folio : short takes on the prose poem
Essay on the prose poem
A pause, a rose. I was writing in sentences and I was writing in poems. The sentences wanted to know things, or wanted to carry over things they knew: dependent clause, parenthetical clarification, citation. Meanwhile the poems accreted a dark drip, secreted a dim sensorium, ballasted the billowing edges of what could be felt or languaged. In either case, what I made of words was not equivalent to speech, but instead to literal and figurative accumulations. I kept some envelopes of tiny slips of paper, and out of these envelopes poems appeared; in these envelopes unmade poems slept between-times. Also I read my way slowly across a shelf of books, synthesizing what I found there into propositions and accounts.
I think a lineated poem is a net of pauses, of breaths. I suppose Olson is to blame: how I love and hate his typewriter, the stave and bar a musician has had, clanking out pages in a fever, one perception that must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER! My lines often halting, but wanting to move that halt, that hesitation, into someone else, as Olson moved his great gasping breaths into me. To make a slow & cautious movement across a page or screen, to move that movement through eyes & breath into a reader’s body. To transmit a privacy or inwardness, a hesitation, a lingering at the threshold.
What sentences transmit is something else. A sentence wants to let you know what it knows; transmits thinking not feeling, or transmits the feeling of thinking. In sentences, feeling takes the shape of thought.
Anne Carson: When he looked at the world he saw the nails that attach colors to things and he saw that the nails were in pain.
Montaigne: I had languished along behind some French words, words so bloodless, so fleshless and so empty of matter that indeed they were nothing but French and they were nothing but words.
Gertrude Stein: Thank you very much for reading sentences. Sentences which are called sentences are laid together. This makes them sentences. For which they are intended.
For which the sentence is intended, laid together with its comrades. I had a classmate who spoke only once in each seminar meeting, but produced, wondrously, a a weekly paragraph of oral prose, each sentence grammatical and complex. Usually a sentence crawls across a dismissible surface, a paper or screen. Usually a sentence is devoid of mnemonics or formalized rhythms; its body is not the body of a breathing person. I write it’s no accident that “prose” begins with the same letters as “print,” though later finding these words, they seem to have been written by another.
I wrote a book of sentences (THE END), ordered into a hundred blocks of prose. Was I writing poetry? The sentences came out of me on the subway and in the library, and I arranged them, a page or so at a time. A riot of parataxis. Ron Silliman: The blank space, between words or sentences, is much more than the 27th letter of the alphabet. I love the prose poem because I love the sentence, and I love the crevasse that opens between sentences when their author turns a different way. A pause, a rose, something on paper.
Lately I traverse in the space between sentences differently. In the small essays published here, I sought forward motion. Prose, from Old Latin provorsus (“(moving) straight ahead”), from the Proto-Indo-European root per- ("forward") and vorsus (“turned”), past participle of vertere (“to turn”), from Proto-Indo-European wer- (“to turn, bend”). Bending forward toward an accretive meaning, an attachment in language. A mountaineering website advises when you get to the crevasse, place the ladder (or combination of ladders) over the chasm. Attach with ice screws. Cross.
Five Short Essays on Timekeeping
How often did time’s whole nature change? While writing the lecture I find the date on the revolutionary calendar: 20 Ventôse CCXXIX. I find my birthdate: the day of hazel in the month of rain. Snow, then rain, wind, seed, blossom, harvest. The world unprepared for the triumph of reason. Reverting a decade later to the old dates named for gods and emperors.
Some weeks later, I wake burning for the history of the Julian Calendar. Darkness climbing up the ladders to the sky / rung by agonizing rung. Wikipedia tells me Caesar cruised the Nile with Cleopatra before returning to Rome to make time in his own image. After the years of confusion, the old wandering calendar with its intercalary months decreed by elected officials, lengthening or shortening years as politics demanded. Elsewhere, Nowruz slipped against the vernal equinox at the rate of approximately one day every four years. In early modern Turkey, each 33rd lunar year dropped (an “escape year”) to align the sacred lunar and secular solar calendars. The outmoded theories are still beautiful. In the room beneath the library stairs, reading Eliade in a deep orange couch: who I was then is no more.
We sit on the stoop as pink petals shake loose from the neighbor’s tree, as we sat one year ago drinking wine from a thermos. Last year, neighbors came to their windows at seven to clap for the hospital up the block. In the first long spring of emergency, none of us wore masks, though Ian came down from the roof in a pair of blue latex gloves. I clocked the spring coming on: what flowered, what withered, what sent out fresh leaves. Now the ragged advance of the second spring of this long plague year. All the world unevenly opening as the future becomes the present.
