. The writing of poetry, or music, is mostly a private process, one in which the solitary writer or composer creates a sequence of words or notes (or brush strokes, as with painting, etc.) which reflects his/er engagement with form, the world, and meaning. But this process is not a social phenomenon. It is not conducted in public. It is not a "shared" experience or melding of more than a single mind. (It's true that jazz performance often facilitates the extemporaneous invention and inspiration through interaction and exchange, but that also may have an ephemeral existence, unless there are sufficient recording devices to "save" the result. But this is the only meaningful exception to the solitary profile of the artist engaged in the production of an artistic product. There are some who might claim that literary "collaboration" is possible, and again, there are exceptions such as poems written by two authors, or fictions which are the collaboration of two people. Ellery Queen. Auden & Isherwood. But usually in these instances, there is a division of labor which enables each party to write separate portions of a work, pieced together out of separate creations.)

One major problem I see in the expansion of media over the last 100 years, is the confusion between performance and composition. We have had [public] theater for thousands of years (since ancient Greece), and no one disputes the power and value of performance of the spoken word, and of music. Opera blends the two streams into one medium. Before the last third of the 20th Century, poetry (as we think of it, as a rhythmic construction organized around a sensibility of keen feeling and tuned thought) was rarely read in public, though much dramatic poesy is in fact poetry simple, albeit appropriated towards a specific dramatic purpose.

Dramatic writing is intended to animate human characters through an action in real time and space (performance). Fiction and narrative poetry may be read publicly, but this was not regarded as an effective manner of presentation until, as I note, the latter part of the last century. We have precious little report of poets or playwrights "reading their work" in public in previous centuries. In religious service, much of what passed for sacred service was a kind of poetry reading, but the idea of reading poetry in profane or secular circumstances is quite uncommon. It wasn't until the rapid growth of media--radio, television, movies, internet, with their attendant promotional and celebrity spheres--that the idea of writers--both prose and poetry--reading to their respective "publics" developed. There are obvious reasons for this development: Publishers' desire to advertise authors as marketable commodities; the appearance and growth of writing workshops and programs throughout the institutions of higher learning; the movement to marshall public sentiment through political rallies and gatherings underwriting partisan readings; and, recently, the encouragement of extemporaneous spoken word expression (as "rap" or "hip-hop" rapid-fire jive talk and crude rhymed lyrics).

Poetry has traditionally been thought of also as a "sullen art." The romantic picture of the "tortured" writer, locked in his garret, in torment over the dramatic effort to produce a masterpiece, is familiar to all readers of poetry. In the Modernist and Post-Modernist era, this fantasy has been augmented, even rejected, by artists and writers who openly and solemnly spit upon the muse, claiming that "serious art" is a myth and an illusion, and that humor and chance and burlesque are the best means by which to get at the underlying meaning of modern life. There are still some, of course, who demand a poetry or a music of solemnity and commitment, for whom the devotion to an art of high purpose and moment requires a seriousness and even a gravity of approach.

The figure of Dylan Thomas [1914-1953] provides a perfect example of the writer for whom the official, romantic concept of the tortured poet, driven by a powerful inspiration, and an excessive lust for living, destroys his own talent in a death dive of self-destructive indulgence, even while he is slaying audiences with the eloquence and fatal charm of his daemon. In Thomas, the fatalistic doomed artist-type, the lionized celebrity, and the literary front-man are all conjoined, making the myth of the lyrical persona acting out the role of possessed hero for swooning fans.

The modern media hero--musician, actor, director, comedian, entertainer, sports hero, sex symbol, poet/writer, with all the familiar cross-fertilizations--is a phenomenon almost unknown before, but it is a tradition that already seems deeply entrenched. Contemporary fame (or notoriety) may be fleeting, but the machines which create it and foster its continued development seem capable of consuming a steady stream of short-lived stand-ins.

