Jim Leftwich: I am looking for examples of a certain kind of thinking about poetry which, if pursued to its logical extremes, would eventually include considerations of asemic and/or desemantized writing. (2021)
Charles Olson
Andre Breton
William Wordsworth
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Denise Levertov
Emily Dickinson (Thomas Wentworth Higginson)
Gertrude Stein
Arthur Rimbaud
Hannah Weiner
Jan Arp
Adrienne Rich
Sun Ra
Isidore Isou
Antonin Artaud
Hugo Ball
Diane di Prima
Lorine Niedecker
Nicanor Parra
John Wieners
Thomas Meyer
Dmitry Prigov
Varvara Stepanova
d.a.levy
Robert Creeley
Richard Brautigan
Bob Dylan
Bob Cobbing
Henri Chopin
William Burroughs0
Velimir Khlebnikov
David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladmir Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov
Mirtha Dermisache
Hanne Darboven
Marcel Broodthaers
Irma Blank
Mira Schendel
d.a.levy, D.R. Wagner and Kent Taylor, from Para-Concrete Manifesto
May Swenson
Marshall McLuhan (& Andy Warhol)
John Cage
Jack Kerouac
Allen Ginsberg
Mina Loy
Lorine Niedecker
Leslie Scalapino
Bob Kaufman
John M. Bennett
Michael Basinski
Hannah Höch
Christophe Tarkos
Charles Olson, "Projective Verse" (1950)
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will take away?
This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is specially confronted by.
Andre Breton, Surrealist Manifesto (1924)
Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and for all:
Surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express ― verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner ― the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
I cannot, however, be insensible to the present outcry against the triviality and meanness, both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonourable to the Writer’s own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time, that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences. From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy purpose. Not that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formerly conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose. If this opinion be erroneous, I can have little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.
[...]
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (1842):
The poorest experience is rich enough for all the purposes of expressing thought. Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use them yet with a terrible simplicity. It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word. Also, we use defects and deformities to a sacred purpose, so expressing our sense that the evils of the world are such only to the evil eye.
Denise Levertov, Some Notes on Organic Form (1965)
Form is never more than a revelation of content.
“The law—one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception” (Edward Dahlberg, as quoted by Charles Olson in “Projective Verse,” Selected Writings). I’ve always taken this to mean, “no loading of the rifts with ore,” because there are to be no rifts. Yet alongside this truth is another truth (that I’ve learned from Duncan more than from anyone else)—that there must be a place in the poem for rifts too—(never to be stuffed with imported ore). Great gaps between perception and perception which must be leapt across if they are to be crossed at all.
The X-factor, the magic, is when we come to those rifts and make those leaps. A religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself; but when that devotion brings us to undreamed abysses and we find ourselves sailing slowly over them and landing on the other side—that’s ecstasy.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
April 16, 1862: I took [Emily Dickinson's letter of the previous day] from the post office in Worcester, Mass., where I was then living. It was postmarked "Amherst," and it was in a handwriting so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town.
Dickinson envelope circa 1877
Gertrude Stein, In a conversation with John Hyde Preston which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1935
You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting. Yes, before in a thought, but not in careful thinking. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come, and if you have anything you will get a sudden creative recognition. You won't know how it was, even what it is, but it will be creation if it came out of the pen and out of you and not out of an architectural drawing of the thing you are doing.
Arthur Rimbaud, Letter To Georges Izambard (13 May 1871)
I'll be a worker: that is the idea that holds me back when mad rage drives me toward the battle of Paris where so many workers are still dying while I write to you. As for my working now, never, never; I'm on strike.
Now I am going in for debauch.Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a visionary: you won't possibly understand, and I don't know how to explain it to you. To arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses, that's the point. The sufferings will be tremendous, but one must be strong, be born a poet: it is in no way my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One should say: I am thought.
I is someone else. So much the worse for the wood that discovers it's a violin, and to hell with the heedless who cavil about something they know nothing about!
Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville (15 May 1871)
I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed– and the supreme Scholar!–Because he reaches the unknown!
Hannah Weiner, "If Workshop", Poetry Project Newsletter, February-March 1990
If you are a poet would you have the three obligations: work on yourself to become more conscious, work in the world to change it free and equal, include ecological survival, and work in poetic forms that themselves alter consciousness.
[...]
techniques of disjunctive, non-sequential, non-referential, writing can directly alter consciousness, whether by destroying long habits of rationality, by surprise tactics to which the brain responds differently, or by forcing a change to alpha level by engaging both hemispheres of the brain, choose your science.
