Yesterday I received news that New York poet Lewis Warsh has died. He had been ill, I heard from a distance, and I had sent birthday greetings earlier in the month—unanswered. We had a kind of . . . rivalrous, or contestatory, poetic conversation over the decades, concerning basic issues of what counts as poetry, what the poetic calling is. The issue was person versus language, if a bit characterized and reduced. We go way back. I met Lewis in Albion, California, up the coast in California, the summer of 1972. I had moved there with Sandy Berrigan, David, and Kate, and Lewis visited on his way down to Bolinas, where I would also see him, and later in Stinson Beach, sharing a beach house with the cartoonist Greg Irons. When I assumed full editorship of This in 1973, taking a turn toward more complex aesthetics, he sent me several works, which I have scanned below. He would have sent them from Cambridge, where he lodged briefly after the West Coast. We wrote a collaboration (now in the archive), and he published my autobiographical writings—some exceptionally raw—in the “Autobiography” issue of The World (28), with its larger than life format and cover drawing by Alex Katz, New York School period style for sure. For the issue of This (4), he sent three works (he had a particular way of calling poems “works,” each being unique):
Entries tagged with poetry
November 16, 2020
Archive 10: Lewis Warsh in This
September 12, 2020
Archive 06: Leningrad/ATD
There is a proliferation of anniversary dates this time of year. This one remembers our Summer School in Leningrad, August 1989, during the last days of Perestroika and the Soviet Union itself—thirty-one years ago. An international conference of avant-garde poets would not have been possible previously, and its meaning took part in that nearly evacuated moment—which we record in our nonnarrative history, Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union. The grandiosity of our monumental title betrays the actual import of the event, which was all in the details—an occurrence that could happen once only, as its effective history. Which is always potential, always about to have an effect. Arkadii and I are pictured above, at the reading where I read in English followed by his translation. I would now say that it is the distance between the two figures that is most active and alive with possibility.
Today I saw Zinaida Dragomoshchenko’s post on, I assume, the scattering of Arkadii’s ashes in 2012, which adds to the historical prompt for my post. At another moment of distance, I want to read Zina’s tribute in Russian, which I screen capture without translating (and as the Cyrillic alphabet does not work on my site). Zina recalls the scattering of Arkadii’s ashes near the lighthouse at Kronstadt, in the Baltic off Petersburg, which has since closed, “but all the beacons of the world are available.” I wonder if the line in quotes, “Vossoyedineniye potoka,” translated as “stream reunion,” is from Arkadii’s works. Streams are coming together, converging. She returns to Petersburg and, speaking to herself, imagines the sun’s closing of a circle and a return “endless swimming” in the stream of Okeanos. She ends, in convergence across the space of eight years, “Svetlaya pamyat’!,” “Bright memory!”
Notes
Photographs: BW and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, International Summer School, Leningrad, August 1989. Photographer: t/k.
Permission to reproduce screen shot.
April 21, 2020
Document 85: Ashbery Lesson
Introduction
To be a writer and write things
You must have experiences you can write about.
Just living won’t do. I have a theory
About masterpieces, how to make them
At very little expense, and they’re every
Bit as good as the others. You can
Use the same materials of the dream, at last.
It’s a kind of game with no losers and only one
Winner—you. First, pain gets
Flashed back through the story and the story
Comes out backwards and woof-side up. This is
No one’s story! At least they think that
For a time and the story is architecture
Now, and then history of a diversified kind.
A vacant episode during which the bricks got
Repointed and browner. And it ends up
Nobody’s, there is nothing for any of us
Except that fretful vacillating around the central
Question that brings us closer,
For better or worse, for all this time.
—John Ashbery
Notes and links
Text: John Ashbery, “Introduction,” in A Wave (New York: Penguin, 1985): 34.
Image: Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1977.
Links: Entry 11: “For a Left Ashbery Critique”
Entry 14: “The Perfect Ashbery (Review)”
Entry 36: “Ashbery Alpha and Omega”
March 23, 2020
Entry 40: Isolate Flecks
It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given offNo one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car—William Carlos Williams
21 March 2020
What I am to think about, in a room with others, is the nature of Zero Hour—our new life. Our colloquy is an opening to that question.
22 March 2020
The poet often sees oneself as an isolato, “a person who is physically or spiritually isolated from others.” We are collectively isolated, as well.
This is the common condition we have sequestered ourselves within. These are the occasions for what I am now writing: here begin.
23 March 2020
Putting on Vivaldi to get the morning started, I recognize the theme music Delta Airlines uses on its transatlantic flights, to CDG, FRA, or AMS.
