The Cat’s Just Fine He Never Left

by Will Hubbard

It is true, as Charles Simic says at the beginning of his review of The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, that publishers’ recent affinity for printing elegantly bound, thousand-page editions of a single 20th century poet could make for some tedious reads.

Perhaps it all began with Donald Allen’s brilliantly edited Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, which at 560 pages still managed to garner the National Book Award for 1972. The sheer magnitude of O’Hara output before his death at age 40 never ceases to astound me, and his Collected is a book that, because of its variousness, breadth, and complexity, I can open at random and always find something striking, something new. For me, a book that contains everything a person wrote in one mode takes on a holy aura, and like any holy book, I would never question its size.

More practically, it seems clear that just as libraries periodically bind together multiple editions of popular magazines, these mammoth Collected editions are a way to preserve and provide useful point of reference to a complex and varied matrix that, more and more, is a poet’s life’s work. With Ezra Pound’s “only the quality of the emotion endures” in mind, I am probably not alone in thinking that time, or more precisely the evolution of manners and usages of language in time, is the best and only reasonable filter of a writer’s varied output.

young dusan simic

After his initial thoughts on publishing trends, Simic, the newly anointed Poet Laureate of the United States, moves into a less venomous than simply dismissive review of Robert Creeley’s two volume Collected Poems, the second volume of which was published last year by the University of California, about a year after the poet’s death in 2005.

While lauding the “wild, pure, original voice” of Creeley’s first major collection For Love, Simic goes on to call his next book Words “uneven”, and everything in and after his next collection, Pieces, “colloquial speech… conceal[ing] a paucity of content”, and in a final convenient and familiar critical missive, “ideas about poetry confused with poetry itself.”

While actually providing useful impressions of For Love and Creeley’s ideas about poetic consciousness, Simic dismisses the ten-part poem “A Step” in Pieces as a crass interpretation of Kerouac’s “an undisturbed flow of the mind,” conveniently reproducing only the poem’s first three parts and calling them “slight." I have personally always loved “A Step”, and thus reproduce it here in full:

A Step

Things
come and go.

Then
let them.

Having to—
what do I think
to say now.

Nothing but
comes and goes
in a moment.

*

Cup.
Bowl.
Saucer.
Full.

*

The way into the form,
the way out of the room—

The door, the hat,
the chair, the fact...

*

Sitting, waves on the beach,
or else clouds, in the sky,

a road, going by,
cars, a truck, animals, in crowds.

*

The car
moving
the hill
down

which yellow
leaves
light forms
declare.

*

Car coughing moves with
a jerked energy forward.

*

Sit. Eat
a doughnut.

Love’s consistency
favor’s me.

*

A big crow on the
top of the tree’s
form more stripped
with leaves gone
overweighs it.

Pieces of cake crumbling
in the hand trying to hold
them together to give each
of the seated guests a piece.

*

Willow, the house, an egg—
what do they make?

Hat, happy, a door—
what more.

A friend wrote me recently, excited by this very poem, saying it clarified for him the Creeley quotation--form is never more than an extension of content--in Charles Olson’s famed essay on poetics, “Projective Verse”.

It is 4:23 a.m. and I am reading my poems to a cat

My friend's letter went on to characterize “A Step”, I think quite aptly, as an “instruction in wonder”. There is a real sense in which two simple stanzas like “The car/ moving/ the hill/ down// which yellow/ leaves/ light forms/ declare” instructs the reader how to both view a striking image and speak of it in a way that is equally striking.

The syntax of a phrase like “which yellow leaves light forms declare” would be at home in Shakespeare, yet Creeley’s insistence on the short line, in disjointing the phrase, does far greater justice to the sheer sensual complexity of such an utterance. It is as much lexical archaeology as it is word play, and in this sense satisfies William Carlos Williams’ injunction to contemporaneity, make it new.

The educative aspect of Pieces, however, offends Simic: “Creeley…bec[a]me a teacher-preacher type giving us classroom demonstrations of how poetry, written according to a particular theory of poetry, works.” Though I enjoyed the pleasure of actually being a student of Robert Creeley’s, I don’t think any student of poetry (which Creeley considered himself to be all his life) would object to a lesson in prosody as beautiful as the following two quatrains toward the end of “A Step”:

A big crow on the
top of the tree’s
form more stripped
with leaves gone
overweighs it.

Pieces of cake crumbling
in the hand trying to hold
them together to give each
of the seated guests a piece.

Though Simic admits to wanting from Creeley “more nicely observed details and memorable stories,” the stanzas above exhibit an attention to detail unattainable by more ornamented language precisely because they recreate the space and movement of the images through syntax rather than static sensual detail.

The image of the crow in the first quatrain seems literally to weigh down lines that follow it, squeezing them into a sort of anxious inarticulateness until the action of weighing down is itself described. The futility of material manipulation described in the second quatrain is evoked in the crumbling syntactic patterning of the lines themselves.

Both strategies seem to meet (or greatly exceed) Simic’s call for ‘nice observation’, and both avoid the ostentation of excessive adjectives and long descriptive passages.

The Doctor William Carlos

William Carlos Williams, a great mentor to Creeley, is the only man in history to decline the Poet Laureateship of the United States. Williams’ letters of the time demonstrate an extreme ambivalence to the position and anything it could supposedly mean to ‘represent’ American poetry. Charles Simic, however, has accepted the charge with open arms, to be, as the Library of Congress states, “the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans….to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.”

It is difficult to understand, by any measure, how that job description could include rather indelicately undercutting the life’s-work of a recently deceased colleague who, as even a brief perusal of the back cover of his most recent book will attest, was admired if not revered by countless of the last 50 years' most important practitioners of the art form.

If anything a poet should be attentive, and I question the motivations of any poet, let alone a Laureate, who could approach the life’s work of a friend and colleague with as much inconsiderate and simplistic rhetoric as Simic in his evaluation of Robert Creeley.