Jean Arp, Dadaland (1948)
In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I painted, embroidered, and did collages; all these works were drawn from the simplest forms and were probably the first examples of "concrete art." These works are Realities, pure and independent, with no meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free rein to the Elementary and the Spontaneous. Since the arrangement of planes and their proportions and colors seemed to hinge solely on chance, I declared that these works were arranged "according to the law of chance," as in the order of nature, chance being for me simply a part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order.
Jean Arp, Dadaland (1948)
I would meet with Tzara and Serner at the Odéon and in Zurich's Café de la Terrasse to work on a cycle of poems: The Hyperbola of the Crocodile-Hairdresser and the Cane. This kind of verse was subsequently dubbed "Automatic Poetry" by the surrealists. Automatic poetry emerges directly from the poet's guts or any other organ that has stored up reserves. Neither the Postilion of Longjumeau, nor the Alex- andrine, nor grammar, nor aesthetics, nor Buddha, nor the Sixth Commandment could interfere. The poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels at will. His poems are like nature: they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Trivia, or at least what people call trivia, are as precious to him as sublime rhetoric, for in nature a broken twig is as beautiful and as important as a star, and it is men who arrogate for themselves the right to judge what is beautiful or ugly.
Adrienne Rich, Poetry and Experience (1964)
Today I have to say that what I know I know through making poems. Like the novelist who finds that his characters begin to have a life of their own and to demand certain experiences, I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those materials according to a prior plan: the poem itself engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses. Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simple way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it. In my earlier poems I told you, as precisely and eloquently as I knew how, about something; in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it.
(Thanks to Kristine for the suggestion.)
Sun Ra, Words and The Impossible
The elasticity of words
The phonetic-dimension of words
The multi-self of words
Is energy for thought -- If it is a reality.
The idea that words
Can form themselves into the impossible
Then the way to the impossible
Is through the words.
Isidore Isou, MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY (1947)
ISIDORE ISOU Shows another way out between WORDS and RENUNCIATION:
LETTERS. He will create emotions against language, for the
pleasure of the tongue.
It consists of teaching that letters have a destination
other than words.
ISOU Will unmake words into their letters.
Each poet will integrate everything into Everything
Everything must be revealed by letters.
POETRY CAN NO LONGER BE REMADE.
ISIDORE ISOU IS STARTING
A NEW VEIN OF LYRICISM.
Anyone who can not leave words behind can stay back with them!
Antonin Artaud, from Ten Years That Language is Gone, Cahier 285 (April 1947)
Translated by Clayton Eshleman (published in 2004)
I am it seems a writer.
But am I writing?
I make sentences.
Without subject, verb attribute or complement.
I have learned words,
They taught me things.
In my turn I teach them a manner of new behaviour.
May the pommel of your tuve patten
entrumene you a red ani bivilt,
at the lumestin of the utrin cadastre.
This means that maybe the woman’s uterus turns red, when Van Gogh the
mad protester of man dabbles with finding their march for the
heavenly bodies of a too superb destiny.
And it means that its is time for writer to close shop, and to leave the written
letter for the letter”
(Thanks to Bill for the suggestion.)
Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto (1916)
I let the vowels fool around. I let the vowels quite simply occur, as a cat miaows... Words emerge, shoulders of words, legs, arms, hands of words. Au, oi, uh. One shouldn't let too many words out. A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language, as if put there by stockbrokers' hands, hands worn smooth by coins. I want the word where it ends and begins.
Diane di Prima, from November 6, 2013, a conversation with Hilton Obenzinger at Stanford University for a series called “How I Write, published by The Los Angeles Review of Books in January, 2021
And then I took a class with James Waring in composition. He was a choreographer, but I wanted to take his composition class. I was taking dance, and I was doing some performing with him. “Tonight we’re going to talk about form. Everything has a form.” He said nothing else. After about 10 minutes, we all started to go out the door. We were looking at everything. Oh, that has a form. That has a form. What he was telling us was all forms are okay. Leave your mind alone. Don’t mess with everything all the time. And I started to write and tried to follow my mind wherever it went, what [poet] Philip [Whalen] calls the graph of the moving mind. Write exactly what’s happening as closely as you can.
And one of the things that came out of that was Calculus of Variations. One of the things I learned from Jimmy’s class was taking a structure and then hanging absolute freedom on the structure.
Lorine Niedecker, The Poetry of Louis Zukofsky (1956)
Technically, a recurring thing, for all but the apathetic student, is never the same -- though the idea of recurrence is useful to establish relationships, to reveal kinship.
Poet’s work
Grandfather
advised me:
learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoff
from this
condensery
Nicanor Parra, from LETTERS FROM A POET WHO SLEEPS IN A CHAIR (1985)
V
Young poets
Say whatever you want
Pick your own style
Too much blood has gone under the bridge
To still believe -I believe-
That there's only one way to cross the road:
You can do anything in poetry.