Homeless panhandler on corner of southbound Lodge offramp and Forrest reaches out without direction as I round the corner, and falls over.
“With history piling up so fast, almost every day is the anniversary of something awful.” Under this rubric I find words I intend to use . . .
24 March 2020
Imagining our isolation through multiple visual maps: blue and gray dots colliding; exponential curves ticking upward; geography filling in at a rate.
The graph of deaths doubling every two days, every three or five days, every ten days—these are abstractions, what do they mean in the event?
Although concern increases with the incidence of disease, the percentage gap in belief stays constant at about 40% between red and blue states.
Am I a nonperson in a mask and hat, or the announcement of a social order to come? The learning curve for what counts as human is constant. … More
December 2, 2019
Document 81: An Example
I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow. … More
September 3, 2017
Document 66: The Bungalows
[In memory of John Ashbery]
THE BUNGALOWS
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.
They are the same aren’t they,
The presumed landscape and the dream of home
Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,
Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes
Became so extraneous and so near
To create a foreground of quiet knowledge
In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that
Will sign for old age
And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.
July 3, 2017
Document 52: Plan B
Plan B is Poem of the Week!
Mark Olival-Bartley has published the first 22 (of 101) tercets of “Plan B,” my poem refusing normalization after the 2016 election, in his Poem of the Week series in Munich. I will read it, and Franziska Ruprecht will perform the poem in German translation, along with other work, on Thursday, July 6, 7:30 PM, at the JYM in Munich. Click here for more information.
November 21, 2016
Document 48: I Saw (Chicago)
Chicago, 18–20 November 2016
Friday, November 18
Jennifer Rupert
Chris Glomski
Saturday, November 19
40 Years, part 2: Gender. Race. Identity @ Rhona Hoffman
Courttney Cooper @ Western Exhibitions
Four Large Drawings @ Western Exhibitions
Ania Jaworska @ VOL
Sara Greenberger Rafferty @ Document
McArthur Binion @ Kavi Gupta
Lisa Nankivil @ McCormick Gallery
Diana Guerrero-Maciá @ Carrie Secrist
Anne Lindberg @ Carrie Secrist
Justin John Greene @ Andrew Rafacz
Theaster Gates @ Richard Gray
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago … More
August 7, 2016
Entry 23: The Last Time I Saw Bill
DREAM
Broken headline column:
“YOU ARE GO
IN TO END”
Allen Ginsberg dives through the space hatch.
I watch him from the rim, hear his voice
trail a statement “MAN ISSSSSSSSSS . . . . . . . . ”
as he disappears into dot-hood.
The Poets—Anne Waldman, me, “all The Poets”—float
in interstellar space—a substance I
can touch, a fine sheen. & then I’m up against the sun,
its soft orange neon glow. “THE SUN,” I say, “IS BIG!”
Pause, a chair sails silent past me & into solar radiance.
“CHAIR INTO SUN!” I remark (a parody of big
poetical remark).
Then I am back on Earth,
speed-skating on the “Power-Cones.”
—from This 8 (1977); see also Portrait and Dream, p. 154
I had come to New York with a purpose—to visit Ted Greenwald, whose health had been failing (see here), and to make contact with people and see art (see here). I was not expecting to see Bill, whom I knew had been living partly in New York but whom I had not seen for some time (not since we read at MOCAD in Detroit, an event so poorly framed and executed—not by Bill, of course, who sounded great—that I only remember it with displeasure). One of my contacts mentioned that Bill would be reading with Kyle Schlesinger at a gallery in Chelsea, and sent an email with time and place, to begin at 5:30. … More
I was in New York for a purpose—for one thing, I had not been for a while and it was time to catch up. At a conference in Boston, I received a phone call from Kit Robinson, in the middle of a session on surrealism no less, that Ted Greenwald’s health was failing. I made plans to visit as soon as the semester was over; a day was arranged, a plane flight, a hotel booking, and other appointments fell into place. I’ve outlined what I did over the four-day weekend here. The time was specified for 2 P.M. Ted was chipper over the phone: “I have an earlier appointment, but I can see you then.” He books his time like a New Yorker, I noted; I don’t, in some unstated way assuming every event is its own uniqueness, even if that has long since become unworkable as a way to manage time. (So it came to pass that I work the day shift on the assembly line of Modernity Inc., headquarters in Detroit. But what’s the difference? Differing cultural styles of time management all depend on the same passage of time.) I was nervous about the event; he had not overprepared it. … More
Poetics
The Grand Piano