I recently asked the poet Philip Levine if there were any Robert Creeley books that he particularly liked, and immediately he said “Later,” adding after a moment’s pause, “and of course For Love, that’s where we all get in.”

How could Lowell not love this guy?

It was heartening to hear Levine, whose work is vastly different from Creeley’s, have the tact to show appreciation for an artist in whom I, his student, clearly had a vested interest. This was advocacy, in its most elemental sense, because my world of poetry expanded in that moment — a connection despite difference was formed. In dismissing Creeley’s later books, Simic seems primarily interested in constricting the public’s understanding of how and why poetry can function. And this, above all, should terrify us.

Will Hubbard is the contributing editor to This Recording. A graduate student in the poetry program at New York University and editor-in-chief of CapGun Magazine, he lives in Williamsburg.

YEAH IT'S OVERWHELMING WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO? GET JOBS IN OFFICES AND WAKE UP FOR THE MORNING COMMUTE

"On Almost Any Sunday Morning" - Counting Crows (mp3)

"Sundays" - Counting Crows (mp3)

"Hanging Tree" - Counting Crows (mp3)

"We're Only Love (demo)" - Counting Crows (mp3)

ANOTHER CREELEY POEM TO ENJOY

The Warning

For love—I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Will took 17 mg with Ted Berrigan.

Will used Cesare Pavese as a catapult.

Will takes Gertrude Stein out for a spin.

julio cortazar

Good Will Syllabusing

by Alex Carnevale

Will won't let me come to his class at NYU, probably because he's afraid I will laugh at his interpretations of The Cantos. I have avenged this dick move on his part by stealing his class syllabus from his gmail. It won't be the first time, and it won't be the last.

your professor for today, WH

Will's syllabus starts with two quotes. The first one is major, the second one is minor and like a party joke. Will once tried it out as a pick-up line, it got a good reception, and he went with it on the syllabus. Stephen Jay Gould also tested out his classroom material in this fashion.

Introduction to Creative Writing

Instructor: Will Hubbard

"The suffering we undergo when forms are preferred over spontaneous perception is called culture."

MC Richards

"Damn your taste! I should like if possible to sharpen your perceptions. Your taste will then take care of itself."

Ezra Pound

ezra pound = jaye bartell

Skipping ahead, Will does maybe the top attendance section of all time.

::Attendance::

Attendance is expected at every class meeting, without exception. More than two unexplained absences will result in a 10% decrease in a student’s final grade. Two or more instances in which a student is significantly late to class will count as an absence. Absences owing to a medical or other emergency circumstance shall be accompanied by a doctor’s (or other official) note.

Sick stuff, I would not mess with this individual.

beckett

Here's the syllabus proper:

January 23 W Introduction/Projection. Recording/Discussion: Olson.
Assignment: “Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson” (Walt Whitman); “Preface to the New American Poetry 1945-1960” (Donald Allen); “Projective Verse”, selected poems (Charles Olson); write a projective poem.

28 M Workshop.
Assignment: “A Retrospect”, “Treatise on Metre”, selected poems (Ezra Pound); “October”, “Those Winter Sundays” (Robert Hayden); selections from “If Not, Winter: Fragments from Sappho” (Anne Carson)

30 W Measure. Recording: Williams, Creeley.
Assignment: “Measure”; “Letter to Robert Creeley”, “Introduction to The Wedge”, selected poems (William Carlos Williams); “Centering as Dialogue” (MC Richards); write a poem in the measure of WCW.

February 4 M Workshop. Student Presentation: Denise Levertov.
Assignment: “I Am Given To Write Poetry”, “Interview with Robert Creeley”, “Poems are a complex”, selected poems (Robert Creeley); “Notes on Organic Form”, selected poems (Denise Levertov); selected poems (Lorine Niedecker)

wcw: where modernity actually began

6 W “some several causations” Recording: O’Hara, Spicer, Baraka.
Assignment: “Personism: A Manifesto”, selected poems (Frank O’Hara); “Excerpts from the Vancouver Lectures” (Jack Spicer); “Expressive Language”, selected poems (Amiri Baraka); write a personist poem.

lorca

11 M Workshop. Student Presentation: Derek Walcott.
Assignment: “Theory and Function of the Duende”, “(Poems)” (Federico Garcia Lorca); “Jack Spicer to Federico Garcia Lorca”, selected poems (Jack Spicer); selected poems, (Derek Walcott); selected poems (Rumi)

13 W From the French. Recording: Apollinaire, Ashbery.
Assignment: selected poems (Guillaume Apollinaire); selected poems (Arthur Rimbaud); selected poems (Stephane Mallarme); selections from Roof Slates (Pierre Reverdy); write three “roof slates” in the manner of Pierre Reverdy.

gwen is our girl

20 W Workshop. Student Presentation: Gwendolyn Brooks.
Assignment: “A Conversation with Kenneth Koch”, selected poems (John Ashbery); selected poems (Gwendolyn Brooks); selected poems (Anselm Berrigan)

25 M Sonnet. Recording: Berrigan, Berryman.
Assignment: selections from 77 Dream Songs (John Berryman); selections from The Sonnets, “Things To Do In Providence” (Ted Berrigan); “The Wall” (Donald Justice); selected poems (Edwin Denby); selections from “Nets” (Jen Bervin); write some sort of sonnet.

donald justice. there is nothing i hate more than teaching the wall, nothing!

