- with asides on airs
by William Carlos Williams
and John Ashbery -
Verisimilitude (Or, How Like It Would Be to Be Like to Like)
So, is it anything like the one from which you’re taking a break to read this? For that’s what we’re striving for: a repetition of the whole damn thing – from the ABC’s prior to procreation on up to the brinks and thresholds beyond which it all winds or unwinds back into the jambalaya of some sullen god who, if not altogether clueless, is hesitant to set once more the clock atick, remembering penance, musical theater, the stuffy airs of the bourgeoisie…But in the moment it’s written it’s rewritten. And hell, this time we’ll concentrate on the rewrites. Maybe we’ll even lose our wits, our minds, and quit harping that like is to be so very much like to like.
Too Close an Angle
(Stuck In the Mirror Stage for
Want of a Mirror)
“Why continue arguing about it? It’s nonsensical simply because it lacks sense, as I’ve told you again and again.” In this way, then, we tip our hats to each other, though not at too close an angle. For once, lacking foresight, I fell into the trough dug by your own lack of self-composure. (Later that day, as I remember, you did the same with respect to mine. It was nice of me not to say “we’re even.”) But soon we are made to forget our petty arrangements, when something flighty, airborne or what have you shits on our parade of two (on one of us, anyway – can’t remember which). Makes us forget what we’ve been griping about. (“Parade of two?” That’s not right – we’re facing each other…)
At the Beginning of the Poem
At the beginning of the poem one decides whether the subject is to be painted wise or wizened…or perhaps “wise” in the sense of “smart-ass.” Sometimes it’s no more than an assertion of a predilection – that one fancies urbane, erudite or otherwise worthy of notice – for, say, British as opposed to American spelling. (In Canada, so I’ve heard, they use both and don’t worry too much about it. Half of them, for that, are likely unaware as to what the very fact of a choice is to be attributed. Bunch of unlettered, kayaking scruffs up there, with their ridiculous undipthonged vowels and their unveering latitudes that stretch poleward through tundra up to Santa.)
From Scratch
- of the things that the
tale left behind the first time
it was related -
We create it all over from scratch – a new scratch, that is, onto which we allow the things of our mind to reemerge, cleansed in the rivers of the imagination…Ah, get on with it. In fact, they’re besmirched with crud the tale left as it was told the first time. For the tale has a backend the same as yourself. (I won’t tell you where you came from – go ask Luther. Suffice it to say that the tale is God – or God’s tail.) The things I’m stacking about are of my self as of yours. Make their reemergence your own! That godly tale or ungodly tail – what do you know of its fact, its event? The only, the proper doubling over is the one made for the jest. May our laughter be as much theirs as mine and yours!
Noch Einmal die Historie
History is the name of that splendid resort we revert to for substantiation. This season it’s all beachcombers and promenades, and teenagers on the lookout for a legal or semi-legal way of staying for free, with their gaudy, 50-cent combs, off on prom break, welcomed neither by the vacationing gentry nor by the paid hotel establishment, scarcely old enough to grasp the niceties of check-out time or of how much to leave for a tip, yet knowledgeable of the latest sugar substitute as yet unsampled by the fat slobs with kids whose excuses for laziness are no more substantial than the flaccid stories they tell to pay their travel expenses.
The Doubling Over Doubles Over
The poem: a second laughter, a reminiscence of the first, so to prose as prose is to the world (to the tale, that is, before its inscription): a doubling over of the doubling over. At times it’s like an undoing of prose – a recovery of things prior to the names we gave them. Yet the poems of a serener age are chary not to clutch at the lost tale and know that recovery is supposition – hence, the mirth churned up via bad attempts. Where prose would yet discern the tale, the poem dishes it up to prose in a soufflé with captions: “Here is the book you wrote. Now eat it!” Prose smirks at the demand, though not in the manner of the poem, which laughs at its own high-handed insouciance.
Green My Sun, Ma!
From the seemingly endless yet ultimately finite set of statements about the sun that have been made in poems and lodged in their corners, one’s task is to fathom, to stumble upon other such statements that have not yet been made – other possible statements. Or not so much new statements of one’s own contrivance as a theory as to what sort of statements have been made and why it is not likely or reasonable that one would think to make other sorts of statements. For instance, we don’t say, “Green my sun, Ma!” or, “It suns one to know how the river’s booked.” (Bob Dylan sings, “The sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken!” Sheer bullshit, until one concedes the pun on the side-meaning of yellow for “cowardly”.)
Don’t Let Him Remain Unheard in the West!
- introducing Wu
Bai - Taiwanese guitarist,
singer, songwriter -
Wake up, America – your pop music is dead! The old banalities have been rehashed all too thoroughly. There’s no blood left in those stones. But behold yon orb, newly aloft in the East: Wu Bai, his name; his magnitude, 500. Verily I tell you, if the world were to end tomorrow, self-extinguished in a pestilence brought on by our latter-day alchemists and facilitated by multinational edutainment cabals (the news, etc.) – in such a great calamity as this, the loss of losses, the sadness of sadnesses, the single greatest tragedy of world history and humankind would be that Wu Bai, the sublime Wu Bai, had gone unheard in the West.
A Proem in Prose
to the Prose Poem (as Posed by
the Poem in its Prose)
“Length matters.” If not with respect to male prowess in things sexual, then at least in terms of poetry and its sliding back into prose. I could set everything up, as I’m now doing, so that it fell into place metrically and without remainder. Still, you wouldn’t hear it unless hearing it were what I expected of you. But who could then say it weren’t a poem? If I told you it were, you’d take me at my word (assuming, of course, that you give to the reading what I, the writer, give to the writing – just as much as I give to it, is what I mean). But if the game went on for too long you’d back off: “A toilet’s on display. He calls it art!” Sheer brevity, though, draws you into the conceit.
Shadows and Aspects, Shadowy Aspects
The poem allows us to conceive that our own names – the names, that is, we’ve allotted ourselves – are superior to the ones that they replace (assuming that there were, indeed, originals). The poem kills the gods that it creates in the killing, and the poem’s moon filters through them as through barely discernible statuary. They edify us, though they scare our children, who are then impelled to ask questions we’d prefer not to answer as we’re not all that sure ourselves. They, come to speak of it, will return us our selves in later poems with a calm, knowing smirk – at a time in that not so, so distant future when they’ll approach us to find us slumbering in shadows, in aspects of our fallen gods.
The Father Who’s Never Come Home
“Since the beginning my daddy’s never come home!” My three-year-old niece, speaking Mandarin, elicited guffaws with her grand declaration. She meant that he hadn’t been home that day, answering her father’s friend in mild astonishment that he didn’t know enough not to have to ask after a person of such general importance as her father. Made me think of the Lacanian two fathers – the mythic hero whose homecoming you await, and the vulgar one you actually get – the nice guy with a middling temper who raises pigeons (a dirty hobby, yes, but there are dirtier). My real dad fishes, teaches history. The other one wrote fugues, invented the sonnet…
What Once Was Called the Prose Poem
This string of beads you’ve just finished thumbing is the outcome of an early AM hypothesis concerning the poem –its births, its rebirths – and its necessary relation to speech, to writing, to written speech, to prose. The ideas were initially recorded in unrhyming lines of ten and twelve syllables. Hard returns were subsequently eliminated, and the verse was allowed to subside – coolly, uniformly – into unindented prose paragraphs, which were then carefully but minimally edited, the goal having been to lessen any poetic plasticity that might have jarred with the blockish arrangement. A rethinking of what once was called the “prose poem.”
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