The transformation of the Modernist media (radio, TV, print media, public events), by the internet (or World Wide Web) and hand-held communication devices, means that a new paradigm of awareness is appearing, one built out of immediacy and the real-time exchange of information. The blurring of edges between public and private, relevant and trivial, data cooked and data raw, suggests that the organization of cultural categories is shifting.

Theories about the relationship between society--the political and social institutions and arrangements--and art in the latter half of the 19th Century and the earlier part of the 20th, held that art (especially the written and spoken and performed word) occupied a crucial place in the development of historical alternatives through time. Art reflected politics, and vice versa. Shaw is a social reformer, while O'Neill is a poet. Odets is a propagandist, while Wilder is a Classicist. And so on.

Poetry, of course, cannot be conjured--or conducted--in public. And yet one senses that a poetry contemplated as a private compulsion, and appreciated as a private pleasure, seems under direct assault in our culture. Novelists, or short story writers, or poets, or music "rappers" who do not "perform" in public, risk being thought irrelevant, or selfish, or obscure (as if obscurity could be cultivated only in private), or pathetic. It seems unlikely that Edgar Allan Poe ever read his poetry in public. or that Keats did, or that Samuel Johnson did (except the brief illustrative couplet to close a point), or that Milton did. Shakespeare undoubtedly had some experience as an actor, and probably did read his own "poetry" to theater audiences, but that was clearly a theatrical expression, not the broadcast of a single voice alone.

The ability to make poetry or prose "come alive" as spoken or sung speech is a special talent, which may be native, or acquired through training. The quality of voice is largely a given inheritance. The uniting of poet and public speaker may on occasion suggest--as with Dylan Thomas's example--that an ultimate perfection of intention and fulfillment is possible in a single figure. It is an ennobling instance when it happens, which we should feel gratitude for.

But too often, we tend to think that the desire to project the role of inspired poet can be manufactured out of will power. Too often, it seems a kind of self-delusion among writers, that the power of the spoken word can simply be assumed, like putting on a special jacket. Or, following along the lines of the social reformers of the 1930's, that the necessity or calling of history demands performance, indeed that inspired performance will naturally follow from correct political sentiment(s).

I see dramatic reading, and the ability to write effective prose or poetry, as flowing from different places in the mind, and I tend to regard great aptitude for public speaking as either a gift, or a skill one learns through training. Great dramatic performances in the theater, or great readings of texts as such, can be impressive. But literature has never been about the ability to make a good speech, though poets occasionally may be convincing speakers, and even readers of their own work. It seems a kind of an aesthetic choice which flows from opportunity (talent) or professional experience. Dylan Thomas had the rare ability to make his own writing compelling and powerfully lyrical in effect.

But most poets don't possess this ability. It can certainly be learned, through training and practice. But is such performance a proof of the validity or value of what one has written? In our hyped-up media culture, the visual and aural validation of personality seems just another shorthand for the counterfeit of cheap notoriety which the media feeds off of, and consumes, even on the vastly reduced scale associated with literary audiences in our time.

Thomas's poem "In My Craft or Sullen Art" is a famous example of the expression of what I am addressing here. Its modesty, even its sullenness, seems an ultimate apology for the vanity of wishing to usurp love in the place of young hearts, acknowledging in the end that this labor is practiced in vain.

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

Few people alive today, can have heard Thomas reading in person, so all that we have are the electronic recordings of his voice, made in studios or with the crude technics of the time. After Thomas was safe in his grave, the phenomenon which was his presence quickly faded from memory, and as attention focused on his writings, it was seen that they were not as substantial as his renditions of them had convinced people at that time that they were. Was Thomas as good as Shakespeare? There were some who thought at the time that he was. Who are the good readers of our time? Are they as good writers as they are public speakers? Do we care? Will posterity?