27 W Workshop. Student Presentation: Elizabeth Bishop.
Assignment: selected poems, “When the Mode of the Music Changes the Walls of the City Shake” (Allen Ginsberg); selected poems, “The Fire” (Robin Blaser)

the waldrops...sickest house ever

March 3 M Litany/Anaphora. Recording: Mayer, Brainard. Student Presentation: Rosmarie Waldrop.
Assignment: selected poems (Rosmarie Waldrop); selected poems (Bernadette Mayer); “She Had Some Horses” (Joy Harjo); selections from “I Remember” (Joe Brainard); write a litany or anaphoric poem.

geoff hill

5 W Workshop. Student Presentation: Geoffrey Hill.
Assignment: “Statement” (Jackson Mac Low); selected poems (Lynn Xu); selected poems (Tao Lin); selected poems (Matthew Rohrer)

10 M Now. Reading: Lynn Xu, Tao Lin, Matthew Rohrer.
Assignment: “The Philosophy of Composition” (Edgar Allen Poe); “The Nearest Thing to Lyric Poetry Is the Short Story” (Frank O’Connor); write a poem in your own voice.

Wisława

If we were to quantify visually how much people know about literature, you can see me there at Number 5. Number 4 is Harold Bloom. Three is God, or Allah, whichever you prefer. 1 is an elm tree, and 2 is Charles Simic. Will isn't pictured, but he's up there in the God-range most probably. I'd have to ask him some important questions, like whether or not he's purposefully ignoring James Baldwin because he's a racist.

12 W Workshop. Student Presentation: Wisława Szymborska.
Assignment: selections from “Tenohira no Shosetsu (Palm of the Hand Stories)” (Kawabata Yasunari); watch “Late Spring” (Yasujiro Ozu); write a palm of the hand story.

24 M Effect. Kawabata. Workshop.
Assignment: “The Importance of a Single Effect in a Prose Tale” (Edgar Allen Poe); “Technique in Writing the Short Story”, “The Bet” (Anton Chekhov)

mishima. this syllabus is totally our suicide list all over again

26 W Workshop. Student Presentation: Yukio Mishima.
Assignment: selections from “The Poetics of Space” (Gaston Bachelard); “A Rose For Emily”, “Spotted Horses” (William Faulkner); “A Sense of Place in Faulkner’s Spotted Horses” (Eudora Welty)

sherwood

31 M Space. Cortazar, Kafka. Workshop. Student Presentation: Franz Kafka.
Assignment: “Blow-Up” (Julio Cortazar); watch Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni); “The Metamorphosis” (Franz Kafka); “Some Reflections on Kafka” (Walter Benjamin); Story #1.

April 2 W Workshop. Student Presentation: Manuel Puig.
Assignment: “Form, Not Plot, in the Short Story”, “Death in the Woods”, “Hands” (Sherwood Anderson); “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” (Flannery O’Connor)

a good man is hard to find is overrated, but that is small potatoes, you still have to teach it

7 M Narration. Stein, Faulkner. Workshop.
Assignment: “Narration: Lecture 2”, selections from “Lectures in America”, selections from “Three Lives” (Gertrude Stein); “A Rose for Emily” (William Faulkner).

9 W Workshop. Student Presentation: Salman Rushdie.
Assignment: “Notes on a New Prose”, selection from The Gold Diggers (Robert Creeley); “The Courter”, “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers” (Salman Rushdie); “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

14 M Time. Joyce, Beckett. Workshop.
Assignment: “The Dead”, selections from “Ulysses” (James Joyce); Story #2.

JWint, as we call her

16 W Workshop. Student Presentation: Jeanette Winterson.
Assignment: selected short prose, selections from “Molloy”, “Krapp’s Last Tape” (Samuel Beckett); Response #11.

going to contemporary writers and then going back in time is a boss move, it really shows your students you're in control

21 M Other Realities. Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon. Workshop. Student Presentation: Grace Paley.
Assignment: “The School” (Donald Barthelme); “Lost in the Funhouse”, “Honoring Barthelme” (John Barth); “Entropy” (Thomas Pynchon).

23 W (non)fiction. Sontag, Miller, Paley. Workshop.
Assignment: “The Way We Live Now” (Susan Sontag); “A Conversation With My Father” (Grace Paley); selection from “The Collossus of Maroussi” (Henry Miller).

gracie paley

28 M Workshop. Student Presentation: Vladimir Nabokov.
Assignment: “The Vane Sisters” (Vladimir Nabokov); “Reading Blind” (Margaret Atwood); “Girl” (Jamaica Kincaid) “Daylight Come” (Amy Hempel)

30 W Now. Saunders, Moore, Hempel. Workshop. Student Presentation: Haruki Murakami.
Assignment: “People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk” (Lorrie Moore); “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” (George Saunders); Revise.

Mazel tov! Except for a bizarre Auden omission, this is a wonderful collection of writing, but I have a feeling Will is going to find himself a bit more notorious for his acting skills. Molly provided the illustration below.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He lives in New York City.

12 M Portfolio Due in Instructor’s box, Basement, 58 W. 10 th Street

MIX TAPE SYLLABUS

"Curtains (Elton John cover)" - Jeff Buckley (mp3)

"Gypsy Woman" - Brian Hyland (mp3)

"Suffragette City" - David Bowie (mp3)

"Low Side of the Road" - Tom Waits (mp3)

THIS RECORDING ON MASTERPIECES

Danielle Collobert

Philip Guston/Bill Berkson

Raymond Carver

Richard Brautigan

Paul Zindel

Christopher Isherwood

Bob Dylan

H.L.Hix

Diane Williams

WH

Lorine Niedecker

Giorgio De Chirico

Rae Armantrout

James Tate

Christopher Hitchens

John Cage

Dieter M. Graf

Alice in Wonderland

Robert Creeley II III IV V

William Carlos Williams

John Ashbery II

ashbery, rushdie, jamaica kincaid

The Interstitial Library

Paris Hilton

Sharon Olds

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Sol LeWitt

W.S. Merwin II III IV

Jaye Bartell

Will Hubbard

Lisa Flaherty

pasolini on the set

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Get used to hell being other people.

Learn something new about yourself nowsy.

