Kevin Cashen's video of "Trouble in Mind" at Bookshop SC

Link to video of the reading of "Trouble in Mind" at Bookshop Santa Cruz on May 8, 2012.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y693tTrBGJg&feature=youtu.be

Rob Wilson's phone-vid of one poem from my reading at UCSC

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=3994065769566

Here we are human-miking "Trouble in Mind #3--Newspeak (for our times)."

"Get the Picture" #2

AWAKE

         (for sleep)

Night stays awake in the light

remembrance dreams place

behind the mind’s eye

so doing calls up that state

and experience answers

with having been elsewhere

in the dark imagining sleep makes

you carry bodily thru the day.

Bigger Picture

This sense of the always already bigger picture is where the poems come from and should be in them from the get-go. It is an attempt to take the unthinking commodification common to today’s realpolitik and turn it back upon itself. There is a pari mutuel here, a risk between us that the reader will always be tempted to simply take the pictures as illustrations. The risk is allowed, though, in order to move us toward the chance of an open dimension that should come from the way that the pictures are chosen to tangentially bounce off something in the poem and from how they always already implicate something more from the bigger picture of our lives.

         In the borrowed picture that is part of the poem “Space (for Tenzin Gyatso),” we have a relatively simple image that can be discussed fruitfully along these lines. It is a highway sign with a schematic image of a sitting meditator on it. If you get those things, and that is not a totally given thing with today’s audiences, but if you do—then, there are those to things to bounce off of the poem together. I hope the poem in itself presents the concept of the “space” to be put into experience and thought by the praxis of shamatha/vipassana/zazen meditation. If we read the picture, we get something like we would get from the familiar orange diamond-shaped one with a curving arrow that tells us “Curve Ahead” without using words. “Meditation Ahead” might be what it says, then, or “Look Out: Meditator Ahead” maybe.

         So, why not just deliver it in words? If this is what it says in words, why not just say it? Arnheim’s famous old book on Visual Thinking gives scientific philosophical answers as to why not: he puts the reasons into terms of the spatial relations delivered in the visual. Reasons also could be given in terms of social relations presented by iconic visuals. That approach could also encompass Aristotle’s two other appeals to the audience: emotional and ethical “reasons.” These are not so easily put into language because of the sentimentalities and other reductive forces at work when one words them. It is the iconic quality of visuals that goes beyond Arnheim and works compactly from and with and on the social in a fashion that we feel and can feel in our ethical gut as critical.

         At the risk of belaboring explanation yet further, something I used to hate seeing done to a poem by my professors, I’ll go on here with the picture in “Space.” It speaks in the idiom of driving. What’s important about that is the way that the domain of driving reflects many of the urges of our current social relations: speed, teleological efficiency, management (to drive in Spanish is manejar), and numerical applications with separation into units. You may notice that these all also apply to the factory. To confront them in their own idiom with something that “speaks” too of meditation praxis is to also say “slow down” and, perhaps, “turn in a fresh direction” or even, jokingly, “watch out for spacey people messing with this system.” Whatever we feel about this, we may also feel in our gut that it might be a good thing to mess in this way. That’s the joke and the brilliance of this little piece of art that I borrowed from the internet (where I found it with no originator named).

         In our society of commodified thoughts, thoughts are packaged for us iconically all the time. This one enters an established domain and messes with it (“occupies” it), by virtue of its packaging. Ezra Pound in his ABC of Reading wrote “DICHTEN=CONDENSARE” (New Directions 1960 ed., 36). It is the condensed quality of this visual that makes it poetic and allows it a poetic function in the poem.

         A good line in a poem plays upon the whole rest of the poem to make it all both add up anew and reach out further. This visual was chosen to act like a line in this poem because it has meditation in it to fit with the lines in words, and it has dimensions that reach beyond into social domains the other lines don’t quite reach.

         If you go back to the first poem in “Trouble in Mind,” a more complex version of this takes place with the iconic elements there. We have Saint Patrick in marble and a “No Camping” sign on a green open hill. The sign names County Meath and helps the chance that this hill might be recognized as the Hill of Tara, the ancient and almost mythical government seat of Ireland. With or without that chance, the picture enters the poem and expands upon its theme of a world where artsy concerns clash against the concerns of those who must make a camp and often sleep on the sidewalks. I won’t belabor all that here, but invite such close and open reading of all the pictures as something like a line in the poem not given a temporal place among the others but a spatially logical and emotionally ethical one.