Coolidge's Quartz Hearts

Clark Coolidge [1939- ] has maintained a position just outside the mainstream American avant garde literary scene for 50 years. He was "associated" with the Second Generation New York School during the 1960's, but by the mid-70's he'd moved on (or beyond them) and had had three books published on the West Coast--The Maintains [this press, 1974], Polaroid [Adventures in Poetry/Big Sky, 1975], and Quartz Hearts [this press, 1978]. The Maintains and Polaroid are close enough in sequence and style to be considered almost as twin poles of a single work. Barrett Watten (the editor of this) was I believe the typesetter for all three books. As is clear from the brief "Notes" Coolidge appends to it he saw QH as a crucial, key work in his development as a poet/writer. (And, of course, he moved on soon after this, leaving behind all other expedient associations along the way.)*

Quartz Hearts is a poem of 51 pages, written in short sections. The lineation is ambiguous, in that some of the sections "seem" like prose with "arbitrary" line breaks, while others clearly "use" the line break functionally, the way Spicer often appears to be doing (as if prose were being worked vertically instead of on a timed line). (This lineation question arises in connection with Berrigan's Sonnets, too; and even in Berryman's Dream Songs.) Note: the whole poem may be read in its entirety on the Eclipse website here.

Coolidge had begun his career as one of the first to break language up into non-syntactic units and clusters, treating words outside of their given signifiers, and ordering senses of language creatively (much as Ashbery had done in Tennis Court Oath). But Coolidge's methodology was much more "methodical" and deliberate (even dogged) than Ashbery's had been. (In Ashbery, for instance, surreal matter is frequently treated as camp, or self-conciously as assemblage or étants donnés, whereas in Coolidge, all language essentially exists as apprehensible matter, without the affected quality implied by any necessary aesthetic permission.) There is a continuity about Coolidge's work, which makes the process of his composition more consistent than that of almost any other Modernist or Post-Modernist writer, with the possible exception of Gertrude Stein, the only figure whose progression of abstract works, beginning with Tender Buttons [1914], and continuing steadily through to A Novel of Thank You [posth., 1958] appears to have as orderly, and uniform a devotion to an eccentric, yet fixed, formality.* There is even in both a recognizable "style" in the traditional sense, as familiar and confirming as it is unique and seemingly inexhaustible. Indeed, the consistency and stepped advance of Coolidge's publication history over the last four decades makes this point almost too obvious.

This orderly, incremental development of an individual style isn't a flat line, but a lively graph of logarithmic variations, with high and medium points of measure and intensity over time. The two meta-language epics mentioned above, and Quartz Hearts, may well be, in retrospect, within the context of Coolidge's career, his major works (at least to date). Not because of their length, or their stylistic difference from his other many works, but because they represent a clearly defined approach, confident and fully controlled, to a vision of literary form, and even statement, which established a benchmark in time. In addition, Quartz Hearts displays an intensity, a purity of synthesis, which has analogies to some of the best works in the history of art, as the concluding "Note" to the text makes clear. In framing the work, it's useful to quote the entire text of the "Note" since its catalogue-like rendition, and key references contextualize the work better than I could by describing it:

Notes

The writing of Quartz Hearts overlaps work on both the last section of Polaroid (completed August 1973) and the beginning of my long (as yet untitled) "prosoid" work (first section completed November 1973). It is in every sense a hinge work, reflecting a fresh interest in sentence structure as axial armature, the final movement of Polaroid had pushed me toward, the "prosoid"'s lengths would explore in full.

In a notebook (entry dated November 1972--a month before starting the work) I find: "Quartz Hearts (a long grouping of aggregate works?)", and on the page following the last words of Quartz Hearts (December 1973) this entry: "Quartz Hearts: meditations on the state(s) of things in other words words...".