Bob Dylan for fun.

olson

The Lake at Annecy, Cézanne.

Ut Pictura Poesis

by WILL HUBBARD

It is widely recognized that the poets living and working in New York in the 1950s and 60s were heavily influenced by the abstract painters of the period.

Schuyler

Indeed, James Schuyler notes that “New York poets, except I suppose the color blind, are affected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble…In New York the art world is a painters’ world; writers and musicians are in the boat, but they don’t steer." From the ground, I can’t even say whether this is the case anymore.

But Schuyler’s statement belies something that aestheticians from Horace to Stein have held with conviction—that poetry and painting are perhaps the two mediums of artistic creation most similar in their ways and means.

“Painting,” in the words of Simonides, is “the silent poetry, and poetry the speaking painting."

Horace extended the argument in the Ars Poetica, reasoning that “poetry is like painting, some attracts you more if you stand near, some if you are further off. One gives pleasure once, one will please you if you look it over ten times." Horace’s “ut pictura poesis”—as is painting, so is poetry—became a common mantra in 20th century poetics: the embodiment of an aesthetic of direct visual engagement with subject matter; a concentration on, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, the familiar image made unfamiliar.

The ostensible ‘modernity’ of this aesthetic could otherwise be characterized as a distrust of the Romantic and Victorian reliance on internal/emotional forces as just source for artistic inspiration. Early in the 20th century, the notion arose that there was something more essential about the human than his sentiments, some more ideal way of processing the seeming disorder of the physical world. And what more essential, what more ideal than the simple “what one sees”—the visual as a replacement of the sentimental.

Frank O'Hara is above the young woman in the foreground.

Gertrude Stein admitted to “writing entirely with [her] eyes,” placing her writing in a context of visual translation that, previously, had been occupied only by painters. Flannery O’Connor agreed with Stein’s displacement of writers from a strictly emotional/cerebral realm to a purely visual one, reinforcing the bond between painters and poets by associating both with “the one image that will connect or embody two points."

In the poem as in the painting, the point of familiar sight within the viewer interacts with the unfamiliar sight(s) of the viewed object itself.

Our girl Flannery

Single painters or paintings have charmed two, three, or entire generations of poets, but we of course cannot assume that each poet has seen the paintings in the same light, or that each finds occasion to write about Cézanne, for example, based on similar experience or opinion of the work. It follows that these concentrations of poetry around common themes or artists rarely demonstrate alliances, but rather serve to ask, as a painting-poem by Robert Creeley does, “What/ fact of common world is/ presumed common?”

Other times, the dialogue between poets is a real one. Wilbur’s poem “The Old and New Masters” opens with the lines “About suffering, about adoration, the Old Masters/ Disagree.” Though in isolation this seems like some sort of mimicked art history lecture, it is actually a direct response to Auden’s "Museé des Beaux Arts."

Auden’s poem opens, “About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters”, and we understand Wilbur’s version to be a reinterpretation of Auden, a questioning of the visual authority that Auden’s poem asserts.

But the most interesting thing about the ekphrastic mode, finally, is the spectrum of occasions that the poets have found to give voice to painting, the most purely visual art. There are, of course, poems of extensive description like Williams’ “Pictures from Brueghel” that succeed in giving the reader an accurate image of the paintings in question.

The primary concern here seems to be with images that offer the reader more than a simple physical orientation in front of the picture.

Yet even in the most essentially descriptive poems we cannot dismiss the sense of occasion the poet finds in the described painting—that is, we cannot explain a poem’s coming-into-existence by merely stating that the poet wanted to reproduce (in the mechanical sense) a painted picture. The act of reproduction is never entirely a preservative action.

There are other times, too, when the poem’s speaker seems to be primarily interested in description, but finds himself pulled somehow into the very scene he translates. Merwin’s “Two Paintings by Alfred Wallis”, for example, opens with the peculiar line “Tonight when the sea runs like a sore,” implicating the speaker physically or imaginatively in the proposed action of the painting itself. The reader, too, comes to inhabit the painting.

At the other extreme, individual paintings themselves are not even mentioned. Creeley’s “Abstract”, for example, chooses to bring into question the very fact of our ‘viewing’ of abstract art, the way in which we suppose such art to have meaning beyond one individual mind. Not so extreme perhaps, is a poem like Paul Muldoon’s “Paul Klee: They’re Biting” in which the art object is just that, an object just like a postcard, that gives occasion to the poet’s thoughts on a current romance.

Klee, Highways and Byways

And the majority of ekphrastic poems are similar to Muldoon’s—the panels which are the ostensible ‘subjects’ of the poems are revealed to be only a means by which the poet is able to re-enter himself through his reaction to visual stimulus. In a sense, they are records of the poet looking into the paradoxically accurate mirror.

As conclusion, I give nod to the two most important long poems of this occasional but enduring poetic mode. Wallace Stevens’ “The Man With the Blue Guitar” really sets the tone for a poetic conversation about painting in the 20th century—it demonstrates, in detail, the way in which a single painting can come to represent and misrepresent “things exactly as they are.”

Ashbery’s “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” extends Stevens’ interaction with the single painting by exploring the occasional reversal of the viewer/viewed dynamic, the way in which the painting can look deeply into the poet himself and reveal things that the mirror, let alone the page, will never see.

Will Hubbard is the contributing editor to This Recording. He is spending most of April sunning himself and writing the finest volume of poetry the human mind can imagine. Talk to him next month.

MUSIC TO TAN TO

"Expecting to Fly (Neil Young cover)" - Emily Haines (mp3)

from here

"Neighbors" - The Long Division (mp3)

"Space Park" - The Long Division (mp3)

"Fire Island, AK" - The Long Winters (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

The latest Thomas Pynchon got us thinking.

We told you our answers, we left you our dreams on your answer machine.

