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The Peculiar Commonplace: On Two Lines from George Oppen
to save the commonplace save myself Tyger Tyger still burning in me burning — from “The Poem” These two lines of George Oppen’s, from his final book Primitive, encapsulate, among other things, his poetic stance. Oppen’s objective, from his first to last book, was unwavering: he sought the commonplace, which is, if not altogether […]
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from My Proust Vocabulary
If Memory, Like a Laborer Trying to establish a solid foundation amidst floods might allow us to compare that which follows. The stolen tail feathers of my knick-knack. With perspective a ready bauble. So much better to admire an orchid, that conspicuous lip with a fringed margin called cattleya. With a stepladder, I might fetch […]
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What Is a Community?
The first time I realized I was a member of a community of writers occurred in the mid-1980s when I read a letter to the editor in the Detroit Metro Times, at that time an alternative weekly (but now, a franchise).(1) The letter-writer complained bitterly about an alleged coterie of writers dominating Kofi Natambu’s journal […]
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A Fitful Beginning: On Philip Jenks’s The Elms Left Elm Street
The Elms Left Elm Street , by Philip Jenks. Plane Buckt Press, Takoma Park Maryland, 1994. On the subject of Philip Jenks, an email correspondent recently wrote me this: “I sometimes divide the world into people who love Phil’s work & people who don’t,” adding that this division is “a narrow but helpful measure.” […]
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The Book of Resemblances
I found this written in pencil at the bottom of page 82 of The Book of Resemblances: ‘To be what flees from being.’ 30.10.98. The words must have come to me while reading, on the same page, the following that I partly wrote over: ‘To read what flees even from reading.’ What I […]
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O Rose, I’m sick too: notes on William Blake’s “The Sick Rose”
I recently spent some time re-reading William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. In the course of my reading, I became obsessed with his poem “The Sick Rose.” Initially I wasn’t sure what accounted for my fascination with this short, ostensibly simple, poem. But the more I lingered with it, the more I was […]
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The Kafka Sutra
Introductory In the beginning the Lord of Lords created men and women, and in the form of commandments in one hundred thousand chapters laid down rules for the proper governance of the Dharma, Artha, and Kama. Those rules which treated of Dharma were disclosed by Swayambhu Manu; those governing Artha were compiled by Brihaspati; and […]
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On Joseph Massey’s Property Line
Joseph Massey’s Property Line (published by Jess Mynes’ Fewer & Further Press) begins & ends in the same paradoxical realization: that the experience of landscape, while so close & near, is only perceivable through the perception of its being perceived. Check part II of the final poem, “Greyhound, North Through Sonoma County:” Window night makes […]
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From The Trick Cyclist
Shadow Verbs Tea on trays, torches en fuego on the patio, women, faint outlines on the wall. Night nigh and one-by-one the stars, the itchy rasp of crickets in the grass. With each sip, three lines on his forehead, thoughts: Oh, the pleasantries of peasants, bare tree-tops in the fall. Everyone a stranger. The last […]