A journal of this work's procession would note the following order of regions:

Franz Kafka's Stories, Diaries, Notebooks and Loose Pages; my daughter Celia (then four

years old) telling me to write down such sayings as "a hat and a flower/walk into your

clothes/and get a drink of water"; the continuing metamorphoses of Philip Guston's

pictures (the sections "Before the wall the war stands up." and "The belongs to a pinch."

written in his studio); Roberto Longhi's Piero della Francesca; Gertrude Stein's Every-

body's Autobiography and Stanzas in Meditation; Bring Back The Prehistoric Animals by

Amanda Trees; (in California, April 1973) Melville's Sphynx, Picasso Dead; (on the road

back east, May 1973) Lehman Caves, Arches Utah, Black Canyon of the Gunnison,

Onondaga Cave, Mammoth Cave, Grapevine Cave, Luray Caverns; Hawthorne's

American Notebooks; Gerry Mulligan's earliest-Fifties Quartets rediscovered; Kerouac's

Desolation Angles; Watergate TV; John Ford's The Searchers; Peter Farmer's Sonata

for Five Brass Instruments (Tanglewood); Luella Agnes Owen's Cave Regions of the

Ozarks and Black Hills (1898); Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable; Texts For Nothing and

Watt; John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy; Jacques Tati's Traffic; Thelonious

Monk's (solo) I Should Care (columbia 9149); and Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 131

Quartet in C-Sharp Minor performed by The Julliard String Quartet (RCA 2626).

Beethoven had written on the manuscript title page of the Opus 131: "Zusammengestohlen von verschiedenen Diesem und Jenem" (Stolen together from various theses and thoses). His publishers, B. Schott, then wrote back in alarm asking whether this was not in fact an original work. Beethoven replied that is was "funkelnagelneu" (brand new) (nailheads shining).

Such a detailed and exhaustive recitation of the sources and influences upon a work as short as this one is, would suggest a range of concern and a level of concentration that is unusual, to say the least--that the Author would specify a set of discrete works and events as a sublimation or intersection of intentions, all focused, as through a lens, upon single work. (The obvious analogy being, of course, Eliot's Notes to his The Waste Land.) The reference to Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14, an overpoweringly serious, even absolute synoptic rendition of "the meaning of life" as Beethoven felt it, suggests something of the importance Coolidge felt in connection with the poem.

The first "paragraph" (or stanza) of the poem sets a scene suggestive of a back yard, with mud, board, white sheets on a line, a window, a cat, lots, a view, rail yards in the distance, home, blocks.... The poem begins in domestic tranquility: "Quartz axis on a baseless ground." (2nd line, third section, first page). The progress of the sections--their length, their separate cohesiveness and "finished" quality also suggest another--slightly earlier, Coolidge work, from about this general period, Tiny Messages (1970, 13VI-25VII) [L Magazine, Vol 2 No 1-2, 1974, Ed. Curtis Faville], which defined Coolidge's minimalist take, in 131 parts--a parallel structure, almost a warm-up (2-3 years before) for the more ambitious Quartz Hearts.

Quartz Hearts "uses" the "prosoid" methodology to specify proto-factual ("original") equations. The nominative joy in doing so is repeated over and over again:

His shoe was the same color as the step.

Pliers/in a room beneath a wind across a valley.

There was a block on the door.

The handle turned out to be square.

An opening gradually/presents itself and arrives.

All margins come to resemble

this pie section which I hold.

The air is nearly all used up.

The placements and relationships of things are stated as self-evident phenomena within the context of a universe of possibilities that seems endless, but is repeatedly familiar. Things vibrate or echo with shades of connotation, sharing the blurred edges of adjacent zones of consciousness. Coolidge's sense shared with mine, or yours, or anyone's. This ambiguity is tuned by a declarative conviction which this work claims as definitive:

The correct length/of wood for a small table is thought of.

A house closed to the ground opens onto a

square the length of a street to the

next town.

Whereas in Space [Harper & Row, 1970] (a summary of work from the preceding 5-7 years?) Coolidge had demonstrated a joy in splitting the atomist's order of syntactical and definitive referents of language, in Quartz Hearts he would return to language the joy of making sentences (and "paragraphs")--as "axial armatures" of statement. Having previously deconstructed "meaning" and "sentence structure" (the diagrammatic connectivity of words) he would now re-construct them to suit an expanding tolerance of method through subtly altered familiars.

