My gray-haired mentor used to urge me
When you write, write one word at a time
But keep it under your hat, boy!
I was a tyro and thought it strange advice
Indeed but kept my word out of respect,
Which is why years later I have so many
Of his bloody little louses sucking
My gray matter dry.
Moderator's comments: I suspect the inspiration for this "poem" is fragment 92 of Heraclitus, to wit:
All men are equally mystified by unaccountable evidence, even Homer, wisest of the Greeks. He was mystified by children catching lice. He heard them say, What we have found and caught we throw away, what we have not found and caught we still have.
(translated by Guy Davenport)
All one can say (echoing Heraclitus and Byron, naturally) is: "They were always right, the Old Masters".
ReplyDelete"Byron might have raised his leonine head, but the search had left me mentally exhausted, and after a few medicinal tequilas, I succumbed to sleep. It was a strange sleep—the kind that one wakes from knowing one has dreamed and nothing more. There was something, though. When I surfaced (on the floor of a motel in Commerce City—but that's another story), I heard this scrap of Heine's Confessions (Gestaendnisse) fading into the early morning roar of the semis on I-70: 'Alas! God's satire weighs heavily on me.'"
-- Joe H, Old Master
trying to re:collect the what-ofs of my Guy Davenport "touchings"...
ReplyDeleteIn the late 60's when I was at U of Md Rudd Fleming , who he and his wife Polly were best friends with Ezra Pound when Pound was in Saint Elizabeth's, were also friends with Guy Davenport who several times came to visit Rudd and Polly... we used to go over to the Fleming's house for a gathering of
poets to read and talk.... especially on the younger side of us were me and Ronnie Wilson and Carlo Parcelli... Guy was there at least one time that I recall... Rudd introduced me to Guy we shook hands
and Rudd embarrassed me with "Ed's an apprentice poet. He would profit from studying with you." or some such. as I recall now many years later, Guy also had a connection with a D.C. small press that did
some of his books (Counterpoint).
then when over at Hopkin's (1971/72 he also "dropped in" on Eliott Coleman (and us) when in town.
In the , I think, 90's, the Johns Hopkins Press published things of his.
when I dropped back in (in 1998) about the first writer I read was Guy Davenport....for the first time delving in.
not sure what trail I'd have strode down had I really studied with what/who was around me (in the 50's,
60,s and 70's or what might have filled-in those 1975-1998 years as far as poetry and art and the combination there-of. maybe it was an advantage not 'studying' others' "stuff" ... to this day I've the habit of NOT reading when writing and not writing when reading. As I just discovered Guy Davenport was 'experimenting' with a fiction that was in-and-out of a prose/drawings "thing"... will have to re:visit my Guy Davenport 'stash' to see ... I think what the article that I just read was about Tatlin (which I have) the first of his stuff that I read (inhaled) was The Geography of the Imagination.
today? off and into Twelve Stories and that Herakleitos piece:
" The red rooster stood on his cobalt legs and brought the sun to
Ephesos. ... "
as for your poem.... a few years ago after reading some of (I think it was) Anne Waldman's IOVIS
(both volumes) I sent her a postcard with this (which also 'plays' to your piece):
everything that comes my way
strikes me
p.s. I think that looking back that Guy Davenport and Eliott Coleman and Rudd Fleming would have gotten a "giggle" out of Stone Girl E-pic. Have a good 2013 such as it unconditionally might be ?
well look what I found ... an interview with Polly Fleming in 2006 ! ain't this net SOMETHING?
ReplyDeletehope there is some one or three folks out there interested in reading this:
http://www.townofchevychase.org/assets/documents/pdfs/oralhistory/Flemming.pdf
a cpl of points... only one "m" in Flemming.
... that Woody's down town ... my cousiin Mildred Harris operated the old elevator there
... my uncle Melvin and his sister Ruth were in that Knickebocker Theater when the roof caved in
... as I recall Polly mentioned that she used to take books over to Pound and that she introduced Rudd to Ezra...turns out that (according to this interview) Rudd's sister or sisters were "big" in psychiatry and when here in D.C. most likely wenrt over to Saint Elizabeth's met Pound and connected him with Polly and, since rudd translated ancient Greek and did write or translate WITH Pound a couple of books
(plays I think)
In about 1998 or 1999 I looked in the phone book to see if people that i had known were still listed... there was "Rudd Fleming" and the address and number... so I called... Polly answered.
after telling here who I was she said "Oh yes. I remember you. Rudd frequently mentioned you. Come over for a visit, sometime."
lots of pretty specific connections for me in this interview.
Brushing away the frosted cobwebs from the crack'd dormer pane, we begin to make out the commentary of the immortal Scholiast, writ in invisible ink upon the paperboard walls of the motel in Commerce City:
ReplyDelete"The apotheosis of the absurd in only seven thousand words; however, what remains of my frazzled logic impels me to peg the odds at 99-1 that prior to writing this 'exercise in futility,' Uncle Polly (the last of the great early boy Sopranos) envisaged the specter of the great Archimedes uttering his famous last words 'Do not disturb my circles' just before an enraged, mathematically ignorant postmodern soldier 'put him in a pine box' for what he thought was insubordination, when in reality all the good mathematician had in mind was to continue his line of thought undisturbed, outside the box."
ahhh
ReplyDeletethe comfort of that rest ...and them phantasies taught in every classroom : the invented 'mathematics' of a 'reality' whose plinth is that
puny-prescribed 'frazzled logic' of the "Good Mathematician" undoubtably a Greek AFTER ,say, Parmanides,
or Herakleitos, or Empedacles and BEFORE Socrates/Aristotle and LONG BEFORE that (strictly based on "reason") Western non-sense of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche
or is this-and-that observation simultaneously 'beyond the pale' and 'outside the box' ?
Tee See :I, for one, really appreciate your reply actually just about ALL of them
as
being windows into extending so many possible ways to go .... with words/thoughts
and what they in their various and sundry ways .... comport.
I also like the collective style and ALL inclusiveness here on this blog... a bit too much of "the In Crowd" for most of them
10,000 daily followers, but much more than the basic-drivvel just about everywhere else....
all that is lacking a Big Fire-source who is not yet been 'put in a pine box' /
These oblique references to Old Masters (one of them currently hanging out in the Rocky Mountains) and to philosophers—interspersed with remarks of an E-pic nature focusing on old Ez’s acquaintances while on sabbatical at St. Elizabeth’s—and rounded out by slightly edited (and thus improved) postmodern quotes from a myopic poet—might they not be signs of an incurable neurosis?
ReplyDeleteIncurable? Incroyable!
ReplyDeleteI fall for zis postmodernism every time I am in ze bistro!
Your link should be of inestimable worth to those wishing to delineate Huuk's trajectory within the postmodern tradition, especially as reflected in the use of une partie de bra de fer poetique to separate the men from the wimps.
ReplyDeleteyes their plinth has always been integrity and honesty and a continuous
ReplyDeletedemand towards perfecting intentions.
Aristotle / Socrates is the sure solved that
revelation/reason dichotomy, eh ?
now we're stuck in that Germanic/Enlightenment (stuff)
where the ONLY things valid are those things provable via Scientific Methods
or by what sells ?