O'Hara's “For Grace, After a Party”

Ted Berrigan once said that this was one of his favorite O'Hara poems. Berrigan, who could sound insincere when making pronouncements, had a very sentimental side to his nature, which seemed at odds with the ruthless rationality--or deeply cutting humor--with which he gauged reality. The Sonnets is both things, really, a deeply emotional and committed record of daily life, filled with affection and delight, but also an intellectual exercise in the formal manipulation of segments of language. Berrigan admired O'Hara's ability to write a seemingly casual and relaxed poem, whose formal technique was concealed beneath an apparently guileless surface of conversational statement(s). He probably would have said that there was no separation, that O'Hara's poem was simply a straightforward series of statements, and that there was no artificiality in its setting or "strategic" moves. But he would also, I'm sure, have acknowledged that everyone maneuvers, on an interpersonal level, and preconceives the effect that their words will have on a (the) listener.

For Grace, After a Party

There's usually a very nice, clear "high & low" tension in an O'Hara poem, between the high calling of the occasion of a poetic utterance, and the low(er) circumstance of the subject matter he chose. Sometimes it's funny, maybe even a little bit embarrassing--especially in light company--but other times it lifts the ordinary into warm illumination, becoming memorable. The tension in this poem, too, is between the speaker's exalted, and slightly exaggerated romantic emotional earnestness ("my most tender feelings/writhe"), and the quotidian facts of an implied "morning after" of waking up in bed with someone--perhaps a lover, or maybe just a close friend. The poem begins in a sort of petulant, passive-aggressive mood ("You do not always know what I am feeling") but also sets a mood of casual seriousness that sets the stage for deeper disclosures, a more personal revelation. It's a love poem, but a disarmingly down-to-earth one. And it's that familiarity--smoking in bed, someone making scrambled eggs in the same old way, the arrival of warm spring days--which allows the poet the permission to address the intensity ("the fruit of screaming") of his feelings--he's earned that with the unassuming way in which he broaches the topic. Those feelings--as often in O'Hara's work--may seem a little over the top, but there's almost always enough routine detail to balance the emotional thrall with the nagging distraction of physical realities. The ashtray and the eggs and the warm morning air anchor the poem's urgent outcry of affection, and allow us to share it, without having to put on a full suit of armor (or a wig) to appreciate it.

That "personal" quality in most of O'Hara's poems--he called it Personism--was a way of removing the traditional artistic barriers between author and reader (person to person), of suppressing the apparent tension of elevated purpose which all art implies, in order to engage in a democratic intercourse.

Like much great art, too, this poem feels "easy." And, like all things that are effecting, and seem easy, it isn't (or wasn't) an easy feat to bring off. I say the "apparent" tension of elevated purpose in the above paragraph, but of course no really good poem is ever an accident. The ingenuity of "For Grace, After a Party," is partly the shrewd invention of circumstance, thinking to write a poem as a description of a conversation on the morning after. We know that will be fraught with some kind of emotional freight . . . it's a moment of confessions, of acknowledgments and declarations. How could it not be, even if the content were otherwise conventional? Sunday morning--oh god, do I have a hangover!--probably not a work day. But the poem, of course, is not addressed to the reader, it's aimed squarely at the person who's in the same room with the speaker. It's a little playlet in which the previous night's behavior is being reviewed and summarized, and the speaker wants this other person to know why he behaved as he did, going on and on, at the party the night before, a little out of control, about some intellectual point of an argument, but driven, inspired by the affection he is feeling in the flush of physical exuberance, the way we always feel when we're in the thick of a new relationship.