The time is/later one inch away.

Three litmus leaves fell.

A typewriter across town.

The museum/on fire, just a frame house.

The absolutely flat things that I saw

near the corner.

Something cleaved right down the middle.

Indeed, these otherwise straightforward American statements all have in common their rail-splitting vernacular, indigenous as twang. The pleasure taken in their direct proposal of an alternatively quaint private mythical jest sings tersely among the topiary mazes. Otherwise blank statements acquire weirdness through their juxtaposition to jokers. No kidding aside. My quotations ripped out of sequence come up dripping in corrosive acid but seemingly unharmed.

I stood up the/stretcher and backed away.

See the book as an edge.

The car is a wall. What the meaning is what's

this.

Before the wall the war stands up. ["this one written in Guston's studio"]

Time standing/as an eye.

Sizes/down the fold.

Wherever it let's can one.

A radio axle/and opens the door over.

What these constructs do is set outer parameters for the apprehension of object-senses beyond our realm of accepted meanings. Things get lost, or mutate into hybrids. This is the implication of play in a vacant lot beyond the closed neighborhood, signs as divisions.

As could what of that even means. A pine

could but of what a late does. Pen out

the salad. Mates. This and that and

of a number separates.

Back on lime kiln avenue a stopped lattice/truck.

These things can happen on Lime Kiln Avenue which is in fact in Las Vegas. Also in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which goes to show.

I linked the fence to.

This in place of is in use.

What I point to is not it. Much as it

seems so.

Take down that puzzle and put up a window.

I'm making my own version of the edifice in plaster. Old world gilt flakes off antique capitals. Sworn on a bit of brush-off. Now I'm infected, we can share the lake.

So I see, a cold lick rose to geo heaven.

That's beer, its syntax a shale spiral.

Propped boxward Namath affects dense

vims. Take a tea metal inflexion of

isostasy. Quartz verbs and opens

water books. Plants north of audience.

Grass spin verb stains halted topaz.

Bedrock calms bask taut morning chalk

sounds. Feldspar cubes tunes chip moth

itself. Stress chill lights vibes of wood.

Van Allen scales time white wrinkles

literally.

The arc of reference flips over here into realms of alternate dimension. The density--packed in and crunched together--doesn't possess the kind of confirmation of sense which Beethoven's four strings accomplishes, because Coolidge's universe isn't the human historic dilemmas which channel meanings down the sluice of history's warhorses. This isn't Keats, after all. It slides off of or merges with what confronts it, incorporating the DNA of each encounter.

It's a syntax/that stains sounds.

The/various cloths there are in a closet where/this all gets vertical and stops.

I would like for writing to do what it only could.

I would like my mind to be there.

. . . let's let it occur. What it is?

Idling by/the marina one day the kites were up.

If we could see events in the world the way we might have felt them when we were as new as our bodies once were, we might have the quality of refreshment which proves our own innocence. Just supposing.

A definition is as the end of its string.

These are the same strings that hold the kites in a blowing wind on the Marina Green. If we were all tone deaf could we distinguish the harmony of separate notes on a field of shapes? Beethoven was deaf when he composed the "last quartets" so his recreation of the music had to have taken place first inside his head. Can you imagine how that could be?

The red wheelbarrow is no lighter

than a rock could be more

so it turns.

. . .

To and for it as considered

the red and the wheel invisible

in state caught.

Vista cardboard.

Dogs should have license plates.

I could use the map book that pages fall out.

Pacific sun paper.

Getting the slant on/mid America.

The butterfly I saved/dried out and disappeared.

Since I was ahead I opened the door.

It like comes and goes. Some. There was

a large iron ring tacked to the news.