Molly yelled at me for posting Five for Fighting. He's really patriotic, I can't resist.

carnevale in the mountains

Hearts Are Broken Every Day

What is so great about poetry is that poems you previously ignored can come to you at a different time in your life and they can hold an entirely different meaning for you. I mean not me personally – when I was a baby my first words were 'lesser Wordsworth', you know what I'm saying – but for you, whose knowledge of poetry consists primarily of the works of Jewel.

And indeed this was a fine lesson, as poetry is mainly about meeting girls. My first summer at arts camp was like School Ties but straight and multi-ethnic. It was not like Salute Your Shorts, it was way more weird and artsy. I thought this redhead was a goddess; this was way before I knew the secret truth about gingers. I spent most of my time repeating my favorite line from American Psycho as justification for my actions: because I want to fit innnnn. It was also the summer I discovered the poetry of Joe Ceravolo.

It pains me to think Joe and I were alive at the same time, for five years. Did I feel a little snubbed? Sure I did.

ceravolo in The Nation

DON'T BREAK IT

He played with a toy they bought
candy She played with a toy
Do not be afraid of the bear
They placed their arms around the bear
Around them the sea
listened but didn't talk because it
can't talk, neither can stars
which emit for no one The gods
can't hear because they are not any place
Friendly the bear embraced them
back. The zoo is a nice
place to live, you are cage in the zoo
In the zoo is the world. Everyone
chews at a different rate and
stars do not emit
I am waiting for you at the
north entrance
into the zoo
Going back we looked at the few
plastic clouds into the dark moony
trees

Ceravolo lived in New Jersey and studied at the New School. He was an incredible poet who was at his best the less sense he made. When he was cute he reminded you of William Carlos Williams' softer side, when he is esoteric he really gets you just before you're going to bed or as you wake up, the only times of the day for dealing with anything important. Enjoy these poems from his seminal collection of other books now sadly out of print, The Green Lake is Awake.

Joe Ceravolo reads "Migratory Noon" (mp3)

Amish Trivedi on Transmigration Solo in Octopus

SPRING

All I will amount to: knowing
your sound, small bees,
the winter wind
is green.

Joe reads "Spring" (mp3)

pics from the ceravolo tribute at The Poetry Project

DRUNKEN WINTER

Oak oak! like like
it then
cold some wild paddle
so sky then;
flea you say
"geese geese" the boy
June of winter
of again
Oak sky

Joe reads "Drunken Winter" (mp3)

CROSS FIRE

This is the second day without anyone.
I am chinning against a dark sky
to strengthen my arms.
A picture of everyone I love passes thru me.

No clear light streams thru this cell.
There's no dawn.
What have I gained
by lying in this abyss,
waiting for the masonry
to show a little slit
for my soul to get through?

specialist in hydraulic engineering

I LIKE TO COLLAPSE

Saturday night I buy a soda
Someone's hand opens I hold it
It begins to rain
Avenue A is near the river

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

I think you're gonna like it.

Whichever way it tolls it tolls for thee.

Ron Artest on the violin.

Image (Withheld)

by Jaye Bartell

The Alps
Brandon Shimoda
Flim Forum Press
(Get your copy over at the Flim Forum.)

NOTE: The blank squares accompanying each poem in The Handmaidens and Bridesman section of The Alps struck me immediately, fascinated and moved me to respond. The squares display vivid possibility, actualized by the writing beneath them, poems that are far more than captions. Possibility, in fact, is the prevailing sentiment I’m left with; there is much to discover in The Alps, and the squares serve as a kind of field guide. They at once refuse to be empty, or to contain anything. The slightest suggestion of an image, --gold / lightning struck / water--, and the square floods. Turn the page, a new square is presented, empty, simple, but vulnerable to the foment of cognition, memory, grasp, and total loss.

The presence of a blank square terrifies. It is end or, worse, beginning, and again, which signifies an end, and one come to nothing but the recurrent initial form.

The picture, implicit, brought forth, shown by the shape it would occupy if present, or leave as mark, if gone. Describe what could be seen within such a dimension. A poem, aspiring toward image, a presentation, cannot hide the strain caused by omission of the fundamental picture, of its basis. Nothing new can be said that would exceed the size of a postage stamp. The frame expanded, a life of days gain narration, new, because told anew. The frame expanded, just so, becomes a window, to see what may be all of it.

The image fractures when given to language alone, failed when words are sole mechanism, to restore experience to the blinded—it falters, gives only sound, the effect, what remained, after reception, and embodiment. An image seen, but so quickly passed from view, that even if photographed, the air is absent, missed. Toward what direction did it all tend, the now unapparent.

It will not. The dimensions, too variant; the sky that held the breaking, dispersed, as if a part. Fixity allows for the emergence of clarity—a beam, a fount, a shaft— from chaos. The hole, drilled in ice, a geyser breaks the punctured surface, and threatens reversal, of surface, that what once contained is no longer, and blurs. A line dropped, into the amorphous, filament, endless particulate, suffused to become element.

shimoda (right) and frequent collaborator phil cordelli

In cold water, memory, languid, what passes among, objects once actual, become debris, of another, no longer possessed, but observed, elsewhere. What new image, to give form to voice, that recalls, and bringing back, sees again as, and not of, away, distant, what picture, correspondent.

Perimeter, both permits and forbids. There are only so many roofs visible from the window, so many arching bared trees, and the cars and lights, ephemeral. Value, defined: that it could have been anything, but was this, what took place, which had first to be made.

Memory, attempting. Looking, as light recedes and perception becomes its object, fade. The picture withheld, the risk, that all is false, that day and its weather. Were my hands not in gloves and those gloves not in my pockets, as now they are not. Am I at all, or have ceased. If not continuity, than at least recurrent, as in again and again, in myriad pieces of dissimilar snow.