John Wieners, from The Journal of John Wieners is to be Called 707 Scott Street for Billie Holiday 1959
I must forget how to write. I must unlearn what has been taught me.
_________________________________________
I must learn how not to write. I must watch with my 5 senses
_________________________________________
All I am interested in is charting the progress of my own soul. And my poetics consist of marking down how each action unrolls. Without my will. It moves. So that each man has his own poetic.
_________________________________________
Thomas Meyer, from ISIS' MEMORY (Caterpillar 5/6, 1970)
The most astonishing fact on which poetry thrives is that every sentence (or projected unit of utterance) CAN stop, not complete itself & begin again as a new sentence related or unrelated to its own initial impulse or sound. No where else in the cosmos is this aspect of will & magic so clearly & precisely manifest.
Dmitry Prigov, from an interview with Philip Metres (1996)
You know, the thing is that no great myth exists now in which a hero could appear. I have written other discourses-the liberal-democratic, the national-patriotic, the contemporary homosexual, the mass metaphysical—these are big discourses—but it’s not necessary to write about heroes. One could just describe a kind of writing. Then there’s the very complex problem of self-presentation-as poet not existing in quantity of poems but as “manipulator.” I have a big project which is about images—I have to write 2,000 poems per year, 24,000 poems overall. It’s also a project that is a type of poetic conduct, more than anything. So I don’t have any problem finding material—some people just don’t understand the structure of this work.
(In 2005 he estimated that he had written 35,000 poems. He died of a heart attack in 2007.)
Varvara Stepanova (1919)
I connect the new movement of non-objective poetry as sound and letter with painterly perception, and this imbues the sound of poetry with a new and vital visual impression. By blowing up the deadly monotony of fused printed letters by means of painterly graphics, I am approaching a new type of creativity. On the other hand, by using painterly graphics to reproduce the non-objective poetry of the two books Zigra ar and Riny chomle, I am introducing the graphics of sound as a new quality into painting, thereby augmenting its quantitative possibilities.
d.a.levy, from Suburban Monastery Death Poem (1968)
its so easy to convince poets
what poetry is
and what it isnt
& everyone knows
sleeping with the muse
is only for young poets
after you've been kept impotent
by style & form & words like "art"
after being published by the RIGHT publishers
and having all the right answers
after youve earned the right to call yrself
a poet yr dead
& lying on yr back
drinking ceremonial wine, while
the muse, who is always a young girl
with old eyes into the universe
suddenly remembers necrophilia
is an experience shes had before
& shes not interrested
in straddling corpses anymore
Robert Creeley, from Pieces (1969)
p.36
The pen,
the lines it
leaves, forms
divine -- nor
laugh nor giggle.
This prescription
is true.
Truth is a scrawl,
all told
in all.
p.62
Each moment constitutes reality,
or rather may constitute
reality, or may have done
so, or perhaps will.
p.65
So that's what you do:
ask the same question
and keep answering.
Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America, page 100 (written in 1961, published in 1967)
Under the grand totals, there was a little Trout Fishing in America epitaph by Alonso Hagen.
It said something like:
"I've had it.
I've gone fishing now for seven years and I haven't caught a single trout.
I've lost every trout I ever hooked.
They either jump off or twist off. or squirm off or break my leader or flop off or fuck off.
I have never even gotten my hands on a trout.
Bob Dylan, from Tarantula (written in 1966, published in 1971)
Claudette, the sandman's pupil, wounded in her fifth year in the business & she's only 15 & go ahead ask her what she thinks of married men & governors & shriner conventions go ahead ask her & Delia, who's called Debra when she walks around in her nurse uniform, she casts off pure light in the cellar & has principles / ask her for a paper favor & she gives you a geranium poem. . .chicago? the hogbutcher! meatpacker! whatever! who cares? it's also like cleveland! like Cincinnati! i gave my love a cherry, sure you did, did she tell you how it tasted? what? you also gave her a chicken? fool! no wonder you want to start a revolution
Bob Cobbing (1969)
Gone is the word as the word, though the word may still be used as sound or shape. Poetry now resides in other elements.
Bob Cobbing
We Aspire to Bird Song
We are aided in our search by sophisticated instruments, the microphone and the tape-recorder. Our human voices extend the range of the tape-recorder's abilities by their demands upon it. Conversely, the tape-recorder's treatment of the voice teaches the human new tricks of rhythm and tone, power and subtlety. We are in a position to claim a poetry which is musical and abstract; but however hard we try to do so can we escape our intellect? In the poetry of pure sound, yes.... Materials are the micro-particles of the human voice which amplified, possibly transposed in speed or pitch, superimposed one, two or many times, treated perhaps with a filter, echo or chopper, shaped maybe by editing, result in a piece no naked voice could achieve.
