Most psychoanalytic theory now is a contemporary version of the etiquette book; improving our internal manners, advising us on our best sexual behaviour (usually called maturity, or mental health, or a decentered self). It is, indeed, dismaying how quickly psychoanalysis has become the science of the sensible passions, as though the aim of psychoanalysis was to make people more intelligible to themselves rather than to realize how strange they are. When psychoanalysis makes too much sense, or makes sense of too much, it turns into exactly the symptom it is trying to cure: defensive knowingness. But there is nothing like sexuality, of course, for making a mockery of our self- knowledge. In our erotic lives, at least, our preferences do not always accord with our standards. We are excited by the oddest things, and sometimes people.

Poetry, of course, does not seek to cure anything, though what Phillips calls “defensive knowingness” can be as much a problem in the world of poetry as it can in the realm of human behavior. And there is no question that there are times when poetry makes too much sense or makes sense of too much. This has nothing to do with what is usually understood as style: Charles Bernstein’s poetry, for instance, falls prey to this as much as, say, Anthony Hecht’s. Poetry that seeks to make itself intelligible to itself — a poetry of (self-) knowledge — runs a great risk. An overt instance of this (though recently I think the instances are more subtle and varied) was the Olson/Duncan conflict as seen in “Against Wisdom As Such.”

But what about poetry that seeks to realize its strangeness to itself? Track, to a certain extent, is that kind of poetry. Just a year ago, I see, I spoke of the poem as a “series of controlled discontinuities,” which is precisely a making manifest or a realizing of strangeness. The incursion of a certain kind of pleasure/terror, akin to the strong incursions of eros into one’s life, is registered through a shift in the verbal patterning, until it potentially becomes a part of the patterning. Appropriately, Phillips has a chapter (“Dreams”), in which he tropes on Kafka’s parable of the leopards in the temple. The question is: what does it take to reveal that strangeness?; or, how do we know, and signify, that strangeness has come. Incursions into the poem of sort I mean are almost by definition uncanny, whether experienced on the level of the visual or aural text, or both.


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10/9/00


But what exactly is the nature of these uncanny incursions? What freight do they carry? Henry [Weinfield], responding to the material from Vol. 2 that I gave him recently, says that “I want Norman to be there more than you want to be. You’re still sometimes flirting with a disembodied poetics, the poetic of language poetry, but you’re just as much a humanist as you say I am.” He goes on to speak of “a poetry that both cedes the initiative to words and yet is committed to being here.” I responded by saying that in Track, I am trying to deconstruct the binary opposition between a (humanist?) poetry of presence and a (postmodern?) poetry of rupture, absence, etc. Thus, it would seem to me that the incursions of which I speak may appear as either postmodern gestures or expressions of “Norman” being there. Procedure or pattern, deduced, for the most part, arithmetically, is a set-up. But it’s also, undeniably, the structure, and structure is still what it’s all about. Why? Because what we “loveth best” reveals itself (sometimes coming from an outside, a scary event) only against or through or coming suddenly into the structure. So, indeed, the uncanny is heimlich in its unheimlich nature, insofar as it reveals itself as the best (and therefore first) beloved.


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1/27/01


How to end the second volume, to say nothing of the poem as a whole? The last movement seems transitional, though I’m pleased with it. The idea of address didn’t go quite where I expected it, though in a typical Track trajectory, it turned on itself, encompassed some repetition (or entered into a previously seen dimension) and then went “outward” (or at least gestured that way). The “numerology” continues to be slightly skewed — again, not a problem. In the light of what’s gone on so far in ##, I’m reminded of Kafka’s parable “On Parables”: “When the sage says: ‘Go over’, he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.” And as we know, it gets worse: “But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.” Indeed.

If the labor were worth it — neither an actual place nor a fabulous yonder, and yet in this poem, I find myself “going over” willy-nilly. It is as if (ah!) the poem is always creating a potential within itself, a fold in the real (the composed). Hell opens to receive the fallen angels and in doing so, becomes that place. Or Satan lands, and in that crash landing hell opens up around him. But the space here is not hell, in any conventional sense, though it may be related to the mind’s own place. Between the actual and the fabulous (Kansas is not the real and Oz is not the fabulous, contrary to popular belief), there is, for lack of a better term, a parabolic reality, and its fundamental quality is order, the composed — form and the breaking of form both. In a certain respect, we can say that the poem is always in and journeying toward a Promised Land. So I ask again, even presuming I’ve just learned something (doubtful): how does it end?


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1/29/01


Further question: would it end when it so fully repeats itself that it’s clear the serpent has its tail in its mouth? I hope not: the degree of predictability there would be disappointing and uninteresting, to say the least. An exhaustion of invention. No, better to acknowledge its interminability and simply cut it off at some point, abandoning it in the truest sense of Valery’s remark. But that too has its problems, which are the opposite of those that arise (triumphalism) in seeking some grand finale. The answer lies elsewhere — and not, I think, somewhere even between the poles I just described. For how does one represent an elsewhere? Don’t ask the author of The Utopian Moment. Don’t even try to find him — he’s long gone.


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8/1/01

Part of the problem of being a “poet/critic” lies in the heightened awareness and concomitant self-consciousness of the current “issues” or “conditions” in the “production” of new poetry. The quotation marks say it all. Not only is beauty difficult but irony is difficult as well, for it devolves too often into a corrosive attitude, a sour stomach, a jaded perspective. Yet we crave the new: that which may well emerge from the circumstances we can describe, but which nevertheless open the door to an elsewhere that is and is not strange and familiar. And this itself in an old story.