The volition, frustrated, the violation, forcing ghost into body, a rehearsal of procreant need, against piety, that dares flicker when the darkening way struggles to preserve opportunity. We kneeled in soot, and in the morning, coughed, ash into the air, we must further live.

Out of phantasmagoria, a shorn plot, to let come what will and must. As if a clearing was all that was ever needed, to allow the story to determine its own course and contents. For once, a gap, uncluttered. Decimate the crowded halls, the stuffed frame, the heap of images, all existent color massed, black, in confusion. A small space but of enough dimension, backward, giving way, for the further image, what next comes to fill, and dispelling, leaves frame, for faces, hands, grasses, the time, all possibility, retroactive, to come again, but as unknown, emptiness given image, its truer name.

Jaye Bartell is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in North Carolina. He blogs here.

"When A Man Loves A Woman" - Karen Dalton (mp3)

"One Night of Love" - Karen Dalton (mp3)

"Take Me" - Karen Dalton (mp3)

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Maybe I'm crazy.

I think you're crazy.

Probably.

CapGun 3

The third edition of CapGun, the literary magazine/event of the year, comes out tomorrow. When you see it arrive in your mailbox you will have the closest thing to an orgasm that such a creation can trigger in the unsuspecting or suspecting recipient. We heartily recommend this third edition of CapGun as a gift for others. It can get you laid, and it will provide for the child that frenzied sex creates should you be so lucky. The cover is hand letter-pressed for christsakes.

What awaits you inside:

Colophon Teaser: CapGun 3 was designed by Will Hubbard, and printed and bound in an edition of 250 at CapGun Press in Brooklyn, NY. The title face, Gotham, was created by Tobias Frere -Jones in 2000 to approximate vernacular lettering found throughout New York City. The text is set in Bulmer, which was used by John Boydell in 1805 for his famous, gilded, and financially ruinous edition of Shakespeare.

We rarely ask you to support This Recording, but we need your help now. Every issue of CapGun you purchase not only keeps this website afloat but gets you an enduring keepsake you'll want to pass down through the generations.

We thank you for reading This Recording, and we ask that you prepare for your coming orgasm.

Alex Carnevale

Will Hubbard

"Sad Days, Lonely Nights" - Spiritualized (mp3)

"Amazing Grace (Peace on Earth)" - Spiritualized (mp3)

"I Want You" - Spiritualized (mp3)

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Where else you might like to submit your work.

Jackie Delamatre's story from our second issue.

Bob Creeley's poem from our first.

Syringa

by John Ashbery

Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part
Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends
Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks
Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon
To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.

Then Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to
Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,
Not vivid performances of the past.” But why not?
All other things must change too.
The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along
Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.
Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;
She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.

No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel
Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent
Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.
Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,
These other ones, call life. Singing accurately
So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of
Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers
Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates
The different weights of the things.

But it isn’t enough
To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this
And didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven
After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven
Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.
Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.
But probably the music had more to do with it, and
The way music passes, emblematic
Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it

And say it is good or bad. You must
Wait till it’s over. “The end crowns all,”
Meaning also that the “tableau”
Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,
Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure
That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this
Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,
Powerful stream, the trailing grasses
Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action
No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky
Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth
Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses
Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,
“I’m a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,
Though I can understand the language of birds, and
The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.
Their jousting ends in music much
As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm
And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.”

But how late to be regretting all this, even
Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!
To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,
Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,
Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of
Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.
And no matter how all this disappeared,
Or got where it was going, it is no longer
Material for a poem. Its subject
Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly
While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad
Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward
That the meaning, good or other, can never
Become known. The singer thinks
Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages
Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.

The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness
Which must in turn flood the whole continent
With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer
Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved
Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification
Is for the few, and comes about much later
When all record of these people and their lives
Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.
A few are still interested in them. “But what about
So-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie
Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus
Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name
In whose tale are hidden syllable

Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one indifferent summer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkOmMVpz1tM]

"Ray Gun" - The Bird and the Bee (mp3)

"Love Letter to Japan" - The Bird and the Bee (mp3)

"What's In The Middle" - The Bird and the Bee (mp3)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8__pWhuHp5Y]

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All the staph infections that you can handle.

The stuffs that dreams are made of.

I paint what I see, not what you hope I see.

My Tombeau for Edgar Poe

by Harris Feinsod

In October, 2007, a blog-happy literato named Edward Pettit loosely affiliated with Lehigh University and the Philadelphia Poe House made an astute grab at media attention with an announcement in the alternative weekly on behalf of his fellow Philadelphians: "This is a literary grave-robbing." It was the necropolitical equivalent of a liquor store heist. His mark? The body of Edgar Allan Poe. "He was buried in Baltimore when he died," wrote Pettit, "But I want to exhume his body and translate his remains to the City of Brotherly Love. That's because Poe is ours. He belongs to Philadelphia."

poe house in b-more

Pettit's ploy worked. His sucker punch to the Baltimore Poe custodians clouded up into a cartoon cat fight between writers for the major dailies of Baltimore, Philly, and soon even New York and Boston were joining the fracas (the Times generously referring to Pettit, a self-professed "freelance book reviewer," as a "Poe Scholar.") The next chapter in this whole strange hagiographical boondoggle will be today, January 13th in a "debate" at Constitution Hall in Philadelphia.

Pettit now has home field advantage in an inter-city spectacle that feels like a sidebar to the great football drama by which the Baltimore Colts left for Indianapolis in the middle of the night, Baltimore years later stole the Cleveland Browns, and re-named them (after Poe) as the Ravens.

Ravens mascots "Edgar," "Allan," and "Poe."

If the Ravens' magisterial performance last Saturday against Tennessee has anything to say about it, my money is on Baltimore hanging on to Poe if only so its NFL team has an appropriate reliquary.

