Young man with an umbrella

[Henry, April 11, 2013.]

Another gum machine, another dowdy streetscape.

And speaking of the dowdy: I remember when umbrellas only came in Large. Carrying an umbrella on a day that turned out to hold no rain became, at least for my younger self, an exercise in acute self-consciousness.

Other Henry posts
Betty Boop with Henry : Henry, an anachronism : Henry and a gum machine : Henry at the shoe repairman : Henry buys liverwurst : Henry, getting things done : Henry mystery : Henry’s repeated gesture

Local weather

We have rain, plenty. And a local television station has two — two — meteorologists on tonight’s news.

To borrow from Tip O’Neill: all weather is local. Stay safe, east-central Illinois.

A related post
The weatherman’s reply to the shepherd

[From the television: “. . . a battle zone of air masses.”]

Free-font sites

From Creative Bloq: twenty-five sites for free fonts. Free and legit, that is. I especially like Impallari’s Cabin Font.

I’ll add two more sites: those of Friedrich Althausen and Jos Buivenga. Althausen’s Vollkorn and Buivenga’s Fontin Sans are two of my favorite fonts for documents.

Little Outliner

Little Outliner is a free, browser-based outliner. I never make outlines, but I do ask students to map paragraphs using the Christensen method, and Little Outliner is perfect for doing that work on the big screen.

Found via One Thing Well.

*

April 17: From the same developer, Fargo is a outliner that syncs with Dropbox. And if you’d like a Dropbox invitation (another .5 GB free storage), click here.

Found via Taking Note Now.

A typewriter film

“A film about a machine and the people who love, use and repair it”: The Typewriter (In the 21st Century), by Christopher Lockett and Gary Nicholson. Here’s the trailer.

Related reading
All typewriter posts (Pinboard)

Review: Joseph Ceravolo, Collected Poems

Joseph Ceravolo. Collected Poems. Edited by Rosemary Ceravolo and Parker Smathers. Introduction by David Lehman. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. $35 hardcover. $16.99 eBook. xxxi + 560 pages.

Joseph Ceravolo (1934–1988) was a poet of the New York School’s second generation — whatever that means. (As the variousness of the poets grouped under that label becomes more recognizable, the label becomes little more than a quick note as to time and place.) Living and writing apart from po-biz, the institutional networks of favor (curried) and favors (traded), Ceravolo devoted his energies to his family, his poetry, and his work as a civil engineer. It seems that at some point he even took leave of the Lower East Side poetry community born of the New York School.

The appearance of the Collected Poems follows a pattern of publication that we’ve seen with the work of another second-generation New York School poet, Ted Berrigan: early aboveground publication, followed by fugitive books from small poet-run presses, a posthumous selected poems from a trade press, and a collected poems from a university press.¹ Ceravolo’s Collected includes six previously published books and a large number of unpublished poems, most notably the twelve-year accumulation of Mad Angels (1976–1988). The Collected roughly doubles what had been available of Ceravolo’s work.

The Ceravolo familiar to me is the maker of poems whose surfaces look something like these passages:

Arrange the geological brush, the wasp,
the part that makes it,
and out with a dog noise,
a night and the airplane lung.    (“Life of Freedom”)

flea you say
“geese geese” the boy
June of winter
of again
Oak sky    (“Drunken Winter”)

These surfaces are made largely of nouns and verbs and prepositions, parts of speech glued together, so to speak, to make wholes with no obvious contexts beyond themselves. Such poems suggest cubist miniatures, presenting everyday materials in new and unexpected ways. One of my favorite short Ceravolo poems in this vein is “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

So much to consider: notations of time, place, and weather; the parallel lines of street and waterway; and a moment of commerce — or is it intimacy? Is the hand waiting for payment, or to be held? Is the first “it” the hand, or the can? Are we following a lone pedestrian, a couple in love, or a parent and child on a schlep in the rain? Part of what’s needed to find pleasure in such poetry is a willingness to be happy with unanswered questions.

Reading through this volume, I now find such poems far from typical. Ceravolo was always the most oracular of New York School poets, with bursts of language that suggested the influence of Kenneth Koch (one of Ceravolo’s teachers):

Flare! prostrates! thirsty!
Undoing!    (Fits of Dawn)

O flower of water’s vent!    (“Passivation”)

But Ceravolo’s frequent “O” (twenty-two poems here begin with one) is no Kochian joke. The Collected Poems suggests that Ceravolo’s apostrophizing, exclamatory energy is deeply rooted (as is Koch’s) in the poetries of Romanticism, early and late. I hear William Blake:

with the performing angel
on the hill of paradise
already seen from a garden’s ray    (The Hellgate)

And Walt Whitman:

