BERNEVAL

1984. Daphne Marlatt. Touch to My Tongue. “houseless”.

what is at stake here is an epistemology of the erotic — how ways of knowing include ways of being together

i can only be, no vessel but a movement running, out in the open, out in the dark and rising tide, in risk, knowing who i am with you —

creatures of ecstasy, we have risen drenched from our own wet grasses, reeds, sea. turned out, turned inside out, beside ourselves, we are the tide swelling, we are the continent draining, deep and forever into each other.

The book also conveys the image work of Cheryl Sourkes and these words from Marlatt apply equally to the photographs from Memory Room; they inhabit the similar space. Before a photograph from Sourkes, the book ends with an essay “musing with mothertongue” from Marlatt (first given as a talk at the 1983 Women and Words conference) in which is conjured the figure of the woman writer (and by extension, artist):

inhabitant of language, not master, not even mistress, this new woman writer (Alma, say) is having is had, is held by it, what she is given to say. in giving it away is given herself, on that double edge where she has always lived, between the already spoken and the unspeakable, sense and non-sense. only now she writes it, risking nonsense, chaotic language leafings, unspeakable breaches of usage, intuitive leaps. inside language she leaps for joy, shoving out the walls of taboo and propriety, kicking syntax, discovering life in old roots.

Note the related work of exploring the breath of language via experiments with syntax and the etymological excavations to inspire further ruminations. When same touches same … more wildly more unmoored.

And so for day 1122
08.01.2010

Sitting in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library is a treat. It is like sitting in a restaurant waiting for the dish to be served up. One delicious item is Autumnal by Thomas Meyer published by Catalyst in 1975. The poem is laid out in a four-folded sheet. The cover is a photo of the poet we assume. The back contains a simple colophon “published 1975 by catalyst” following the bottom border of the page. Inside the left page is blank, the right page has the poem set in two columns and the signature “Tom Meyer”. We appear to have in our hands a pastiche of a greeting card.

And the poetry? Exquisite.

Meyer is the master of the short line as evidenced in his books such as Uranian roses or Staves calends legends. Here at the heart of this one-pager is an image of a detail familiar to anyone who has prepared leeks. Startling however is the leap to an image of rain and wet hair (unless one is alert to an unstated suggestion of homophones: leek/leak).

What is remarkable is how the scene unfolds from the mention of detail. Note how the poet begins with the grit and comes to name the vegetable last. Likewise we are led from rain to hair via the position of the hand. The “news” item is always last and lingering.

The poem ends with the image of the speaker’s hand in the beloved’s “wet August hair”. Or at least tone and style set this in the erotic mode and we believe we are presented with an image of the beloved.

And so for day 1121
07.01.2010

We are attracted. We are repulsed. And still we flutter. Puzzled.

Joy Kogawa in the middle of a poem (“Hangnail”) has a description of the death of a moth. The poem is found in A Choice of Dreams. The passage lifts the speaker out of concern for the small but painful hangnail. Our speaker with sardonic tone notes that “A hug might help / But I can’t feel any cosmic arms / Nor earthly ones —”. And then we are thrust into a meditation upon the moth and its demise.

While walking I stepped on a giant moth
And in the long moment of its dying
All the accummulated injustices
Of squashed and battered bugs
Sacrificed on windshields
And sprayed to oblivion
Poured out of its eloquent wings
In one long fluttering —

Yes, our copy text gives us two m’s for “accumulated”. Almost as if the moth was squashed right into the word.

And Kogawa’s poem makes me want to revisit Robin Blaser’s Moth Poem. It’s a long sequence but this little bit provides a nice pendant to the Kogawa.

the moth in the piano
will play on
frightened wings brush
the wired interior
of that machine

Penn Sound has a recording of Blaser reading The Moth Poem. To listen is to rediscover as the poet writes “the moth-kiss has two languages” and in neither am I fluent. C D E flat G A B flat B D [C D Eb G A Bb B D] (this sequence of notes set out on a vertical axis concludes The Moth Poem as collected in The Holy Forest; the sequence goes unarticulated in the recording). I have no ability in reading music but the mention in The Moth Poem of mirrors evokes for me Ravel’s Miroirs of which the first movement is Noctuelles (“Night Moths”). For recordings and score see http://imslp.org/wiki/Miroirs_(Ravel,_Maurice). Neither by sight nor by ear can I make out if Blaser’s notation matches Ravel’s piece composed for piano solo and dedicated to members of the Apaches. Lacking musical knowledge or a convenient gloss, it is but with a moth’s breath that I connect Ravel to Blaser — and the little journey from flame to flame all began with Kogawa’s fluttering lines.

ADDENDUM:

In response to an appeal for assistance in elucidating a musical component in Robin Blaser’s Moth Poem, a subscriber to Humanist conveyed their daughter’s suggestion that I pose the query to the American Musicological Society list. A most fruitful suggestion.

It was with a bit of trepidation I trod on the turf of the experts. But I was curious about what it might be that the poet Robin Blaser in The Moth Poem presents as the penultimate section of his serial poem:

C D Eb G A Bb B D

What I proposed to the AMS-list: What I am trying to determine is whether Blaser is citing an existing piece of music, inventing something, or translating (i.e. modifying something that exists). The musical “quotation” occurrs before the final section of the poem which is devoted to the figure of the translator.