The brief erotic or love lyric has a long history. Dante and Shakespeare and Donne and Marvell and Browning and Poe and D.H. Lawrence. O'Hara's poem, published in the early 1960's, conceived of it informally. Every love poem isn't a marriage ceremony, in which the participants make public vows with pomp & circumstance. Each generation redefines and updates its version of the form. O'Hara sees it in the context of a privacy in which each party's vulnerability turns on uncertainty. Poetry is a way of exclaiming what, under ordinary circumstances, may sound corny, trite or pretentious. Poetry itself is a kind of pretense, that anyone should think to talk openly about a private passion, in a way that anyone could share or appreciate second-hand. A love lyric is a window on a very private affair, the gist of which is that the poet either cannot contain his affection, or his distress, or his impatience, and uses the poem as a vehicle to get that out, into the world. But that process may occur without in any way injuring the object of one's affection, or of embarrassing them.

Is love an embarrassment? In some ways it is. In other ways, it is certainly not. No one should be embarrassed to express love, but of course passion and affection are always first private things, before they're expressed. Love makes the world go around, but our emotions are rarely sensible, or convenient. Love unrequited. Love ventured or lost. Secret loves. The range of affection is as broad as the ways we may think to describe it. O'Hara's lyric is a classic of its kind.

The Boat

I had wanted to write a poem out of the barest essentials of "deep image" inspiration. Then--in the early 1970's--it was still very much a preoccupation among poets and critics. The deep image, duende (as some referred to it), had derived from hispanic sources. Lorca had spoken of it, as a kind of "dark sound" of authenticity and power--"that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." The duende may be a lyric, an image, or a design which stands for this feeling. In American poetry, Robert Bly had led a loosely defined group of poets for whom the deep image was an abiding element. Supposedly, South American and Spanish poets possessed the skill to evoke the duende, or to employ the duende. You could, accurately, say the duende was a sort of ghost or goblin, which hid in or haunted certain imaginative precincts, and that to capture this spirit in a work of art was to seize a little bit of magic in a jar. American deep image poems usually had generic settings, and the nominatives (nouns)--barns, wells, doors, clouds, echoes, etc.--usually were intended to have a resonance or evocative echo in the unconscious mind. Freud, Jung, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism--each played a part in feeding into the development of a deep image concept. Today, people don't remark the deep image movement much any more. Movements run their course, may be forgotten, or subsumed within the continuing evolution of artistic production. It was a style, perhaps, which ran its course.

The following poem was composed in the early 1970's, perhaps as early as 1973, or as late as 1976. I didn't intend it to be an imitation of any other writer's poems, but to try my hand at the genre (if one may call it that). I've come to think of it over the years as one of my more successful poems, though I feel a certain distance from it, since it's generic and hermetic (within its sphere of reference). I'm surprised now at how it functions as an exercise in linguistic metaphor--the act of naming, and what that process implies. Names may conceal at the same time they reveal. They may cover over reality with an apparent comforting surface, or divulge troublesome or frightening aspects. Names are ambiguous. I said once "naming is a sin" in connection with some of Gertrude Stein's works. She often seemed to want to disentangle names from things, to set words free from pure referentiality. In ordinary discourse, we don't want to do this, but in art, it's a way of releasing the power and suggestiveness of words. But in this poem, my use of words wasn't non-referential, it was primarily symbolic. My use of certain nouns--like the things in a house, or on a lake, or in a forest--were meant to invoke universals of things, rather than specific places, persons or objects. That universality seemed to me to be what the deep image poets did in their poems: A language of objects organized into a coherent whole, through the skein of words. A mobile of half-real, or imagined, relationships of objects which told some kind of story through them.

The Boat

1

Fists of water. You name each wedge of light,

let it wake you. The house splits

along the seams there, your body a boat

to it. There is dirt in the egg,

hard ground. The sheets ask for knives,

the door for a tooth. Names sink in the stream.

2

Boards cover a face. In the attic

are mountains. The boat begs to be let

in, wanting a name. Under the bed

a pile of dirt, water rising

in the other room. Near the well voices

saved and not saved. And not enough string.

3

The well rooted in darkness. You knew

skin of geese, knives found water

knotted. Fire shuns water (hissing), the word floated

on the surface, with the slime.

The soap blue-edged, morning halved.

4

The old houses bound in light.