Think of the journey through a sequence of this as a cross country road trip punctuated with national monuments to the history of ice. Jack-hammers open the morning with bent plates and twisted rubber joints. It's all a noise I could like, if my shoes were on straight. I'm dogged if I do.

Particles on the/freeway, sagebrush in colors.

Huge white boxes, with dials, driven like trucks.

The/language inside is going to make forms/harder?

Let the words tell you what it means. I'm standing here as your barker handing out bills like litter under the streetlamp: A million staples is what it looks like. Rounded and seamed with fibers. Confounded. In Stein, subject-matter coheres into nodes of soft ganglia which throb with reassuring frequency. But in Coolidge, the real talks back in errant tongues, disturbing the surface of humming healthful mien with resistant apperception(s). Consternation varies according to the case.

Copper rings of steel wire/in a red cylinder.

A more than sent loop back it's name it's

then gone. A part. For a make it's gone

beyond its name of it.

. . . Garbanzo

with orange. Paper soap of the lit duck.

. . .The wood wicker

of a library. The librarian's coat.

The splices are precise and uncompromising. Total attention riveted at all points. No narrative plucked from the mass of swirling experience, suggested images and events and places yoked into complacent proximity, aimless as a map to a non-existent territory. "I made this."

Match wrappers/with you.

Clue. The all the time the curves the

stamps. The.

A water is all gone/to the bottomless.

. . . Silo's ahead.

Lift the sign to fade out. A stem off much knee.

Cut. A cut of wing buttes in the slant air,

wrist edges missing. Gun in lodestone, the

preserved farm dawdling. Mix ton. Eyeglass

pinched. Getting down from a middle distance

gone away.

. . . Slab mass shifts an inch. Each way, grounded.

Fissured stone pinching out an eye.

This is like an aesthete's de rerum natura, inventory of things in their special hermetic system of fixities, walking naked in Olmstead Park.

My lab, it's me.

Thumb back to noun wall.

It defeats the simplest linkages in favor of slits, impacts, gaps, flirtatious gestures, "false" echoes, adamant mute--these are nothing but what they are, unique samples in a box of same, level eye on flat edge, a private lingo we go into as under the damp accordion of mysterious panels.

You walk into a hole in the rock, the hillside

ledge and the man wonders.

How could that be, how could that stop.

The vents that form cones in a back crevice ceiling.

This all saturate level drained ago.

Pick up your steps retracing to a former light.

It could be that a constellation of phrases, in a certain order (such as this) is an exact replica of the synapses in the brain from which it originated. Swirling four dimensional vortices attracting bits of strata from the layered animate consciousness. Passing through a slinky in a dream.

Houses that look like cubes. Houses that

look like tubes. Nothing looks like

anything. Nothing looks like homes.

Returning to nothing as an about-face to memory. Walk in the door, threshold a force-field of forbidden presumption.

Is a house side sent from here. A glance

of the eye is not there.

I walked on the street and closed

the door. I passed trees (my height

and other). I passed another. Thinking

on changing one's mind. The glass of a

store side comes up. A fish on wooden board.

I don't go in the door's shut. Small rings

and catches are they brass. The grey feeling,

the air glasses, the walking down. I

don't sense I state.

A pebble next to a pencil.

Wholestone. Supposed to be emboldened. The metamorphosis proposed in the concluding "Note" is the transition, between the discrete implementation of the early period, up through The Maintains and Polaroid--and the expansive, "walking music" of the middle and later period works--occurs in Quartz Hearts. Stolen together from various theses and thoses. Coolidge's Quartz Hearts is a masterwork, whose earliest germinating seeds originate as far back as the early 1960's, reaches a crescendo, in this poem meditation, and then expands outward to encompass the full breadth of experience and the tapestry of elaborated representations. All the later extended pieces grow out of this form, and rehearse its formula of method. The Crystal Text, The Book of During, the ROVA Improvisations, The Act of Providence, etc. The template of the creation of an analogue for the transposition of "reality" superimposed upon the inert matter of disintegrating surfaces. Nothing stops.