Henri Chopin, ("vocal microparticles")
unpublished interview, ABC Television, Sydney 1992
When I put the microphone into the mouth I have simultaneously five sounds:
the air and the liquid in the mouth, the respiration in the nose, the air between each tooth and the respiration in the lungs … In 1974 I put into my stomach a very small microphone and it was a discovery – the body is always like a factory!
It never stops – there’s no silence!”
William Burroughs -- “Introduction,” in Henri Chopin, Poésie sonore internationale, (Paris: J.-M. Place, 1979)
The lines separating music and poetry, writing and painting, are purely arbitrary, and sound poetry is precisely designed to break down these categories and to free poetry from the printed page without dogmatically ruling out the convenience of the printed page.
Velimir Khlebnikov
Scrape the surface of language, and you will behold interstellar space and the skin that encloses it.
David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladmir Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov -- A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1917)
The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics.
Mirtha Dermisache (2011)
The only time I made reference to the political situation in my country in my work was in Diario: the column on the left on the last page alludes to those killed in Trelew. That was in 1972. Except for that massacre, which affected me—and many others—a great deal, I never wanted my work to be read in political terms. What I was doing, and still do, is develop graphic ideas on writing which, in the end, have little to do with political events but much to do with the structures and forms of language.
Hanne Darboven
I see myself as a writer, which I am, regardless of what other visual materials I may use. I am a writer first and a visual artist second.
Hanne Darboven
I only use numbers because it is a way of writing without describing. […] It has nothing to do with mathematics, nothing! I choose numbers because they are so constant, confined and artificial.
Marcel Broodthaers (1974)
I am now able to express myself on the edge of things, where the world of visual arts and the world of poetry might eventually, I wouldn’t say meet, but at the very frontier where they part.
Irma Blank
I save writing from its enslavement to sense: writing purified of sense. I return to the zero point, the semantic zero, the semantic void: silence as a germinating source.
Irma Blank
There is no such thing as the right word.
Mira Schendel
My concern is with capturing the transfer of the instant living experience, full of empirical vigour, onto the symbol imbued with memorability and relative eternity.
d.a.levy, D.R. Wagner and Kent Taylor, from Para-Concrete Manifesto
Our concrete poems are Shit
each poem a tiny spat of diarrrrhea
growing into infinite globules of cement excrement
our concrete poems
are beyond concrete poems
Where DaDaism failed, preaching Anti-Art
but creating art & the NaDaists failed by creating an art of nothing-
ness when they proclaimed NOTHING - the cleveland cement fuckers will
succeed in giving the Public SHIT. . .
each poem - a new death of WORDS AS ART.
May Swenson
Poetry is based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness.
Statement by Marshall McLuhan famously appropriated by Andy Warhol:
Art is anything you can get away with.
----McLuhan, The Medium Is The Massage (1967)
Claes Oldenburg, I am for an art, from Store Days, Documents from the Store (1961)
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
John Cage, in conversation with Wes Nisker (originally published in the Winter 1986 issue of Inquiring Mind)
I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I’m doing.
John Cage: from An Autobiographical Statement (1989)
I once asked Aragon, the historian, how history was written. He said, "You have to invent it." When I wish as now to tell of critical incidents, persons, and events that have influenced my life and work, the true answer is all of the incidents were critical, all of the people influenced me, everything that happened and that is still happening influences me.
_________________________________________
Take any part of this book and go to the end of it. You will find yourself thinking of the next step to be taken in that direction. Perhaps you will need new materials, new technologies. You have them. You are in the world of X, chaos, the new science.
Jack Kerouac, BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE
1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Jack Kerouac, "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose"
SET-UP The object is set before the mind, either in reality. as in sketching (before a landscape or teacup or old face) or is set in the memory wherein it becomes the sketching from memory of a definite image-object.
PROCEDURE Time being of the essence in the purity of speech, sketching language is undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words, blowing (as per jazz musician) on subject of image.
METHOD No periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas-but the vigorous space dash separating rhetorical breathing (as jazz musician drawing breath between outblown phrases)--"measured pauses which are the essentials of our speech"--"divisions of the sounds we hear"-"time and how to note it down." (William Carlos Williams)
SCOPING Not "selectivity' of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)-Blow as deep as you want-write as deeply, fish as far down as you want, satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in his own human mind.
LAG IN PROCEDURE No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.