Fathers prevent me on the stairway. The vulnerable

shark, I touch her panic, it is a lake.

Boards flying to windows, shore light.

Dawn aborted the boat.

Oars creak in the house.

5

Each road leads to a room. In the closet

water, the rudder. The loaf grows

patches of numbness, fingertips. The blankets (guests)

want names (rising), and the sleeves. In the

room, a forest, air. The fake rooms.

6

The boards want names. So a rope

holds a boat to shore. The lake is calm

tonight, she murmurs. He wants to know

where the road is buried, how

names bandage things with the invisible.

7

The door contracts. How light sheds dimension

on the house, breathing a little flame in.

How water rings the boat.

Being shy of wells, you climb dry rungs

to the boat, and rock. The house contracts

around you, for you have entered

it completely, though tethered to her.

--1973-76

Reading it again, it seems like the evocation of a haunted house, a house on a lake. Or of dreaming of being in a house on a lake, perhaps from one's past. Images of jeopardy, perhaps of conflict, foreboding.

Angry Babies

Can you recall what it felt like to burst into a crying fit, when you were very little, as young as 2 or 3 years old? Most people's memories don't endure from before about age 4; those recollections may still exist in deep memory, but they're hard to access. Perhaps this is nature's way of insulating ourselves against the stresses and traumas of infancy, when our emotional life was apt to consist of violent mood-swings, and intense physical pleasure or pain.

I do remember how it felt to be hurt, as in falling down or being struck hard. The reaction would begin as a sudden intake of breath, and an overwhelming wave of agony would explode out of my mouth, and blurry tears would gush out of my eyes. If I were separated from my parents, I would immediately turn to, or run towards them for safety and healing.

I wasn't an angry child, but I often felt threatened by circumstances or other playmates or adults. But the way I expressed this was usually by pouting, or avoidance. My brother seemed to have a similar nature to mine, when he was a baby boy--occasional crying, but usually not of long duration or intensity. We had the same parents growing up, so we had the same environment, for the most part, as children.

Over the last decade or so, I've increasingly noticed children screaming in public. Children between, say, the ages of 1 and 4--accompanied by a parent, or parents, sometimes with other siblings present. We're all familiar with crying babies, it's usually not a troublesome sound, though when you're raising a baby, it can get tiresome, especially if it's excessive. But what I've noticed, more and more these days, is kids screaming angrily, furiously, for prolonged periods, and even resuming with regained fury after being temporarily "comforted" by the parent. Almost anything may trigger this raging outburst--it hardly seems to matter what. The kid will start screaming at some provocation, demanding comforting, but even after this is provided, will continue to grind out wails like a banshee, red-faced, squirming (even hitting or flailing) with denial and frustration.

Reading a bit in the literature of infant rage psychology, I find that traditional diagnoses involve seeing such children as narcissists, displaying symptoms of megalomaniac impotence. All babies, apparently, initially feel omnipotent, unless this omnipotence is challenged. If a child is allowed to achieve results through threshold acting-out, s/he may come to believe it is successful behavior. Such children may fall into a chronic sense of isolation or neglect, as the frustrated parent(s) feel(s) less and less able to address repeated crises. This may be why they scream and act out tantrums, because they believe it is an expression of power (from need). Narcissistic rages may become habitual, and routine, extending into adulthood, where they're seen as abnormal aggression.

I used to think that people who were unbalanced in adulthood were expressing something that may have caused them some injury or embarrassment in childhood. But I'm beginning to think that some people are simply born with this kind of capacity for rage, which shows up early in their lives, and can never be really bred or trained out of them. Such people may have trouble with authority or relationships all their adult lives. A lot of traditional (and even "pop") psychology is built around understanding one's tendencies and behavioral traits, the better to manage them. But emotional explosiveness may simply be a part of one's mental genetic thumbprint. Some people may just be born angry, and are incapable of learning to be peaceful.

