:: The Cannon
Political/Social Demonstration of the Time of Writing
The role of poetry in society is a secret doctrine—One is the visitor, yet the man reading first takes up most of the time. At a reception following the reading, a student engaging one, says, “It seems to me your work is like Gertrude Stein.” The man, one’s reading partner, immediately inserts himself and says, “Gertrude Stein. Certainly not! Gertrude Stein is the human mind—she [oneself] is merely human nature. [Reading of] someone dying of AIDS!” he scoffs, “Her writing is human nature, not the human mind,” he instructs the student. At a reading with him a few days later, he insists that he will go first and “read for a very long time!”
Any interpretation or reference to this instance is merely experience/anecdotal, it is of human nature—therefore impermanent.
“As, one example, Godard’s ‘The immediate is chance. At the same time it is definitive. What I want is the definitive by chance.’”1
the man’s death—from
being sick at a young age—as not a
senseless point—not to—
by desire—reach such a thing in
that way2
This segment is from a long poem, way, in which each line and poem-segment is qualified (changed from within) by, and in, the entire structure of the extended writing. Yet the unplanned, forward structure is at once entirely changed by the minute, present-time unit. Real-time events ‘recorded’ (as only events as written, fragments that are sound patterns) were frequently so minute (with the exception of a friend dying of AIDS) that in passing, they could not be remembered later, had existence only as writing. Any event is qualified by the future even—in the writing itself.
One feels a sense of despair—trying to unravel a dichotomy that is despair. It’s impossible to undo it because it is similar to the conventions that exist.
I have to unravel it as that is (one’s) existing at all—interior instruction.
Yet someone else thinks that maintaining the dichotomy hierarchical is existing—for them.
Seated in the audience, much of which is volatile—two men are to arise—yet a destitute man is lying on the floor (he’s come in because it’s cold outside), he’s stinking, only a few teeth, drunk raving, lying he has no arms
drunk he can’t hear their asking him to be quiet.
The armless is dragged raving from the room by a crowd of men and put outside on the street. A young woman in the crowd comments that some people, disturbed by this, are voicing “sentimentality.”
When one of the two men arises—an outsider, strong, frisky, who has arms, also drunk, rises voluble and is dragged from the room and thrown into the street—he returns with a huge lionish cat in his arms and says “Look at this big cat” and is hurled through the door again—One of these men later says to oneself “And to think that you noticed this—there at a time” (one had written it in a segment—he hears it being read): as if one did not exist—as if only their existing occurred then.
He is no more responsible for that occurrence than oneself, although he was regarded as ‘in charge’ of that context in which one was an outsider. One as the outsider sees oneself as observing actively and at the same time being inactive in the past event and the insider as active yet unobservant there. The event itself occurs ‘between’ these.
(My) intention—in poetry—is to get complete observing at the same instant (space) as it being the action.
There’s no relation between events and events. Any. They are separate. Events that occur—(regardless of their interpretation—). (But also that they are at once only their interpretation and only their occurrence.)
Radicals in the sixties and seventies used to speak at the same time when authorities were speaking to change what the officials were saying.
Outside(-events) is bounced to be occurrence, itself.
Paul Celan was described (I can’t remember the source of this interpretation) as being essentially conflicted (just in written—or in spoken word also?) in his own language, German being the language of the nation (his own) that had exterminated his people. (His written language was) articulation within the language that is seen to be oppression/to be separation from that which one loves.
The dichotomy is impermanence/separation; a distinction made, for example, by Bob Perelman, between writing based in the “experiential” (thus without authority or as the ‘authority’ of the bogus self only)—
and writing that is articulation of/and as social polemic (the writing of which is then regarded as not being “narrative”—the word “narrative” used as if that were anecdotal per se). Yet in the distinction there is an equivalence drawn between ‘anecdotal’ and formal innovation itself.
Two sentences from Bob Perelman’s talk at the Assembling Alternatives conference at the University of New Hampshire: “This equation of social power, or say social intelligibility—the familiar—and poetic value challenges much of our poetics.” “The equation is less clear in any positive sense, i.e., that social marginality produces good poetry.”
The conception of a normative language as being dominant perspective (conception that there is such a dominant perspective; and that such is or should be determining) is hierarchical conception per se. I think that power is the poetic issue or narrative of this period. An aspect of the conflict broached in that narrative is: the continual transmogrification of gesture, making something into an intellectual concept that can’t simply exist there, only the concept of the gesture respected.
In academic terminology, for example, there is now a category spoken of as “other,” the assumption being that we are not that and therefore this area cannot be rendered, or even broached except from a distance. As if ‘we’ are of the world that articulates. The implication even is that if one is “other”—while a recipient of sympathy and elucidation, or lip-service—one being outside (as minorities, or lower class, at any rate experientially) has no repute or credibility, cannot speak. The assumption is that language be polemical or discursive exposition as it/one has no (or exposes there being no) intrinsic relation to the subject “other.”
Yet that is one.
Distinction as ‘doctrine’ and ‘experience’ is the conventional social separation here; that is, it is the way our experience is culturally described. The other side of this coin (the camp of “emotion”) bolsters the same view of reality but with an opposing allegiance: that is, the ‘opposite’ view (opposite from: ideology as basis) is that emotion/narrative/experience are aspects of “self” that, being viewed ‘inherently,’ appear not to be the same as (appear not to have any relation to) outside events. The personal, the confessional, is an “expression” of an inherent self as if that self were the cause (of events, of cognition), thus (in my view, and in that also of Perelman presumably) mistaking the nature of self in reality.
Yet either causal agent (self-scrutinizing ‘conceptualization’ or ‘concept of personal self’) are inaccurate as revelation of events—events’ natures and relation to each other. “Stillness of that order, perhaps a node peculiar to the mind alone.”3 They are aspects of hierarchical categorization that merely duplicate that categorization.
Giving a reading from As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen—(Deer Night), which is an intricate interweave, I included a passage, an overlay itself of seeing an impression (image) of blue dye on the surface of the eye only, dye that in fact in the circumstance is infused within the left side of the body of the person who thrashes being turned on a table.
A man speaking to me afterward referred only