I’m far from a window.
Yet I am window and
feel the multicolored pushes
through open window self.    (“Floating Gardens”)

And Jack Kerouac:

ah chirp of seen
Bang my tide    (Fits of Dawn)

And in the title Mad Angels and in much else, Allen Ginsberg:

O holy mass, o holy waters
O holy woman, man, and rain    (untitled poem)

Romantic influences are everywhere in the later poetry, which is marked by a primal vocabulary — sun, grass, tree, wind, heart, dirt, body, blood — and greater plainness of statement. It is as if, after making beautiful, mosaic abstractions, Ceravolo has begun to sketch and paint and photograph. The poems of INRI (1979), twenty syllables apiece, are full of pith and wit:

This morning I could
walk and walk.
That’s freedom.
But I drink this coffee
before work.    (“Freedom”)

The last poems in this volume, gathered under the title Mad Angels, move toward greater expansiveness. Many contain observations from Ceravolo’s weekday commute from New Jersey to New York, as he notices fellow travelers and the urban scene:

           Elizabeth! Elizabeth!
What dreams the American spirit
had for you    (“Railway Box (Deo Te Salve)”)²

There are translations from Saint John of the Cross, poems that comment on events in the news, poems of love, sexual and familial, and moments of shining clarity:

A guitar of noon, a guitar
of lightning,
a guitar, aloft!    (“Guitar Ode”)

As a much younger reader, I was delighted to realize that it wasn’t contemporary poetry I disliked but one version of it: the genteel domesticity of the so-called workshop poem, the little anecdote dressed up in strained metaphors and similes. Ceravolo’s Collected Poems is an antidote to anecdote — a poetry of energy and invention that risks everything. Here is life and food for future years.³

¹ The relevant Berrigan publications: the Grove Press edition of The Sonnets (1967), the Penguin Selected Poems (1994), and the University of California Press Collected Poems (2005). Ceravolo’s Spring in This World of Poor Mutts (1968) was published by Columbia University Press. A selected poems, The Green Lake Is Awake (1994), was published by Coffeehouse Press.

² It helps to know that Elizabeth is a city in New Jersey.

³ This sentence adapts two partial lines from William Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”: “in this moment there is life and food / For future years.”

[Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the book. Cover image from the publisher’s website.]

Smith going backward

In Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor, who is not a doctor, speaks in mighty and fantastic monologues. A small sample:

“We say someone is pretty for instance, whereas, if the truth were known, they are probably as ugly as Smith going backward, but by our lie we have made that very party powerful, such is the power of the charlatan, the great strong! They drop on anything at any moment, and that sort of thing makes the mystic in the end, and,” he added, “it makes the great doctor.”

The simile “as ugly as Smith going backward” sounds as if it has vernacular authority, but try as I have, I find no source for it other than Barnes’s novel. Like the punchline “No soap, radio,” the simile sounds as if it means something, but what? I think it suggests someone who is so ugly that he does us a small favor by turning as he walks away.

I know of one other Smith going backward: an early chapbook by the poet Steve Carey owes its title to Barnes. (Does anyone else know that?)


[Steve Carey, Smith Going Backward. San Francisco: Cranium Press, 1968. Cover illustration by Peter Kanter. A long-ago used-book-store find.]

The book’s title poem seems to pay brief homage to Nightwood with the line “in moods strange as a fictional doctor.” I will guess that Carey was reading Nightwood and that the novel, like so much else — street sounds, weather, a cold sore, Oreos — found its way into his work.

Here are the beautiful last eight lines of another poem from Smith Going Backward, “Half a Western”:

When five and again when six comes
everybody just yells a name and
walks upstairs swinging keys
Myself, Buzz Sawyer, Beetle Bailey
we bother the breezes for the coat of RJ Reynolds

The mystery of me is mine
the book no one knows I’m writing
Times with all my heart I wish it showed

 
[Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) and Steve Carey (1945–1989). Photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Rochelle Kraut. About “Half a Western”: Carey’s grandfather and father were Harry Carey and Harry Carey, Jr., actors with long careers in cowboy films and much else. Buz Sawyer (one z) was a comic strip. Beetle Bailey is one.]

DARE needs help

John McIntyre has put out the word that the Dictionary of American Regional English needs help.

Les Blank (1935–2013)

“He shot what he wanted, captured it beautifully, and those subjects are now gone. The homogenization of American culture has obliterated it”: director Taylor Hackford, quoted in the New York Times obituary for filmmaker Les Blank.

I can vouch for The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1970) and Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980). Neither is currently available from Netflix. The films are available from Blank’s website, and samples may be found in the usual place.

Repurposed

Other repurposings
Bakeware : Dish drainer : Doorstop : Tea tin

[For clarity: the first five came with the box.]