When I see these angry babies in public, it's embarrassing for innocent bystanders, whose activities are hugely distracted. But the parents hardly ever seem concerned. They seem to have become accustomed to the "anger" part of the routine, and it doesn't concern them a bit. They've learned they can't really do anything about it, and there's no point in going into a panic, or being excessively apologetic to others. In fact, they seem to ignore the tantrum. I used to think this was selfish, or indicative of neglect. But now I'm not so sure. Are these kids acting this way because their home life is all screwed up, or have they just inherited the "angry baby" gene?

Dry Ice - Sophisticated New Cocktail

Dry ice is interesting stuff, and it has practical uses of which I was unaware, until I seized on it as a name for this cocktail. About all I know about it is that when you put a "soft" object into it--like a rose, for instance--it turns it brittle as glass! The gassing off appears as a "smoky" or simmering cloud, as if it were hot. But it's very, very cold! At atmospheric pressures (on earth) it is -109.3 degrees Fahrenheit! That's cold. You have to handle it with care, since if it touches you it can cause "freeze burns" of frost-bite. That's what happens to people who climb mountains in the Himalayas! Ouch!

But more to the point, tropical drinks are designed to cool you down. It's true that alcohol actually has the opposite effect when ingested. But in the eye of the overheated customer, a cool drink with lime overtones has an irresistible attraction. Which is why so many citrus cocktail drinks are consumed during the hot summer months.

Crystal structure of dry ice

So here's my version of a rather dry, but seductive Summer lime flavored cocktail, measured out, as usual, by proportion, rather than as a total (don't want to encourage an unnecessary inebriation!).

4 parts white rum

1 part cachaca

1 part créme de bananae

1 part limoncello

juice of 1 1/2 whole fresh lime

--shaken vigorously and served up in a chilled cocktail glass.

I guarantee this will make you think of the Bahamas, or of Mazatlan, or of the Cook Islands. Or perhaps of British India during the height of the Raj. We all have our orient of the imagination.

Darling

Darling [Joseph Janni/Vic, UK, 1965] is a classic British New Wave movie which I saw when it was first released in the U.S. Directed by John Schlesinger [A Kind of Loving (1962), Billy Liar (1963), Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), Marathon Man (1976)], it's among a handful of gritty--some might even say grungy--post-War films which document, criticize and celebrate the breakdown of British class tradition, and bring a hard edge to the sentimentalized relationships which had dominated English films since the 1930's.

Looking at the film now, it seems as much about the suasions and trends of the 1960's, as it is a portrayal of the disintegrating social structures it addresses. Its spirit of negligent disrespect, its crassly cynical attitude towards the commerce of getting-on in the world, gives it a brittle shell of cocky disdain which is part of the reason it still resonates in our time, as, in the present-day, America settles uncomfortably into a parallel decadence and economic decline.

Darling, in my mind, is associated with a handful of other films of the same time--Losey's The Servant [1963], Clayton's Room at the Top [1959], Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner [1962], Schlesinger's own Billy Liar [1963] and A Kind of Loving [1962]--it's like all these other films in having been done in coal-and-chalk black and white, in showing the raw, verité surfaces of British urban life, and in the way it mocks and mourns the cravings and miseries of ordinary people trying to find salvation in prosperity, or an escape from the compromises and temptations of a hollow respectability--but it has its own kind of bizarre, far-out attractions, which anticipate the daring innovations of the 70's and beyond in both British, and American movie-making. It announces a new world of values which will become the commonplace of the boom years to come.

It features three English actors whose careers were still on the rise in those years: Julie Christie, the vivacious, sexy blonde sprite with the sensual lips and knock-out body;

the natty, debonair (and sardonic) Laurence Harvey; and the consummately charming and complex Dirk Bogarde. Christie [Diana Scott], an ignoble, aspiring minor model, actress and social climber, meets sophisticated public affairs television host Robert Gold. Beguiled by Scott's carnal sweetness and emotional craving, he and Scott begin an affair. Gold leaves his wife and children, as Scott divorces her young naive husband, and they take an apartment.