"Get the Picture" #1

SPACE

         (for Tenzin Gyatso)

Between words an old-time printer put

not nothing but a piece of type

that would work with words by saying nothing;

ems, ens, mutton quads, and combinations

marked off words as they edged toward thought.

Thought will fill any space like water is said to;

its words go anywhere they are not held out of, and even there.

Those little bits of type or today’s digital equals

show what thought is not that it could not do without

between the words that keep flowing in.

As the grasp of thought expands, always

some light or maybe some dark shows thru yet—

filling in for the nothing we give no thought to.


 

Useful Remainder

Along with that Mallarméan extension into "poème critique," I was thinking more practically of the Nordic terser tenser praxis in Tomas Tranströmer's way of showing associative thinking. In Baltics "VI," he actually writes of trying to remember what comes to mind ("det påminner om något / it reminds me of something") when he sees the old island graveyard and feels himself standing there ("jag var dår / I was there") as he had stood somewhere else. Then he sees it was Prague's Jewish cemetery ("ghettokyrkogård"). The new publication of Sam Charters' translation has photos by Ann Charters providing illustration. They show the island life of which he writes. However, if we had an insertion of a photo of Prague's ghettokyrkogård like the verbal version Tranströmer inserts, we might literally see how that image exceeds its use in the poem. The sufferings of the Baltic islanders and the concentrated culture of fishing/shipping/living on those islands is imaged in the crowded stones he sees, but the other stones he sees from Prague have further associations: it is what we might call a useful remainder.

“WITHNESS” & “ILLUSTRATIVITY”: DOING JUSTICE IN THE BODY OF THE WORK

 

“WITHNESS” & “ILLUSTRATIVITY”:

DOING JUSTICE IN THE BODY OF THE WORK

Picture a poem with a picture, and think of what you make of that when you look. Whether it’s a woodcut with Longfellow’s Hiawatha or Ben Shahn with Ted Hughes’ Crow or even Larry Rivers with Frank O’Hara, the two are usually taken as separate elements and their relation is some kind of illustration. Even when George Schneeman writes the poem to go with his own Italian paintings, illustration is what we see. Maybe with Ted Berrigan writing onto the same page that George Schneeman draws on in his turn, the word illustrates its own object status and referentiality just the way the drawn lines do. But still it seems that that is just that––an illustration of an equivalent relationship. There is a sense of adequacy, a sense of equivalence, involved in illustration; you might call it a sense of justice.

The urge to do justice to an image with words or, vice versa, to illustrate meaning or feeling with a picture becomes an effort usually to create congruent wholes. When part-to-part relations within those wholes are made parallel as well, we also have what we call analogy. The justice involved in that is a kind of rightness, a mastery displayed. This is like the justice of everything being in its place: what liberals call for as the rightness of people’s rights, or that which conservatives call for in saying you’ll get what you deserve­­––good or bad. Both concepts are controlled by a greater whole. When we apply this to poetry, we may be setting aside an important remainder in the illustration equation. Even within poetry itself when we make the requisite image with words, the desire for a whole match is never fully requited. There is something that falls short or hangs over or both. The way we have, what we have let ourselves have, of reading as though images come through to us simply and fully from words is illustrated by our desire to have an illustration fit what it illustrates. We like to think we get it and get it all.

There is, however, another kind of justice we know from the great narrative romances, and from Twain and the movies, that simply springs the prisoner out of the system. In the terms of illustration, this outside chance would be created by something like the “illustrativity” described in the prelim to these Post Language poems:

The guiding concept in the poetics is a use of the word "illustrativity" to extend beyond and around the term "illustration." This is developed through the way that the suffix "-ative" forms an adjective describing "the habit of performing an action" rather than the simple noun form of an action ("illustration" as a thing which "illustrates"), and then becomes a descriptive noun through the suffix "-ity" expressing state or condition. That is to say: [we are working with] the state and condition of a habitual sense of comprehending illustration.

What is at issue here is the form of reading and, of course, thereby a form for writing. The point of working with this at all is to let ourselves experience another shape that can raise our consciousness about the shape we’re working in. Charles Olson, starting out in a world of multiple metrics, reached for an analogy in physics and philosophy to shift the handle we could have on measure in poetry. There is a path to trace here that leaps through that effort regarding the ear to the one we’re making here for the mind’s eye.