Results:

I was kindly disabused of the notion that the letters represented chords. (Ever so nicely done off list: “Those notes are probably not chords per se, but some fragment of melody. If they were chords it would sound something like smashing your entire hand on the piano, […]”).

The series of pitches is not connected to Ravel (WWW keyword searches had revealed a possible allusion to Ravel’s Miroirs of which the first movement is Noctuelles (“Night Moths”) but the evidence is negative for a citing of the Ravel)..

Likewise for a direct connection to Pierrot Lunaire, a set of poems by Albert Giraud set to music by Arnold Schoenberg.

Eric Grunin (grunin.com) suggested “That poem was set to music by Harrison Birtwistle, in “The Moth Requiem”. His publisher’s page for the piece states: ‘This poem was prompted by Blaser tracing eerie nighttime sounds in his house to a moth caught under the lid of a piano, touching the strings in its efforts to escape.’ Those notes are an ascending sequence, so if the story is not apocryphal they may plausibly be the notes Blaser heard.” This is a very elegant solution — in an Occam’s Razor fashion. Also aligns well with internal evidence.

Bonus: Harrison Birtwistle set the poem to music in the “The Moth Requiem”. Question remains if Birtwistle took up the pitch-row given at the end of the Blaser poem in his “Requiem”.

Other searches uncovered a possible intertext for the Blaser poem in the verse of Don Marquis (http://www.donmarquis.org/themoth.htm). Blaser is likely to have known this item of the popular culture. BTW I first encountered Archy and Mehitabel through the music and stories of Rosalie Sorrels (Always A Lady).

An abundance of riches, gratefully acknowledged. And a testament to the ongoing value of discussion lists.

And so for day 1116
02.01.2010

Robert Bly in Point Reyes Poems concludes with a piece called “The large starfish” which describes a nine-pointed starfish which slowly wraps itself around the speaker’s hand and after a while is returned to the tidal pool. In a small space, the conclusion in its punctuation not only reflects the elaborate description of the animal to which we have been previously a party but also lends an ephemeral note to the passage since it revolves through ellipsis, hyphen and comma (lots of changes) while noting that nothing has changed.

I put him back in … he unfolds — I had forgotten how purple he was — and slides down into his rock groin, the snail-like feelers waving as if nothing had happened, and nothing has.

The reader is abruptly yanked into the present by the change in tense. In seashore parlance we get wet as we walk along the perimeter between land and water. The syntax here reminds me of the image of an earlier piece “Sea water pouring back over stones” in Point Reyes Poems.

Waves rush up, pause, & drag pebbles back around stones … pebbles going out … it is a complicated sound, as of small sticks breaking, or kitchens heard from another house, good bodies turning over … then the wave comes down to the boulders, & draws out over the stones always wet, it is the gentleness of William Carlos Williams after his strokes …

The ellipses are Bly’s.

The movement from a description of wave action to a named person reminds me of a poem by Joy Kogawa collected in A Choice of Dreams which is entitled simply “Beach Poem”. As with Bly, we are immediately there. It begins …

Walking in warm knee deep water
Watching tiny waves inside of waves

And the speaker deeply absorbed is surprised.

The coming and going water pattern
And not seeing the round bald man

We are then treated to the image of the round bald man splashing, grinning and grunting “startlingly like a pig”. Which expression of joy prompts a moment of envy to conclude the poem.

And the water murky around him
And small pearly waters dripping
All around all around and I wish
I had a curly tail but sadly it is only forked.

The tone, to me, is wry. A little devilry in the round all around for the fork-tailed speaker has just produced the little marvel we have read.

And so for day 1115
01.01.2010

Jacques Le Clerq in the introduction to the Peter Pauper Press (1955) publication of his translations of Love Poems from the Greek Anthology writes about the “somewhat special” section of the collection, the “Paedic Muse or Musa Puerilis”

which, as its title shows, was devoted to the celebration of pederastic amours. Compiled under the reign of Septimus Severus (193-211 A.D.) by Strato of Sardis, it consists of two hundred and fifty-eight epigrams, about two-fifths of which are by the compiler. Mr. [W. R.] Paton believes that originally Strato published merely a collection of his own poems — he was an avowed homosexual, sometimes a witty and felicitous poet but too often gross and obscene — and that some later Byzantine added other like writing. This, Mr. Paton argues, would explain such blunders as presenting obvious heterosexual lyrics as homosexual (especially in the case of Meleager) and including a poem by Asclepiades addressed to himself. “Among the poems by Meleager,” Mr. Paton writes, “are eight relating to women, six of them being on women whose names end in the diminutive form (Phanion, Callistion, Thermion, Timarion, Dordion).” True, doubtless. And yet a mere bowing acquaintance with sodomy and linguistics might suggest that female diminutives are often substituted for male praenomens among the gentry of Urning persuasion.

Mr. Le Clerq omits one point brought forward by Peter Jay in his introduction to The Greek Anthology and Other Ancient Greek Epigrams (1973).

Kephalas was not very consistent in his redistribution of the poems by subject-matter. Book 12, based largely on Strato’s Mousa Paidiké (Pederastic Poems) has a number of heterosexual poems in it; Book 5, the other collection of erotic poems, likewise has some homosexual poems.

What a tangle of genre and gender. Transposed and otherwise. Interesting migrations.

And so for day 1113
30.12.2009