Scott pursues "culture" with Robert, but then jumps into a new relationship with Miles Brand, an advertising executive and a veritable reptile of a creature, who exploits and copulates with equal contempt, drawing Scott into an immoral world of philistine venality, and illicit play, effectively destroying her relationship with Gold (Bogarde).

Diana (Christie) and Miles (Harvey) in the overture to sex

Finally, during an escapist holiday in Italy with Gay fashion photographer Malcolm (brilliantly played by Roland Curram), on a location shoot for a candy commercial, Scott runs into none other than a genuine Italian prince, Prince Cesare della Romita,* who proceeds to propose to her almost immediately. Scott, dreaming of Roman Holiday and Grace Kelly (no doubt), imagines herself in paradise, but when she finally does hook up with him, he turns out to have been looking for a trophy wife, and spends his weekends in Rome with his mistress, leaving her to look over his passel of kids and an army of servants, lonely and bored. Old world charm looks suddenly empty and decayed, and she despairs once more. Hopping to London incognito (she's by now a celebrity principessa) for one last fling in the sack with Robert (Gold), we leave her finally returning to Italy, and the dreary existence fate has fashioned for her.

We feel a mixture of sympathy and contempt for almost everyone in the film, because none seems immune from the opportunistic impulsiveness which leads them astray. Only the Prince, perfectly at ease, appears to conduct the sort of life he prefers. Diana (Christie) is used by everyone, but she in turn uses them. There's more than enough betrayal to go around here, and as it begins to pile up, we get to be feeling there are no other choices in life for these people.

In one particularly weird sequence, Miles drags Diana off to a shag party in Paris, populated by seducers and transvestites, who engage in a sort of conga-line strip-tease game of truth or consequences--clearly one of the more demoralizing scenes in all of cinema. Frederic Raphael, who wrote the screenplay (as well as Far from the Madding Crowd [1967], and the mini-series The Glittering Prizes (based on his own novels)), injects about as much cynical carnality into the story as possible. Harvey, who had already established his aspic-cool persona of ruthless social climber in Room at the Top [1959], seemed inseparable from his character here. Bogarde had already worked in a host of British productions, achieving matinee status with several romantic parts, as well as a handful of skilled character roles. He won a BAFTA as Best British Actor for The Servant in 1964, so he seemed perfect for the slick, slightly arrogant but idealistic Robert Gold. Seeing him fall into love with Diana, we're conflicted about whether to admire him for his sexual good taste, or condemn him for infidelity. Diana is so transparently cheap and selfish, Gold (Bogarde) must deserve his distress at losing her. The mutual scorn with which all the characters eventually appear to regard each other is the very currency of exchange in a world scuttled by capital and ugly indulgence. Diana is indeed the Honeyglow Girl, a lower-class wench who waddles and skips into the the European jet-set and ends up the miserable kept wife of a slick womanizer who only values her for her trivial good looks. Some have seen Christie's role here as a reprise of Room at the Top (from the female point of view).

The film score, by John Dankworth, who did the music for the British TV series The Avengers, as well as for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Servant, is sheer genius. Dankworth's arch amalgam of bleached-out pop advertising jingles, breezy sleezy jazz riffs, and coy ironic segues, is the perfect undercurrent for the film's thematic tropes.

The film's frame--its conceptual technique--is the interview/biography, presented as the "princess" describing her ascent to royal entitlement. Incorporating a newsreel-like tone, Diana's self-aggrandizing, excuse-making manner, her unconscious humor are counterpart to the corrupting world she passes through. In the opening credits, her enormous image is projected onto a billboard as the "Ideal woman"--as the credits roll. This media-exposé metaphor is picked up later as Robert's BBC television man-on-the-street interviews and studio tapings, and then as paparrazzi pursue "princess" Diana through airports. Diana is undoubtedly a tart--a "little whore" as Robert calls her--but in some sense she's better than the vile Miles. In a famous bit of dialogue she has with Miles during the seduction scene in his empty boardroom with the long table, she offers--

Diana: "Suppose it took three . . . "

Miles: "What do you mean?"