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*In one respect, it's always seemed ironic to me that the canonical works of the so-called Language School of Poetry & Poetics, though including Coolidge's and Michael Palmer's writings (for instance) among its specimen works, don't include the Authors themselves among their number. This might be an instance of the social and aesthetic streams diverging, or perhaps a failed act of appropriation? Coolidge and Palmer are just a bit older than their younger contemporaries in the Language School, though their earliest works clearly belong to the same preoccupations and interests as those of the school itself. Recent attempts (such as the Grand Piano project) to consolidate their legacy aside, I suspect that posterity will see the whole scene differently, and assign meanings and connections in ways that don't respect the social fabric, or the communal tendencies evidenced in the critical and theoretical writings of the group.

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Addendum: Reading day before yesterday an interview with George (Dadie) Rylands, who was for many years a well-known Shakespeare scholar and theater director at King's College, Cambridge, I was interested to learn that he had organized a reading of Eliot's Four Quartets, I think during or just after the War, in which the program was divided into reading and musical performance, with one segment given over to a Beethoven quartet. I don't know the citation, but someone once referred to poetry which "aspires to the condition of music." It would seem a very short jump indeed to think of Coolidge's Quartz Hearts as a kind of serious chamber music. I can imagine it performed in conjunction with a concert, say, of Stravinsky's Octet, or Carter's Piano Sonata [1945-46], or even Miles Davis's Kind of Blue. There is no such thing as "pure sound" in poetry, though there is certainly non-sense sound; but the human mind is incapable of hearing syllabic variation without detecting accents and echoes of actual words, though organizing such fragments into anything like a meaningful whole, or sequence, might be simple fantasy. But Coolidge's constructions are anything but nonsense. The body of meaning, to which his word sequences refer, however, is not describable by reference to "actual" things or situations. To what, then? An analogous area of thought or structure which bears some resemblance to precincts of mental space. Perhaps one reference might be to "pure music"--by which we mean it has no specific reference to any programmatic agenda, but simply sets up its own abstract theses and then manipulates them according to expedient techniques. That may seem a very abstract way to describe what Coolidge is doing, but Quartz Hearts is a very abstract work. So then is Beethoven's Opus 131 Quartet. Both engage the reader/listener in a sequence of statements or assertions which carry emotional and intellectual weights and elaborations, towards an end which seems to be used up in the process of its duration.

[3/8/11]

The Dancing Ladies Cocktail

Arthur Mathews [1860-1945] was an important figure in the Northern California Arts & Crafts movement. The kind of California world he and his contemporaries envisioned had a sweet innocence about it, which appears to our jaded eyes as a kind of inspired folly. Did they imagine that the population would stabilize, industry meld into a placid landscape of genteel sensibility, while ethnic distinctions, greed, exploitation and environmental degradation would simply wither away? They were wrong, of course. The California we know today is nothing like they imagined it should have turned out, or at least as they seem to have imagined it in their art and philosophical statements.

But the vision they did create in their paintings, sculptures, architecture, literature and music still impresses with its charm and elegant play, its satisfying idealized landscape of pleasure and inspired activity. They were terribly serious about it all, and seem to have thought their visions would materialize in due course. Mathews's most famous painting is the one above, of a group of young ladies dancing outdoors. Their attire, their attitudes, their spirit, all bespeak an innocent, indulgent pleasure, uninhibited, and yet mannered. It was a world based on privilege, of course, but the Arts & Crafts advocates didn't think of it that way. Life was going to be better for everyone, and the cream would rise to the top. The cream, of course, would be the artists and social reformers. Politicians, bankers, salesmen, and that sort would be tolerated, but within limits.