         What Alfred North Whitehead went at in the late 1920s and Charles Olson engaged in mid-century in his effort to open up a sense of measure for a post-Poundian poetics forms an analogous model for this work. Whitehead very scientifically in the language of formal philosophy showed that measurement depends upon a rather arbitrary sense of congruity and an ignorance of the fact that “there are no infinitesimals” (332-3). Olson took this in hand to get freedom from justified syllable counts and to get at “impetus,” Whitehead’s word for length seen through “presentational immediacy” in its impact on the body through “withness” (333). By putting such terms between the thing and its measurement, the philosopher sought to be more exact about what we do when we measure a whole as if we can see the contiguous congruent segments we would number as “extensive quantity.” The feet, though, are never perfectly straight, the inches neither, and “there are no infinitesimals” (as Olson liked to repeat); so, we must count out the contortions (Whitehead 328). Olson overcomes this by grasping the body-oriented “withness” factor and emphasizing vector, strain, and impetus as in a particle physics within measurement. The poet scoots with a Brownian motion right along past the analogy of analogy problem.

         Olson wanted to get away from feet. We are working now in the wake of this in a poetry of grammar beyond such quantities as even Olson used in his great heave. However, we have not yet investigated all of the three elements of poetry that Olson laid out for us in his Greek: “topos / typos / tropos.” He is answering Elaine Feinstein’s seminal question about “Image” when he comes up with that tripartite analysis of what a poet goes on and goes on about (96-97). I would unfold it thus: topos = where the poet is at; typos = what strikes the poet; and tropos = the turn or spin the poet puts on things. Olson is trying to answer: “where does the Image come from?” without resorting to spooks or science to bring it to him. How is the Image to be equal to the task? is more like the question he would ask. The answer he gives in those Greek terms is matched by another he gave in his article about Shakespeare when he writes about “attention” (93). Being the poet Charles Olson and not the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, he never quite nails it down in either place. The poet here begins to insert the extra elements of stance and impetus within the trope of an image given. Olson takes Whitehead’s sense of measure for a model of a sense of image that is—as he likes to say—“equal, that is, to the real itself” (Olson 177-122).

         Now, if Whitehead were not part of this equation, we might be back at the flat sense of “le mot juste” that Pound’s dicta were reduced to by the professors. But Olson goes beyond “the exact word to match what you mean” or “to bring the object before the mind’s eye.” When he says Shakespeare worked at “going in further to the word as meaning and thing,” and not so much at music and image, Olson is pushing into a critique of the way poetry has relied on those two machineries (93). When Anselm Berrigan recently wrote on FaceBook “image is lame,” I had to laugh and think of his mother’s heavy reliance on image in her great works. It is this “can’t write with it; can’t write without it” dilemma of feeling image’s limits and its necessity that Olson was trying to push past by asserting how The Bard had. In his discussion of The Bard’s art, Olson focuses his attention on the poet’s attention: “what it is on” and “how it is on” (93). He comes to the declaration that with Shakespeare we are “in the presence of the only truth which the real can have, its own undisclosed because not apparent character” (94). That might sound like an old transcendental romantic truth if it were not for that focus of attention that set up Olson’s claim for the great one. Both “what it is on” and “how it is on” are said there to be the action of going “further into the word as meaning and thing” (93). The tension there lies in that concept of equivalence, of full adequacy, that Olson is attempting to get beyond when he writes about a truth that is “not apparent.” This truth is the locus of a non-equivalency like the immeasurable distance between the thing and measurement of it that was pointed out by Whitehead. If we experience somehow the mis-measure and get free-er within our metrics, we can also experience the mis-match of image and concept in the twist of each trope. This is more than to say that all measure or all image is approximate; the point is that there is a discrepancy and there lies the point of our search. This is where we dig into the X that we have used to mark the undisclosed.

         And that makes Poe appear for me because of a couple of famous stories that he gave us about just this. Melville was Olson’s guy from that time when American Lit was assembling its root threads, but he said he trusted my teacher Robin Blaser on Image­­––and Blaser’s guy was Poe. Poe should be already with us as we talk about the “undisclosed” and the “apparent”; his story of “The Purloined Letter” is the classic reference point on that. “The Gold Bug” is his story about reasoning and where to dig. Both stories work through not-quite-equivalent equivalencies: a cipher, a letter turned inside out, an ambiguous map, coincidence, or mirror-image backwardness. Poe’s non-Euclidean bent is more obvious in his great long essay “Eureka” but is there in those tales of mystery and imagination too. In that long essay, which he asked the future to see as a “poem,” he undertakes a logical analysis of both the spiritual and the physical senses of a unity of being. At one point, his proof relies upon a demonstration of inequability and discontinuity in radiation from a center (243-5). Poe’s science and logic may not be up to the level of Whitehead’s, but more important for us is the fact that these concepts were there a century and a half ago. They have been part of American Literature since its emergence. Poe, in fact, refers to his story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” at just that point in “Eureka.” His detective Dupin there refers to his “facility” for solving mysteries as being based on “deviations from the plane of the ordinary” (407 n. 26).