Diana: "You know, to make a baby . . . "

Miles: "Charming!"

Raphael seems to be suggesting that none of these three people is a completely whole person, perhaps only a third or a half of one, and to complete themselves, to "make a whole" would necessitate pooling their combined DNA. One is conflicted to separate the chicanery and willingness-to-be-used on the part of these characters, from the perverse contexts within which they live. Their best moments come when they're attacking each other, exposing their ethical limits indirectly. Each lives out a fantasy arrangement as a kind of holiday from the drudgery of the everyday existence otherwise offered to them. You can hardly blame them for wanting more stimulating lives, but we all have boundaries to what we'll do to realize them.

Despite the hard, bitter surface--and the tendency to conceive of all the characters as stereotypes of delusion and decadence--we do feel disappointment and even pity for them in the end. Each in turn falls into traps through the seduction of temporary fulfillment. It's almost a morality play: Everyone gets his/her just desserts, and the pay-0ff is the dreary ending. These British New Wave dramas seem buried under the coal and mortar dust of post-War reconstruction. No one escapes the grinding drudgery and pathetic mediocrity of moderated expectations, of the consolation of banal dreams and third-rate respectability. Business, art, love, security, loyalty--nothing seems to suit.

What did the English expect after World War II? --that life would prosper, hope bloom, and the general welfare rise? Not bloody likely. Judging by the spirit these overcast, cloudy grey narratives showed, socialism and the Labor years were anything but bright.

_____________________

*Played by a real Spanish marquis, José Luis de Vilallonga (9th Marquis of Castellvell), who also acted in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Behold a Pale Horse, and Juliet of the Spirits, and many lesser films.

Minimalism XIII - Saroyan's Pastoral Suite - Sled Hill Voices [1965]

Pastoral has a long tradition in English verse, which derives from Greek and Roman sources (Hesiod, Ovid, Virgil). In traditional pastoral, nature serves as a backdrop for man's appropriation, expressed through meditative, erotic, or agricultural modes of use. The idealization of landscape, and to a probable pre-existing state of perfect harmony between man and nature, takes a turn in the Victorian Age, and by the 20th Century, ambiguities and complexities creep into the equation, leaving naive versions of pastoral behind.

By the 1960's, the bucolic clichés had long since been abandoned, though the idealization of nature had entered a late phase. The first generation of New York School Poets (Ashbery, O'Hara, Schuyler, Koch) entertained a vicarious, camp position in relation to the pastoral tradition. But the High Modernists such as Williams (of Spring & All) and Zukofsky (of All parts I and II) had extended it, though couched in Modernist language and formalities.

Aram Saroyan's minimalist, post-Modernist experiments of the 1960's present a revolutionary application of pastoral, one in which the signifier is objectified, and the object (nature) is isolated from its traditional literary contexts, and given new life as a purely hygienic phenomenon, vicarious, joyful and witty.

Sled Hill Voices was published in 1966 by Goliard Press, printed letterpress in an edition of only 450 copies [pictured above]. In its brevity and concision, its discrete gestures acquire truly elemental scale, making of the least utterances fully comprehensive icons of idealized natural phenomena. On its own terms--of only six pages long, and only 48 words!--it bids to be taken as a whole, rounded and complete segment--in time and space--of the relation between the authorial persona and "the garden" (landscape, outdoors).

not a

cricket

ticks a

clock

The setting of the poems--as a suite of pieces devoted to the pastoral--occurs initially through the apprehension of sound, as heard from an interior (clock), confused with or compared to the sound of crickets (outside, in nature). The grammatical relationship between "not..." and the cricket(s) evokes a musical echo ("and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a...")--not even a cricket. But crickets don't "tick"-they vibrate or buzz by rubbing their hind legs together, in order to attract mates. The poem's lack of elaboration and careful construction suggest silence, or the flatline of listening for the lowest registers of sensory data.