If you like this kind of art, you're probably the outdoors type, but not necessarily. It smells of the boudoir and the salon. It's warm and brown and elastic-seeming. It's sensual, and earthy, but not too earthy. It evokes a style of life that probably never existed, but which might have been possible, if you had money, and good taste, between about 1890 and 1915, that twilight era when impressionism and fin-de-siécle were going strong. If all this seems a bit effete to us now, it's still nice to daydream about an afternoon picnic with a bevy of ingenues, all dressed in fetching white togas, their hair pulled back, dancing like Greek goddesses under the spreading oaks along the coastal foothills near Monterey or Santa Cruz.

In honor of which, this latest concoction from the pewter counter of yours truly. The Dancing Ladies Cocktail, in honor of Arthur Mathews, and his lovely palette of a California summer, so many summers ago.

The Dancing Lady

Recipe, by proportion:

1 part sweet vermouth

1 part dry vermouth

1 part Compari

1 part limoncello

juice of one half lemon

Shaken lightly, or stirred with ice, and served up.

Aurelia and Honoré and Rowena like it very much.

Middle East Protests - Are Things Really Changing?

Protests around the Near and Middle East over the last three months have surprised many in the West, who may have thought that the sleeping giant of the region--its growing population and consciousness of conditions elsewhere in the world--would never express itself publicly. Apparently, the penetration of media--television, movies (video), cell phones, internet and texting, etc.--into previously "dark" parts of the globe has been having an effect. It has been thought that this phenomenon will eventually "open up" China to Western influences, much as Japan was "opened up" in the late 19th Century.

This concept of prying open previously "closed" societies, or those which had developed a sort of insular character, was an aspect of colonialism, chiefly the notion that Western powers could exploit Third World nations, with the excuse (pretext) that they were "civilizing them." But the domination of "primitive" or "backward" or weak societies by technologically superior Western powers was not an honorable duty. Britain's influence upon India, for instance, or South Africa, was undoubtedly a mixed blessing; much of Great Britain's vaunted technological and cultural "order" was simply imperialism in its purest form.

Most of the African, Asian and Middle Eastern regions today bear the vestiges of Western domination and meddling. Borders, relationships, class distinctions are hybrid adaptations of Western cultural organization and structure. Which is to say that they still look a good deal more like how we imagined they should look, than they would have, had there never been the colonial expansionism of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries. We can't undo history and turn back the clock. The march of industrialism, capitalist development and exploitation, and intellectual enlightenment which has occurred over the last four centuries has an irrevocability about it which appears unstoppable. In a sense, the rise of China and India, Indonesia and the other Tigers fulfills a promise made at least two centuries ago, when the organization of society turned away from agrarian concentration of land, and mass production began to take hold. China and India are simply late-comers to the party. In the West, we're still surprised when the paradigm shift, foretold so long ago, has finally come to pass.

The Middle East is, in this respect, quite like Asia. Europe's "disintegration," as symbolized by the First World War, was an expression of the "delay" of Germany, Italy and Central Europe to achieve a widened enfranchisement of political power; they were latecomers too, and the dictatorships represented a transition between the old hereditary figure-heads of the Middle Ages, and the Parliamentary forms of Western Europe and America. The rise of China and India represents the same kind of transitional birthing pains. Mao ruled China with an iron fist, just as Britain dominated India. It may only be a matter of time before the real power centers of China--the present-day capitalists building great fortunes and influence on a global scale--sweep the old Communist hierarchy aside for more practical instrumentalities.

Are the rising societies of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere in the Near East, the harbinger of a real transition to a democratic-styled institutional framework? Or will these surging mass protest movements be hijacked by the old religious institutions which still guide much of the thinking and opinion in these societies? My guess is that it's still too early in the game, for us to expect parliamentary structures to be established. The tradition of dictatorial power is still stronger than any notion of Western style enfranchisement. That's true in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lybia, Jordan, Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen. It would be unreasonably optimistic to expect anything better than theocratic oligarchies in any of these states, for at least another quarter century. Wishing won't make it otherwise.