TIMING Nothing is muddy that runs in time and to laws of time-Shakespearian stress of dramatic need to speak now in own unalterable way or forever hold tongue-no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting).
CENTER OF INTEREST Begin not from preconceived idea of what to say about image but from jewel center of interest in subject of image at moment of writing, and write outwards swimming in sea of language to peripheral release and exhaustion-Do not afterthink except for poetic or P. S. reasons. Never afterthink to "improve" or defray impressions, as, the best writing is always the most painful personal wrung-out tossed from cradle warm protective mind-tap from yourself the song of yourself, blow!-now!-your way is your only way-"good"-or "bad"-always honest ("ludi- crous"), spontaneous, "confessionals' interesting, because not "crafted." Craft is craft.
STRUCTURE OF WORK Modern bizarre structures (science fiction, etc.) arise from language being dead, "different" themes give illusion of "new" life. Follow roughly outlines in outfanning movement over subject, as river rock, so mindflow over jewel-center need (run your mind over it, once) arriving at pivot, where what was dim-formed "beginning" becomes sharp-necessitating "ending" and language shortens in race to wire of time-race of work, following laws of Deep Form, to conclusion, last words, last trickle--Night is The End.
MENTAL STATE If possible write "without consciousness" in semi-trance (as Yeats' later "trance writing") allowing subconscious to admit in own uninhibited interesting necessary and so "modern" language what conscious art would censor, and write excitedly, swiftly, with writing-or-typing-cramps, in accordance (as from center to periphery) with laws of orgasm, Reich's "beclouding of consciousness." Come from within, out--to relaxed and said.
Allen Ginsberg on Mexico City Blues (lecturing at Naropa, circa. 1985)
AG: I’m just trying to check through the things (in Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues) that are exemplary of pure poetry
[74thChorus]
“”Darling!”/Red hot,/That kind of camping/I don’t object to/unless it’s kept/within reason” – You got that? – “”Darling!”/Red hot,/That kind of camping/I don’t object to/unless it’s kept/within reason./ “The coffee is delicious.”
This is for Vidal Didn’t know I was.a Come-Onner, did you? (Come-on-er)/ I am one of the world’s/Great Bullshitters,/Girls/Very High Cantos.” – (It’s whatever he thought).
[80th Chorus]
“This is about a kind of funny bebop complexity or bebop simplicity in poetry – 80th Chorus – Goofing at the table with Bill Garver, actually. The situation was Bill Garver (was) in Mexico City, sharing an apartment at 220 Oruzaba Street, an old junkie retired from New York, who had a legal (prescription) for morphine in Mexico, and who had retired to live out his days there. Kerouac was living upstairs and would go down and visit Garver who was shooting-up, or just talking, or…
“GOOFING AT THE TABLE/ “You just don’t know.”/”What don’t I know?”/How good this ham n eggs/is/”If you had any idea/whatsoever/How good this is/Then you would stop/writing poetry/And dig in.”It’s been so long/since I been hungry/it’s like a miracle”/Ah boy but them bacon/And them egg– /Where in the hell/is the scissor?/ SINGING: -“You’ll never know/just how much I love you.”
That’s the 80th Chorus. So it’s dispersed mind, but it’s actual recollection of the things happening there.
[81stChorus]
“Mr Beggar & Mrs Davy/Looney and CRUNEY,/I made a pome out of it,/Haven’t smoked Luney/& Cruney/in a Long Time./ Dem eggs & dem dem/Dere bacons, baby/if you only lay that/ down on a trumpet/Lay that down/solid brother/’Bout all dem/bacon & eggs/Ya gotta be able/to lay it doen/solid -/ All that luney/& fruney”
[82ndChorus]
“Fracons, acons,& beggs,/Lay, it, all that/be boppy/be buddy/I didn’t took/I could think/So/bepo/beboppy/ Luney & Juney/ -if-/ that’s the way/ they get/ kinda hysterical/ Looney & Boony/Juner & Mooner/Moon, Spoon, and June.”
[83rdChorus]
“Don’t they call them/cat men/That lay it down/with the trumpet/The orgasm/Of the moon/And the June/I call em/them cat things/William/Carlos/Williams – He knew William Carlos Williams’ work and advanced on it into the mind. In other words, not merely vernacular thought but vernacular mind. So that’s why it ends – “I call em/them cat things/ “That’s really cute, that un” – that one – that un – “That’s really cute,/ that un”, William /Carlos/ Williams.”
Bobbie Louise Hawkins (in attendance in the class): (Did you make that up “vernacular mind”?)