something moving in the garden a cat

The duration of silence here is interrupted by the awareness of the existence of another being--a cat--moving silently (or surreptitiously) through the garden. The "something moving" becomes the cat along the time-line of the sentence--we discover (or notice) the cat by the end of the phrase (or sentence fragment): In a sense, the cat "arrives" or achieves identity through the nominal signified word "cat." It's a minutely constructed mystery, in duration only the segment of six words' length. The phrase drifts horizontally in either direction, in perfect balance, like a pendulum, a little machine made of words. Too, the cat introduces the additional element of predatory fauna--the cat is certainly "hunting" for something, an entirely instinctual behavior in stark opposition to the classic pastoral conception of a gentle, happy, innocent landscape.

Sunday

as the

grass's

cut

and its smell

rises

twice

The parameters of the setting are expanded as the sabbath-day, and the fertile ground of man's appropriation is further elaborated as a territorial "lawn" or turf, tended and demarcated as generic cultivation. But importantly the only impression it leaves is the olfactory. What would it mean to have a smell "rise twice"? Perhaps the metaphorical shearing of the possessive "grass's" (in which the apostrophe acts as a blade, separating the two s's from each other) implies a division, in which the two stanzas--separated, again, by the metaphorical "cut"--each produces its own distinct smell. This may strike one as a gloriously precious interpretation, though it is through the action of just such subtle means that the effects of minimalist poems are achieved.

incomprehensible birds

Here is flurry, multiple confused action contracted by a rapid six-syllable firing--in-com-pre-hen-si-ble--a veritable phonemic rat-a-tat-tat of action which both signifies and mimics the objects (birds). A palpable amusement at the indefinable complexity of the natural world, as an animate flock challenges the prevailing order of rest which the previous three poems had established. The disturbances of the meditative space proceed then to--

what energy pops

flops her

on her back

laughing

in the water (1)

--in which buoyancy (or eruption) is enacted through a sequence of visual and aural detonations portrayed as visual leaps or stepped descents.2 The poem achieves a perfect oscillating balance as a further elaboration of the action of bodies in complex motion (as the incomprehensible birds does). The evocation is neither specifically visual, nor aural, but a combination of the two senses, where the words both stand for (signify), and (en)act, what they literally "say." "What energy" is exclamatory ("what energy!") and inquisitive ("what [kind of] energy [is it]"?), held in balance as the very fulcrum of dynamic ebullience in which the body is suspended, on water, in air, in the phenomenal space of the poem's presence in the void of the page's white space. Nature (matter and energy conjoined) in a post-Einstein universe are indistinguishable from each other. The pure joy we feel at the bracing impact of moderate physical sensation is delight--a harmony not conceived as a sentimental regard for the sweetness or satisfaction of closure and static virtue, but as a balance of energetic forces in a taut dilemma.

the noises of the garden among the noises of the room

--functions as summary closure. What are the terminal limits of "garden" as tamed by conscious manipulation, and the untended "wild" beyond our control? The noises of the garden is like a tape which flows, a complete circle or mobius strip of linear time line data--through the air, through the window, flowing round the room, and then out again, the concentric waves of sound connecting us (via sounds) both to events beyond our immediate place, and to an immediate confirmation of our reflexive self-consciousness. The transposition of inner and outer worlds, the awareness of the totality of the inter-relationship of body, mind, universe, as perceived through instigations of language, all occur as such ingenious promptings, out of the most apparently modest (though in another sense, the mostly grandly ambitious) of means.

Saroyan's Sled Hill Voices is about as perfect a book of poems as one could well imagine. Among a handful of ingenious works produced by Barry Hall and Tom Raworth in London during the 1960's--crucially important as part of the "American invasion" of the New American Poetry (into Europe) after the Allen anthology benchmark--it stands in my mind as a brilliant collaboration of book art and innovative content. And Saroyan seems to have been wholly original in his experiments. The empirical verification of the authentic value of one's thought and performance is finally the work itself. Like Oppen, as evidenced by Pound's remark about Discrete Series, he seems not to have gotten his ideas "out of any other man's books."