I stay up until 4am reading Matt’s new book about a film I watched alone in the Irish Film Center in the summer of 1998. Though the movie affected me profoundly, I remember little about its plot. In my journal from that year, a series of clippings: reviews of films and plays I saw, cut from the Irish Times or the booklet advertising the Film Center’s season. This one movie is conspicuously absent. What I remember: the shock of real time passing on the screen. Matt writes: a three and a half hour movie in which people hang out in cafés or sit listening to entire songs play on records. The problem of time crystallized, which is also the problem of relation, or of living in a body. (In Matt’s retelling, I find a series of improbable echoes of my own life in the three to five years after I saw the film. I have to remind myself: in 1998, I had not yet met the suicidal and unfaithful lover, nor had I marched in protests that failed to stop a war.) Matt writes: what we come to know, when we know each other, may be something about time itself rather than anything we might recognize in those others who travel beside us. In my journal from 1998 I find three letters from Anna, and a photograph of her inside a cafe, her bangs held off her face with a brown barrette. Looking at the photograph, I am struck with an intense and immediate sense of proximity to both who she was then and who she was in the days and weeks leading up to her death two months ago.
Kalaija’s sundial on instagram: COUNT ONLY SUNNY HOURS. The angle of the photo makes the disc appear flat, white, perhaps reflecting back the gallery’s white cube. Only later do I realize it’s a mirror: that looking into time, what we see is ourselves.
Essay on Materials (Ink)
To place ink in a series of small dots off the pallet knife’s corner. Then to flip the press’s switch, sending cylinders into motion. A pattern of dots smoothes first into stripes, then into a thin and even layer.
First you learn to add ink by eye, and then by ear, listening for the hiss between rubber and metal. You learn to feel thickness with a pallet knife, then to draw the knife’s corner through. Will the shoulders slump or stand? Shake in white powder, carried on the wide edge of a popsicle stick from a silver tin. Raise and lower the rubber rollers as the thickness of stripe on the metal lollipop demands. I learned all this with my hands, eyes, ears, and taught it with my mouth, hands. To recount it in writing I conjure sense memories: a smell both sharp and wet, machine’s sibilant hum.
When I was young I knew little but still I wished to write. I filled notebooks and notebooks, saying so few things in so many ways. Now not all that my body knows quite makes it into words. I doubt what I’ve learned in printshops, turning to the internet for confirmation.
I say to the book history students Not only metal type, but all the other parts. Not just the raised letters in an alloy of Gutenberg’s making, but also the winepress, the ink thick enough to sit atop. The peculiarly glittering blacks of the Gutenberg bible: linseed oil, graphite, copper, sulfur, lead, titanium. Lampblack, egg white, and oil. Pilgrims’ badges had been printed before, and whole books from wood blocks, ceramic and metal types (in China, Korea, among the Uyghurs). Bi Sheng’s pine resin, wax, and paper ash. If ink had not existed, someone would have needed to invent it / though ink existed, someone always needed to invent it.
Lampblack, oak gall, hawthorn, wine. Iron salts, fish glue, bone black, carbon. Turpentine, walnut oil. Iron, ocher, gum arabic. Maya blue, verdigris, cinnabar. Aquamarine made from lapis lazuli. In a workshop on manuscript illumination, I apply small dots of glair, moisten them with my breath, and tamp down gold leaf with a small wooden stick. An action proximate to ink. The gold waves violently as I exhale.
Back in the archive, I find the John Clare’s ink recipe, write its number on the form I’ve been handed, photograph it. Take three ounces of bruised nut galls [illegible] into a pint and a half of rain water let it stand for three days then put in one ounce and a half of Green Coppers and a piece of Stone blue and shake it up every day and it is fit for use. This ink, once blue and now brown, is slowly eating through the papers he wrote on, leaving thin spots or air where his words have been.
Essay on Birds
Had I really not noticed them before the year we spent at home? In the first spring, regular sounds ebbed. All that was left was siren and bird call. To me they formed a single cacophony; I could thread out no individual song. In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell writes about a song sparrow she sees in a park: just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known its name, might not have even known it was a sparrow, might not have seen it at all. How lonely that world seemed in comparison to this one! Kept mostly away from humans, I turned, like others, to the birds. In the park and on the streets closed to cars, we held our phones aloft to catch their voices. We developed a habit of interspecies gossip: Becca playing the barred owl call in the zoom party, Justin texting the photo someone took of a juvenile bald eagle in the cemetery. In the fall someone hangs a block of suet from a tree branch near the edge of the park. I route my winter walks by the hedge full of wrens. The same house sparrow comes to sit on the fire escape railing every day, and I stop work so we can watch each other until he leaves. One early spring morning, a single cardinal calls from thirty feet up in a London plane tree. I think of Anne Carson: someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.