AG: I just thought it up this minute. That is to say, Williams was working with actual speech as he heard it around him and arranged it. (He) composed his poems, as he says, of the elements of the speech as it is heard around. But he was primarily preoccupied with quotidian speech, or vernacular speech, or Rutherford (New Jersey) speech. Kerouac was more preoccupied with the quotidian mind, that is to say, the sounds in the ear, or the sounds in his head,
Bobbie Louise Hawkins: (What) is that word? – “quotidian”?
AG: Quotidian – Q-U-O-T-I-D-I-A-N – Everyday. Everyday mind, or, in Buddhists-speak, Ordinary Mind, i.e, what is actually happening in the mind and the stream of language that goes in and out of the mind, as in those early poems when he’s saying, “DON”T IGNORE OTHER PARTS/OF YOUR MIND/…when you’d let the faces/crack & mock/& yak & Change” – the “yakkety-yak” of the mind, the matter-babble behind the ear – “yak & change/& go mad utterly/in your night/firstmind/reveries” – as a baby. “Bo-bee-zabba-dooble-wee-blue-di-doo” [Allen parodies mind-language, scat singing] – Anything you do with it. The actual mind sounds, rather than the household sounds of Wiliams’, orthe doctor’s sounds. So Kerouac was really preoccupied with the internal vernacular
Bobbie Louise Hawkins: So it’s like his mind is the locus of experience..
AG: Yes
Bobbie Louise Hawkins: ..and the source of his language
AG: Yes, rather than Rutherford (New Jersey). In that sense, I think, there was an advance over Williams (not over, but an advance from Wlliams’ base) because previous writing of that kind of gobbledygook nature, or Surrealist, or automatic, writing, or Dada had been senseless, but literary (rather than senseless, but painted after nature..sketched after nature). Jack was sketching after what-he-heard-in-his-mind-nature, His mind was Mont St.Victoire and he was constantly sketching Mont St Victoire, his brain was Mont St Victoire, so that he was constantly making paintings of (that), rather than the speech out of the mouth, in the street, So, as we were moving from, say, Objectivist, Imagist,1930’s clear lucid material world preoccupations to a later psychedelic, more internalized subjective exploration (in the) (19)50’s and (19)60’s, this was sort of like a signal…what do you call it? – graduation or move or evolution, in terms of his and others’ preoccupations to what’s going on inside my head.
Allen Ginsberg, MIND WRITING SLOGANS (1994)
“First Thought is Best in Art, Second in Other Matters.”
— William Blake
I Background (Situation, Or Primary Perception)
“First Thought, Best Thought” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
“Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
“The Mind must be loose.” — John Adams
“One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.” — Charles Olson, “Projective Verse“
“My writing is a picture of the mind moving.” — Philip Whalen
Surprise Mind — Allen Ginsberg
“The old pond, a frog jumps in, Kerplunk!” — Basho
“Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” –– Walt Whitman
“…What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature? … Negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” — John Keats
“Form is never more than an extension of content. — Robert Creeley to Charles Olson
“Form follows function.” — Frank Lloyd Wright* (*Quoting his mentor: Louis Sullivan).
Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions. — A. G.
“Nothing is better for being Eternal Nor so white as the white that dies of a day.” — Louis Zukofsky
Notice what you notice. — A. G.
Catch yourself thinking. — A. G.
Observe what’s vivid. — A. G.
Vividness is self-selecting. — A. G.
“Spots of Time” — William Wordsworth
If we don’t show anyone we’re free to write anything. –– A. G.
“My mind is open to itself.” — Gelek Rinpoche
“Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound.” — Charles Reznikoff
II Path (Method, Or Recognition)
“No ideas but in things.” “… No ideas but in the Facts.” — William Carlos Williams
“Close to the nose.” — William Carlos Williams
“Sight is where the eye hits.” — Louis Zukofsky
“Clamp the mind down on objects.” — William Carlos Williams
“Direct treatment of the thing … (or object).” — Ezra Pound
“Presentation, not reference.” — Ezra Pound
“Give me a for instance.” — vernacular
“Show not tell.” — vernacular
“The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” — Ezra Pound
“Things are symbols of themselves.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
“Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones.
He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars.
General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.”— William Blake
“And being old she put a skin / on everything she said.” — W. B. Yeats
“Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better.” — Jack Kerouac
“Details are the Life of Prose.” — Jack Kerouac
Intense fragments of spoken idiom best. — A. G.
“Economy of Words” — Ezra Pound
“Tailoring” — Gregory Corso
Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. –– A. G.
Syntax condensed, sound is solid. — A. G.
Savor vowels, appreciate consonants. — A. G.
“Compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” — Ezra Pound
“… awareness … of the tone leading of the vowels.” — Ezra Pound
“… an attempt to approximate classical quantitative meters . . . — Ezra Pound
“Lower limit speech, upper limit song” — Louis Zukofsky
“Phanopoeia, Melopoeia, Logopoeia.” — Ezra Pound
“Sight. Sound & Intellect.” — Louis Zukofsky
“Only emotion objectified endures.” — Louis Zukofsky
III Fruition (Result, Or Appreciation)
Spiritus = Breathing = Inspiration = Unobstructed Breath
“Alone with the Alone” — Plotinus
Sunyata (Sanskrit) = Ku (Japanese) = Emptiness
“What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” — Zen koan
“What’s the face you had before you were born?” — Zen koan
Vipassana (Pali) = Clear Seeing
“Stop the world” — Carlos Castaneda
“The purpose of art is to stop time.” — Bob Dylan
“the unspeakable visions of the individual — Jack Kerouac
“I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly.” — Chuang Tzu (translated by Burton Watson)
“Candor” —Walt Whitman
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” — William Shakespeare
“Contact” — A Magazine, Nathaniel West & William Carlos Williams, editors.
“God appears & God is Light
To those poor souls who dwell in Night.
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.” — William Blake
“Subject is known by what she sees.” — A. G.
Others can measure their visions by what we see. –– A. G.
Candor ends paranoia. — A. G.
“Willingness to be Fool.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
“Day & Night / you’re all right.” — Gregory Corso
Tyger: “Humility is Beatness.” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A. G.
Lion: “Surprise Mind” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A. G.
Garuda: “Crazy Wisdom Outrageousness” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
Dragon: “Unborn Inscrutability” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
“To be men not destroyers” — Ezra Pound
Speech synchronizes mind & body — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
“The Emperor unites Heaven & Earth” — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” — Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Make it new” — Ezra Pound
“When the music changes, the walls of the city shake” — Plato
“Every third thought shall be my grave — W. Shakespeare, The Tempest
“That in black ink my love may still shine bright.” –– W. Shakespeare, Sonnets
“Only emotion endures” — Ezra Pound
“Well while I’m here I’ll
do the work —
and what’s the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow.” — A. G.
“… Kindness, sweetest of the small notes in the world’s ache, most modest & gentle of the elements entered man before history and became his daily connection, let no man tell you otherwise.” — Carl Rakosi
“To diminish the mass of human and sentient sufferings.” — Gelek Rinpoche
Mina Loy, from Aphorisms on Futurism (1914)
IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.
AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.
THE mind is a magician bound by assimilations; let him loose and the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers.
CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that molds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.
CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.
LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create.
Lorine Niedecker, The Poetry of Louis Zukofsky (1956)
Technically, a recurring thing, for all but the apathetic student, is never the same -- though the idea of recurrence is useful to establish relationships, to reveal kinship.
Poet’s work
Grandfather
advised me:
learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoff
from this
condensery
Leslie Scalapino interviewed by Maggie Golston (1997)
It’s as if we’re all making translations of things which we take in almost by a process of osmosis, and it becomes a form of ventriloquism. And writing is, in a way, a form of ventriloquism, where you’re reproducing things that are supposedly you and that are supposedly outside you, that are supposedly social, and you’re taking yourself for that and that for yourself. It is, in any case, something that is illusionistic, because it is a matter of your training and your being placed in a context that articulates it that way, a training from birth in terms of a construction of self. What I’m interested in in poetry is to try to get to what actually is there, so it does involve in a way deconstructing a sense of self, as not being real, as not being what is actually happening.
[...]
What I’m really interested in is contemplation, or observation or apprehension, in terms of the interior, and action, and to make these things come into the same space, so that they’re going on in the same time. There is something that is possible to occur in people’s understanding of what they’re reading, what they’re experiencing, something that is neither social nor private, that enters some other realm, that becomes itself, and gets past any of those kinds of categories.
Bob Kaufman, Abomunist Manifesto (1959)
ABOMUNISTS SPIT ANTI-POETRY FOR POETIC REASONS AND FRINK.
ABOMUNISTS DO NOT WRITE FOR MONEY; THEY WRITE THE MONEY ITSELF.
Bob Kaufman, Second April (1959)
Session fourteen... is a roach and happy guts, shorn hair of minor criminals, on floors of prefabricated gas chambers, we mad on Aztec planted turnips, read poems off each others' ass by narrow daylight in New Tex hotel rooms, they watch, we unzip fly, why, gasping into our own interiors, hoping to drag air to strange tomb-like bellies ... they watch tombs, we throw soggy peanut shells under skidding wheels, we witness God's divorce, the bitch leaves, we cry jazz historical tears, they watch, we lock door on bankrupt, God give us new, we ate fire last time, be cool, God.