_____________________

1. Because of the limitations of Blogger, I was unable to set this poem as it should be. This is only a crude approximation of the indentations of lines 2-5. Sorry!

2. Obvious antecedents for this stylistic approach would be the work of Larry Eigner or Paul Blackburn, two poets whose work demonstrates the potentials of visual and musical pacing and control on the printed page.

As From a Great Height - the Madoff Scandal

The saga of Bernie Madoff is a familiar one. The only unique thing about it seems to be the enormous scale of the fraud he perpetrated. It's almost a miracle that--given the extent of his dealings, the size of his transactions, and the length of time he had been in business--he wasn't exposed earlier and put out of commission.

Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years in prison, and it seems unlikely that there is any way that this could be shortened enough to permit him to live again outside the walls. White collar crime in America has traditionally been quite leniently dealt with, perhaps in acknowledgment of the high regard we place on the ambition to attain wealth, to "improve one's lot" in the marketplace.

But the market isn't an ethical arena. Anyone who has ever dealt in securities trading knows this. The recent fraudulent activity by brokerage houses, investment banks and accounting firms isn't a new phenomenon; only the scale of it is. Americans have apparently come to believe that investment and speculation can be conducted on "a level playing field," in which cheating and influence and frauds (like Madoff's) can be outlawed; that ordinary people who don't know how the market works, can rely on "experts" and proxies to act faithfully on their behalf. But this has never been true. The trust that people place in advisers and money managers is only repaid by results, and results can be manufactured, as Madoff's grand Ponzi maneuvers have proven, once again.

Is the New York Stock Exchange a "zero sum game" in which there are never any more winners than there are losers; or, to put it another way, is the total wealth at risk in it a kind of balance in which money lost is always, at any given moment, at least as great as money gained, over the long term? It's easy to see how the system can be gamed, especially when those authorized and tasked to watch over the process are not paying attention, or--as has been more common lately--the players are all cheating in full view of each other, and it's in none of their mutual "interests" to divulge.

The American banking system is designed primarily to enrich the biggest players--that is, those whose available capital is great enough that it "entitles" them to have the most influence on the financial system (and the government agencies set up to regulate them). To be sure, there are risks, even to the largest institutions, but the possible rewards for "playing" are great enough to insure that there will always enough "influence" to guarantee that society is "convinced" that the system can't be allowed to collapse entirely; and that those most culpable not be made to account for their transgressions. And the greater the possible pay-offs, the greater the temptation to manipulate the processes by which risk and rewards are settled.

In point of fact, the American economy has never been a "fair" system in which there is equal access to investment opportunities. For every "ordinary" citizen who makes some money through the ownership of "shares" of stocks or mutual funds, there are many more who lose, or whose "gains" are no greater (or less than) the rate of average inflation. Some proportion of those who play will succeed, but that success is not a proof of the reliability of the system or of its fairness. In fact, just the opposite.

But the dangers of a systemic flaw in the investment system are only significant at the highest levels. If a thousand investors get screwed, or even ten thousand, or even a hundred thousand, the damage control is sufficiently cynical to accommodate even this much pain. And for the general population, any suffering at the upper limits is seen as just recompense for the irresponsible risks that were taken. It's easy to hate a rich man, especially if he selfishly played to win. And for those who envy it, it's an ideal they can't resist.

The system works off of confidence--"the full faith and credit"--but the FDIC doesn't insure high risk investments like stocks and derivatives. It protects the bankers from themselves--as we all saw with the bail-out--but not the man on the street. The confidence of the general public is as fragile as the last market crash. No one should ever risk more than they can "afford" to lose on any bet. But with sharks like Madoff hiding behind every turn on the road, it's no wonder that people are squeamish these days. The market is bouncing like a hard rubber ball. Will Greece default? Will Germany and France and England let them?