Just today, maybe yesterday, I was reading somewhere about the value of repetition. Not in the Kierkegaardian sense, but more along the lines of Augustine — that it tells us we’re at least going somewhere. Here is Augustine: “A mode of assuring the seeker that he is on the way and is not merely wandering blindly through the chaos from which all form rises.” Odd but true. If Track is a grand set of loops or repetitive fractals, then process will take precedence, and we are faced with the sort of formalism I’ve always found rather dubious. My skepticism in the face of my own methodology could stop me dead. Does poetry only tell us what we already know? What we want to hear? Even when we’re discomfited, uneasy? Partly it’s a matter of what Bronk, Williams, Weinfield speak of — the poem buried beneath the language, the certainty in the all-uncertain, the desert music. Well and good. One finds then, when all is working, the same familiar tune. Or a prize one wrests from chaos, noise, formlessness. Is that why you returned so long ago to the order of numbers? That sureness…

I don’t know. At times I seem to falter so easily; I put my foot in my mouth; I’m so dumb. Not even, as I said at the outset of the poem, too smart for my own good. Just a schlemiel or worse in every dimension. Oh, I know I’m not. But to be competent, confident, have a few folks in life or poetry to rely on me, and to come through for them. Fine. And to be patient and do your work. Fine. ———————

Several minutes go by. Dissatisfaction. Track is neither autobiographical grousing, linguistic game, nor cultural pronouncement. It is not the voice of the self, the voice of the other, the voice of a ghost, the voice of language. No, none of the above. It is not a grand refusal, but it’s not a gracious acceptance of the world’s invitation either. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I don’t know why I started it and I don’t know why I stay with it. Nor, for that matter, why “it” stays with me. If it does.


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2/19/02


The trajectory of the final volume — an approach to or attempt to establish a home, a pleroma, which is a resting place in all senses of the term, which is also an uncovering or excavation of what had been such — thus simultaneously anticipatory and retrospective. Then broken, ruptured by the immediate, the exigency of the present, in a movement that is a work of mourning and an attempt to get one’s bearings, in the end folding back, returning “to the text or act of love.”

In previous volumes, some sort of form — formal marker — would continue to break/continue — continue to break — break to continue. The principle of repetition would demand this again, but also would be contented if another instance or type of repetition were to occur instead. But what? Track vacillates between a hypostatizing discourse and an indirectly personal discourse, though neither of these terms, strictly speaking, is accurate. As for looking forward to an “ending,” “closure” is and is not desirable, is and is not possible. This is not, after all, Dante, but neither is it Duncan. Closer, I guess, to Zuk or Johnson but substance and form are still different enough. “I” will come to a number or a number will come to “me.” Which is to say a form, bearing, I suppose, its content, will make itself manifest. It should call, which may be right where we are currently. As usual, we have been here before.

(NO) Message from the throne.


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3/12/02


Preparing for my presentation at ASU. Rereading Joe Conte’s Unending Design, which I continue to admire immensely. His typology remains very helpful in thinking about Track. In most respects, the work conforms to his definition of the serial poem of the “infinite” variety, despite the fact that I would like to bring it to a definite end. This leads to certain issues… — oh well, maybe, since he correlates Spicer’s haunted house to the “finite” series, p’raps Track is more that sort of text. One can drive oneself crazy with this stuff, though the poem is certainly serial in most respects. Except that the numerology operative within each movement relates it to procedural forms too — one sets an arbitrary, predetermined rule or rules. Anyway, Conte says, thinking first of Creeley’s Pieces, that discontinuity in the series “disrupts any internal development or progression of its materials. The sections of a series are not hierarchical. There is not initiation, climax or terminus precisely because there can be no development. In the sequence, the reader must, so to speak, enter through the front door and exit through the rear; but in a series such as Robert Duncan’s Passages, the reader is encouraged to select any of these ‘passages’ as an entrance. The reader does not require the information of any one section in order to comprehend the others.”

So how true is this of my work-in-progress? I guess I would accept most of the above statements as applicable. One could begin anywhere, though in later sections they wouldn’t be aware of the repetition from earlier ones. I’ll say there’s no hierarchy, but I’m not prepared to say yea or nay in regard to development, because there can be all sorts of development, both formal and thematic, and I might not (maybe best not) be aware of them all. One can only be one’s own critic to some extent, and not too much at all is best. The degree of “hybridization” amongst these postmodern forms is very great. The form presents itself, and continues to do so. The proceduralism was always intended to be disrupted, though intentional disruptions were also subject to dictation, chance, etc. The tension between the predetermined and the aleatory remains strong, at least as I experience it, however it ends up looking.


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5/29/02


The “division material” repeats itself forward, not backward, which doesn’t make it symmetrical as fanning forward and backward from the center (the 16ers). So that’s how the big # of Powers goes (is going, will go).

But — this machine — these concerns — is it a system-monster that eats everything as it marches toward some endless horizon, beyond which is some cloudy Absolute? A Kafkan fate, which one can imagine abandoning, as K his novels. With pleasure or regret? Shame? To love the ordinary up to the limits of (one’s) language. To love invention, even if it feels derivative.

“All that’s left is pattern* (shoes?).”

To understand that the shocks are to be expected, are and are not shocks. And that this makes it beautiful.