John M. Bennett, from an interview with Volodymyr Bilyk (Zouch 2016)
John M. Bennett: Since High School I’ve been interested in trying to understand the creative process. and have kept my drafts and versions of poems and notes toward that end. I still don’t fully understand it, but I know it’s something that involves training many parts of the brain and body, most of them unconscious, so that they all come together to create something, to do something, to be something.
Volodymyr Bilyk: What training techniques have you tried over the years?
John M. Bennett : Everything I write is a kind of training.
[...]
Volodymyr Bilyk: Can you describe your more or less ordinary working session?
John M. Bennett: I sit down before some blank paper, usually a blank notebook, and just start, whatever comes out is what I work with and continue. I write first by hand. Then type into a computer (I used to use a typewriter!). Then I will revise. I usually finish, or abandon, the poem during the same day I started it. But not always. When it comes time to assemble poems in a book, I might make further small revisions here and there.
[...]
Volodymyr Bilyk : How do you work with notes? Is there any specific method of assembling? Do you have any specific way of starting the session?
John M. Bennett: Sometimes I make brief notes of things that occur to me when I can’t sit down and write. I will sometimes use these as the start of a poem. There are some pieces I do that involve rapid selection and re-writing of texts of others, as I have done recently quite often with work by Jim Leftwich and Ivan Argüelles. As to a way of starting, I just start; whatever comes out, whatever is in my head. No planning ahead, except occasionally with regard to forms, but not content.
Michael Basinski, ON EXPERIMENTAL POETRY
in The Experioddicist #8
June 21. 1995
edited and published by Jake Berry
My first thought on experimental poetry is that it is hardly experimental
enough. There is far too little pushing and pulling and manipulating of
literary boundaries in the realm of the poem. I think that this is the result
of poetic careerism. Some of our best and potentially brightest poets are
more concerned with prizes and photo sessions than poetic limits.
Experimental poetry is left to poetically positive outsiders, radicals, and
eccentrics, and to the poets from the working classes or from working-class
backgrounds. Fortunately, at this time this is a fantastically rich loom of
writers who are not rich or suburban in mentality. There are two veins of
progressive marginal writing. There are those working with the visual and
aural potential of poetry and those pushing the moral content of poetry -
that is, those engaged in writing about the body (particularly anything that
has to do with human sexuality). Interestingly, both of these forms of
writing are locating their audiences in an increasingly growing non-literary
community. That is to say , there are non-poets listening and reading poetry!
True, it is a small audience, but real, and it is now as it has not been in
the near past. Experimental poetry is therefore a populace event. People are
interested in it! Experimental poetry has made the poem again an exciting
experience. And it must continue to do so. It is something that titillates
the senses (as well as the mind). A poetry slam is as experimental in
presentation as a performance in a dark, obscure gallery. Experimental
poetry's mission is to engage the ordinary (this means ordinary people and
ordinary readers too!) and make poetry alive again to those beyond the
egg-head world of too much of modern poemitry.
Hannah Höch
There are millions and millions of other justifiable points of view besides yours and mine. I would like to blur the firm borders that we human beings, cocksure as we are, are inclined to erect around everything that is accessible to us.
I would like to show the world today as an ant sees it and tomorrow as the moon sees it.
Christophe Tarkos
Poet Is Getting Ready To Think
He falls and he drops things in the stairwell: a thin string of sand, a thin string of rice, of crashed, pulverized crackers, and as he lets them fall from above, kilo by kilo, sac by sac and chair after chair, table after table, tree after tree are falling, dropped by him, as he himself thoughtlessly falls. And out of his fall intelligence and poetry are born.
Poet And Human Thought
A poet is intelligent. He prepares himself for difficult thinking. All thought is withdrawn, hard and pasty; so, the poet has to rub, soften, and warm it up. He trains his intelligence to get out of its torpor, he trains his head, parts of the brain, his neck, his ten fingers to pull out of it. He wants to cleanse himself. He peels the husk off his mouth, and the mouth begins to chew upon the right arm of its owner and master. And this is how little by little, he learns to wrap his head around ideas.
The Poet Prepares His Head
All thought is difficult to extract from thinking. The poet picks up his head, fumbles, squeezes it, takes out the eyes, pulls out the tongue, warps the skull bones, delves into them, carves and re-shapes, presses, sniffs, breaks off a tooth, and traces a groove across the face, adds more scars, slices off pieces, then completely overhauls the head, taking the cut-off parts, ironing them out so that he could saw and staple them together and then attach it all back to the head with pieces of scotch.