         These are not simply deviations but serious critiques of commonly accepted logic. In “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin sees what everyone else is seeing and then allows himself a different look that includes the way that the letter is there where it is not. It seems to me that this is what we need to undertake regarding image; to just see image as approximate is to maintain the myth of a value in equivalencies, but to move to another plane of relations between image and meaning is to allow another measure of what we might call “comprehensivity” rather than just “comprehension.” To make room within image for the inversion or deviation that makes for the kind of open relation that was for awhile called over-determined, that might be possible with a little re-training of our sense of illustration. If it were not overly but also not under-determined by references, the habit might be not broken but unhinged a bit.

         The logic here following Whitehead, Olson, and Poe is this: If the Image that poetry presents is too simply thought to be equivalent to some picture in the mind’s eye adequate to some meaning, then we have a space of discrepancy that is denied. To get this extra space back in, to make new use of it, I have tried putting pictures in the poems as a “withness” other than illustration’s way of being with words. This strategy offers another “if, then” proposition. If the picture here is not equal to the task we ordinarily assign to illustration in pictured image or worded one, then it may open to the kind of reading we have learned to give a good line. Charles Fillmore’s “Parsimony Principle,” borrowed by Ron Silliman in 1982 to discuss “Migratory Meaning” in poetry, explains how we add extra new information to an adjusted sense of the whole in a continual shift of what we think we know in a poem or anything (115). To do this with the new in image’s domain, a space where ordinarily we would be matching a whole to something already there (whether it is through words alone or, by strategic choice, a picture), is to have an opportunity for re-imagining the extra (the de trop) in any image—pictorial or poetic.

The critical thinking in this area of “referentiality” has come lately mostly from the LangPo gang as though it were wholly new. But look back; something has been gaining on us: Olson was there; Poe was there; Olson’s Shakespeare may have been there, too. It is Post Language as you’ll see it here, but it was pre-Language too. In what Mallarmé called “le poème critique,” the poet would want “to mobilize around a thought all the diverse flashes of the mind” (372). The key word there is diverses, one key sense of which is “varying.” The discussion of what the poet meant by this concept of a “critical poem” has mostly run around worry about which of his works demonstrated the concept, but maybe every good poem does in the way it is not too anxious to close down as a whole.

         To put a picture in a poem as part of the poem somehow, to not reflect as whole to whole or as whole to part in parallel apart and explaining from outside, to open out as from within the poem as a lively line does by adding something that changes the whole, this is what became the object of this search. It was Ted Berrigan, Alice’s husband and Anselm’s father among the many other things he was, who, as my teacher at Naropa, said to the class that that was the work of a lively line.

So, one day, naturally, not thinking of Ted at all, just trying to post a picture on FaceBook, I saw how that machinery asked me to “say something about this photo” and got it that I was naturally expected to follow the ordinary relation between picture and words. Being always working at poetry, I thought, “What if I put a poem here instead? What if I mess with that relation in the word ‘about’ just a little? What if Poe’s sense of something beyond illustration, something outside reference, of disclosure by means other than the apparent, were to appear here?” And this little strategy was born. It is imperfect, bound to the uses readers make of it, caught in an open possibility of misunderstanding. You can just look at the pictures as imperfect illustrations, oblique angles on the poems. On FaceBook, many people tend to ignore the “something” said (the poem) and comment on the pictures or just to “like” the photo and let it go at that. The way things are structured there, they can. Here, I am saying something about this to allow that imperfect rendition to work in another way. I am asking your mind to gather something more from the oblique relation going both ways, by not asking the picture to be the whole. I am here suggesting that your mind/body of experience let what it sees go further, as maybe it was doing always already anyway. Go back and check out the pieces from that angle, and let me know what you see.

WORKS CITED

Mallarmé, Stéphane. Divagations. Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1949.

Olson, Charles. Human Universe and other essays. Ed. Donald Allen. NY:

Grove/Evergreen, 1967.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe.  Ed. Harold

Beaver. NY: Penguin, 1976.

Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. NY: Roof, 1987.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected ed. David R.

Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. NY: MacMillan/Free Press, 1978.