Now, I myself am a Baltimorean, and one of the formative, surreptitious experiences of my adolescence took place literally sitting upon the 8-ft white Italian marble grave of Poe while I was absconding from the Mexican buffet at a bar mitzvah at the adjacent Westminster Church, which is an event hall. Like Jeff Jerome, curator of the Baltimore Poe House, who said of Pettit, "I will argue the other guy down with grace and facts, then I will walk over to him like a gentleman and punch him square in the nose," my allegiance to Poe's Baltimore burial plot could not be more fierce.

Nevertheless, if Philly were to succeed in Pettit's plan, it would not be the first time a city stole a patron from a neighboring polity in an act of apostolic smuggling. Tradition has it that as the young city-state of Venice grew into a maritime power in the 9th century, it absconded the remains of San Marco out of Alexandria by hiding them in barrels of pork meat that were noxious to the Muslim customs agents. A mosaic in the Basilica arch on Piazza San Marco mythologizes the event, as does a 16th century Tintoretto painting.

St. Mark in a pork barrel: central portal of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice

By coincidence, there are also at least three small Tintoretto paintings at the remarkable Barnes Foundation museum in Merion, a suburb of Philadelphia. But suddenly it hardly seems incidental that Philadelphia has successfully lobbied to move the Barnes collection to a new building downtown, on the site of a demolished juvenile detention center.

Tintoretto's Trafugamento del corpo di San Marco, 1563-1564

The great sympathy I feel for Philadelphia as one of the truly hardscrabble, realist cities of the Atlantic coast has been withering as it proves itself a petty thug trying to ransack its way into a Chicago-style "museum walk" like a soft-core Napoleon. Besides, as a reader named Wolfgang Schafer noted in the comments to Pettit's original manifesto, Philadelphia levelled the grave of one of its other literary patrons--Charles Brockden Brown--to make room for a parking lot.

But lost in this winsome tale of literary infighting along the I-95 corridor (one wonders if New Jersey will join the debate and propose interring Poe at one of its many honorific rest stops, just down the turnpike from Joyce Kilmer or Walt Whitman or Howard Stern), is the fascinating story behind Poe's real grave.

There was no headstone on the tomb of Edgar Allen Poe from the time of his death in 1849 until 1875, when an eight foot marble monument was finally erected in Baltimore and a memorial volume commemorating Poe was prepared.

A young school mistress named Sara Sigourney Rice had led her students in the fundraising initiative, and tributes by a cohort of luminaries on both sides of the atlantic--Tennyson, Swinburne, Longfellow, Mallarmé -- were sent and read. Neither Philly nor Boston nor any other regional interest had saved Poe's "neglected grave" from anonymity so much as an international gathering of testimonials from the most modern of modern poets. "And now, with fame that cannot die / he has the world's affection too" concluded William Winters' poem as an orchestra broke into a soaring Mendelssohn chorus.

Swinburne wrote that the Poe tomb would be the physical manifestation of the already considerable monuments to Poe in France that were represented by Baudelaire's translations. Mallarmé's "Le Tombeau D'Edgar Poe," one of the tributes written for the event is a gorgeous threnody following the conventions of the tombeau or "tomb" poem, an old form of funerary writing. It ends with the command that the stone block over Poe's grave "evermore" mark the boundary "to the dark flights of Blasphemy hurled to the future." The hurling blasphemers at Constitution Hall tomorrow could pay it mind. Or if their thirst for exhumation can't be quenched, maybe they should join the movement to dig up Lorca instead.

Harris Feinsod lives in San Francisco, where he is working on a Ph.D. in comparative literature.

"Mehnomae" - Asobi Seksu (mp3)

"In The Sky" - Asobi Seksu (mp3)

"Sunshower" - Asobi Seksu (mp3)

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The strangest place in the world.

The future versus the present versus the full-length album.

Molly’s legendary adolescence post.

Pink Times For Pink Ladies

by Will Hubbard

I paint what I see, not what you hope that I see.

- Lucian Freud

Everything in the New Yorker is pink. A pink devoid of any symbolism, but still a very distinct pink, meaning it has a color. By which I mean it has a flavor, too, and a scent, a lovely one. Even the font does not change.

Such a pink magazine has mostly articles. They are funny and vibrant, intelligent in a most acceptable way. I would call it cogitation. Unfortunately, poetry is not cogitation. Not to say that poetry is anything in particular, but it is not cogitation. Nor is it pink.

This is not humor. This is the opposite of humor.

A magazine is a tank of water. The water at the New Yorker has been dyed pink. Everything that is dropped into that water turns a faint shade of pink. Which is not to say that it becomes any less lovely. Because it doesn’t, it's just pink.

The New Yorker has a font. It is distinct and they own it. When they print poems they print them in this font. This font is metaphorical. I am using it metaphorically. It means that what is in the poems does not matter. Good or bad, they are still pink, same as the rest.

Pink sells. The New Yorker does not sell sex, it sells well-formed ideas. For the most part, this makes for a good magazine. In the case of poetry, however, it does not.

As the painter Philip Guston says, "the most clearly articulated thoughts are usually wrong." This applies more to poetry than it does to articles and other cogitations. People like to have well-formed ideas at hand, even if they aren’t going to use them. Poems need not concern themselves with well-formed ideas, because no poem will be as good a cogitation as a New Yorker article.

When you are listening to an information session, it works best to pay little if no attention to whomever is talking. This way, you will only pick up on the interesting ideas. Everything else will be a distraction, in that you already know it even if you have never heard it before. This applies also to poetry, but not to the New Yorker.

It is better if a poem can be the color it is, rather than pink, or an equally arbitrary blue? Picking a color for a poem is not arbitrary, from the perspective of the poet. Nor is it cogitative. If a poem is to be dropped into a magazine, the water should be clean and warm. This is true even if the eventual color of the water is brown. More often, I think clean water will hold its own, keeping the fish healthy and happy.

Philip Guston is a lovely painter. I’m sure there has been an article about him in the New Yorker, and equally in the New Yorker’s font. Philip Guston loved the color pink, but not the same hue as the New Yorker pink. There is thus little relationship between Guston and the New Yorker, except that someone may have formed some complete and formidable thoughts about Guston’s paintings in the New Yorker.

Philip Guston had some friends that wrote poetry. Some, in their old age, have probably published poetry in the New Yorker. These were pink poems, every one of them, which is not meant pejoratively. Nor is it meant metaphorically. It simply means that these poems were in the New Yorker, and therefore pink.

The New Yorker has little if nothing to do with the New York School of poetry, which itself has little to do—in that it’s a name—with the poets who created it. There is a contradiction in this fact, but not a simple one. It has to do with a city being a tank of water, like a magazine. New York City is somewhat pink, but with a healthy amount of orange mixed in. This comes from the lights and air additives.

This is not to say that a magazine should not pick a font. But eventually all you can see is the font, which is a bad thing. Even beautiful rooms like to be redecorated. The implication is that rooms have opinions about how they should look.

The tulips that bloom heavily in the spring are sometimes pink. The rings around the eyes of an alcoholic or meth-addict are also sometimes pink. The poetry published in the New Yorker are, like the articles and cogitations, pink. Thus, you see there is nothing pejorative or metaphorical about my saying the New Yorker makes everything a faint sickly shade of pink. Oh, some meats are pink, too.

When poetry does occur in the New Yorker, it is like a tulip. Tulips flower in New York City even with the artificial light and air additives. Not to say that they are beautiful, because even flowers can be ugly when soaked in dog piss. Poems in the New Yorker can be beautiful, but not in the New Yorker. Every poem has its own natural color, and almost no colors look good when imbued with pink light. Pink poems, however, which are written and sent to the New Yorker, look great in pink light, but nowhere else.

Almost everything I have said here applies equally to the Paris Review. Paris is nice, somewhat grey-blue.

William Hubbard is the contributing editor to This Recording. He lives in Williamsburg.

"Smile" - Robert Downey Jr (mp3)

"Broken" - Robert Downey Jr (mp3)

"River" - Robert Downey Jr (mp3)

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Will used Cesare Pavese as a catapult.

Alex brings the Creeley/Olson correspondence to the masses.

Will takes Gertrude Stein out for a spin.

Paradise Our Speech

Words for A Girlfriend

by Cesare Pavese

I walk without saying a word with a girl
I picked up on the street. It’s evening,
the boulevard’s lined with trees and with lights.
It’s the third time we’ve met.
The girl makes the awkward decision more difficult:
cafés are ruled out since we can’t stand the crowds,
the cinema, too, because of the first time
we went there... we shouldn’t do that again,
if only because we aren’t in love.
So let us keep walking
all the way to the Po, to the bridge, we’ll look at the palaces
of light that the streetlamps make in the water.
The deadness of the third date.
I know of her all that can be known by a stranger
who has kissed and embraced her in a dark room
where other dark couples embraced,
where the orchestra—a single piano—played Aida.
We walk down the avenue, with everyone else.
Here too is an orchestra, screeching and singing,
a metallic commotion like the jolting of trams.
I pull her to me and look in her eyes:
she looks at me silent and smiling.
I know of her what I’ve always known of all girls:
that she works, that she’s sad, and that, if I asked her,
“Do you want to die tonight?” she’d say yes.
“And our little affair?” “Our affair’s something else,
it’s only for now.” (There’s a boyfriend around.)

Oh beautiful girl, tonight I am not that boy,
audacious, who won you with a kiss on the street
in front of an old man who watched with astonishment.
This evening I walk with the saddest of thoughts,
like when you say that you wish you could die.
Not that I wish I could die. Those days have passed,
and besides, “we aren’t in love.” The crowd passes by,
pressing and crushing, and you too are the crowd,
like everyone else, you’re walking beside me.
Not that I hate you—could you ever believe that?—
but I am alone, and I’ll be alone always.

Here we are at the Po—“It’s lovely—it’s crystal this evening.
Columns of light... the curves of the dock:
it almost looks, in the dark, like the seashore.”
She talks to me happily, holding me:
I should hold her more tightly, here on the bridge.
The distant orchestra has followed us here.
The hills are all dark. “Will you come to the hills?”
“Not to the hills, it’s too far. Let’s stay here and watch...”
I don’t really desire even your body tonight,
my beautiful girl, even though you’re alive
to my hand as it moves on your hip.
I know of you what I’ve always known about all girls:
that you’re eager beneath the pale blue silk of your dress,
that you work and are sad and someday perhaps will be mine,
if you ever—and who knows?—abandon your scruples.
But I’m silent for now, and alone,
alone as I will be till death.
Nor is it pride, my girl, I’ve long since forgotten my pride,
it’s just that I don’t want anyone to turn me away from my life.

“How about a boat ride tonight?” “It’s too cool, let’s just stay here.”
“No it’s not, you’ll be next to me.” “But it’s dark, we’ll fall out.”
“What do you want us to do here, staring off into space?”
“But it’s beautiful here.” “Come on. It’s prettier still from the water.
They’ll give us a lantern.” I talk to her, holding
her sweet hand, and clumsily give her a peck
on the cheek. From beneath her felt that she fixes me
and then, almost contritely, repeats: “Let’s just stay here and watch.”

[caption id="attachment_13705" align="alignnone" width="373" caption="Louis Stettner, 1953"][/caption]

edited by Yvonne Georgina Puig. You can find last week's Paradise Our Speech here.

"Back to This" - The Helio Sequence (mp3)

"You Can Come To Me" - The Helio Sequence (mp3)

"Broken Afternoon" - The Helio Sequence (mp3)

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Will and Eucalyptus

Molly in the coffee shop

God lives longer with a child.