Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Robert Creeley died yesterday in Odessa, Texas.

Sparks Street Echo

Flakes falling
out window make
no place, no place--

no faces, traces,
wastes of whatever
wanted to be--

was here
momently, mother,
was here.

From Selected Poems (1991)

*

Why poetry? Its materials are so constant, simple, elusive, specific. It costs so little and so much. It preoccupies a life, yet can only find one in living. It is a music, a playful construct of feeling, a last word and communion. I love it that these words, "made solely of air," as Williams said, have no owner finally to determine them. The English teacher all that time ago who said, "You must learn to speak correctly," was only wrong in forgetting to say why--for these words which depend upon us for their very existence fail as our usage derides or excludes them. They are no more right or wrong than we are, yet suffer our presumption forever.

From the Preface to Selected Poems (1991)

Joe LeSueur's Digressions

I just learned that the following review (which I wrote in December 2003 and lost sight of) will not be printed in World Literature Today. No room. So here's a new home for it.

Joe LeSueur. Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2003. xxvii + 302 pages, ill. $25. ISBN 0-374-13980-6.

"I just met the most terrific person!": That is what Joe LeSueur remembers saying after meeting Frank O'Hara. LeSueur and O'Hara met in 1951; from 1955 to 1965 they shared a series of Manhattan apartments in what LeSueur calls an "ambiguous" relationship as roommates, friends, and occasional lovers. (It was the ambiguity that brought their life together to an end.) With Bill Berkson, LeSueur edited the invaluable assemblage of memoirs and essays Homage to Frank O'Hara (1988). In this book LeSueur (who died in 2001) assembles his memories and speculations concerning 40-odd Frank O'Hara poems.

LeSueur writes in response to poems that prompt memories; while a number of O'Hara's best-known poems are here, others ("Meditations in an Emergency" and "Why I Am Not a Painter," for two) are conspicuously absent. LeSueur does indeed digress, freely, wittily, and generously. He resists at almost every turn the impulse to provide critical commentary on poems: "I am not … so audacious as to delve into the singular depths of this poem" he writes of "Joe's Jacket" (named for his jacket, a seersucker from Brooks Brothers). Instead, he focuses on what Allen Ginsberg in his elegy for Frank O'Hara, "City Midnight Junk Strains," calls "deep gossip." A chapter on "Personal Poem" collects affectionate memories of artist Mike Kanemitsu before turning to less-friendly recollections of Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). A chapter on O'Hara's Jackson Pollock poem, "Digression on Number 1, 1948," turns into an unflattering portrait of Pollock's wife Lee Krasner. At times deep gossip threatens to make O'Hara's poetry peripheral, most dismayingly when LeSueur tries to find a "personal response" to the dense, dazzling "In Memory of My Feelings." He finds that the poem triggers "nothing" and proceeds to recount painter Grace Hartigan's gaucheries. (The poem is dedicated to Hartigan.) Here and elsewhere LeSueur seems to be settling scores, and the relation between commentary and poem becomes reminiscent of Nabokov's Pale Fire (a resemblance LeSueur no doubt consciously makes use of).

A claim that one is unable to "analyze" ("Make of it what you will" is one recurring phrase; "What can I say?" is another) might seem merely a pose--LeSueur did, after all, major in English. But I think that LeSueur's claim is genuine: he is without the luxury of critical distance. And unlike Nabokov's Charles Kinbote, LeSueur shared a world with the poet of whom he writes, making Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara a uniquely valuable adjunct to O'Hara's poems. LeSueur offers countless details of New York at mid-century: the jobs available to a young man with a "worthless" liberal arts degree, the pieces one would hear on classical radio stations, the various subcultures of gay Manhattan. LeSueur offers a fascinating commentary on O'Hara's use of blond and blonde and identifies numerous film references in the poems. His digressions bring relatively neglected poems--"John Button Birthday," for instance--into view. And he recounts events for which there are few if any other surviving witnesses, including the aftermath of the famous "4:19 to East Hampton" train that O'Hara has on his mind in "The Day Lady Died." As the details of Frank O'Hara's world--rotary phones, unfiltered cigarettes, old movies on late-night television--recede further from view, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara honors O'Hara's poems by providing contexts for their further appreciation.

Later

From the University of Texas at Austin, Design Your Own Anti-Procrastination Plan, a page of useful strategies.

That (In)famous Line

My essay on a line from Van Dyke Parks' lyrics for the song "Cabin Essence" is now up at Jan Jansen's website, Van Dyke Parks. "Cabin Essence" is a song from SMiLE (words by VDP, music by Brian Wilson).

The line in question,

Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield

has become a touchstone for thinking about SMiLE. "Over and over . . ." piqued the antagonism of Beach Boy Mike Love, who insisted that VDP explain what it meant. VDP preferred to let his work speak for itself. Conflict over the lyric content of SMiLE--a far cry from, say,

I'm gettin' bugged drivin' up and down the same old strip

--was one of many factors in the breakdown of the original SMiLE project. This line from "I Get Around" is of course wonderful in its own right, but by 1966 Brian Wilson was gettin' bugged drivin' up and down the same old strip and was interested in pursuing new directions in his music.

You can read the essay by clicking here.

From the Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl
This site has photographs from the files of the Farm Security Administration and interviews with men and women who experienced the Dust Bowl.

Voices from the Dust Bowl
This site documents life in the Farm Security Administration's migrant work camps.

Jim Jarmusch: favorite books

From an audio clip included with the Criterion Collection dvd of Down by Law:

I love the book Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. I like Flaubert's novels, especially Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education. I like pretty much anything by Balzac. I like Proust. I love Orlando Furioso by Arisoto. I love the Divine Comedy, especially the Inferno. How about Hamlet? Anything by William Blake. Rimbaud, Illuminations and The Drunken Boat. I love the New York school of poets, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, David Shapiro, Ron Padgett, Frank Lima, et cetera. I love Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel. I love Rilke, Neruda, Pierre Reverdy, Mallarmé, Georges Bataille, Blaise Cendrars, his poems and his novel Moravagine also. I love books like The Woman Chaser by Charles Williford, Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, James M. Cain's Serenade. I love the book The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain, one of my favorite books ever written. Luc Sante, one of my favorite writers, The Factory of Facts and of course Low Life. Herbert Asbury's The Gangs of New York, soon to be a major motion picture. I love Michael Ondaatje's writing, especially the book Coming Through Slaughter. I love the novels of Samuel Beckett, far more than his plays. That's just a start anyway. They're some of my favorite books.

Jim Jarmusch's films include Coffee and Cigarettes, Night on Earth, and Mystery Train.

Bobby Short

From the New York Times:

Bobby Short, the cherubic singer and pianist whose high-spirited but probing renditions of popular standards evoked the glamour and sophistication of Manhattan nightlife, died today at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He was 80, and had homes in Manhattan and southern France. . . .

Mr. Short liked to call himself a saloon singer, and his "saloon," since 1968, was one of the most elegant in the country, the intimate Cafe Carlyle tucked in the Hotel Carlyle on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. There for six months each year, in a room where he was only a few feet away from his audience, he sang and accompanied himself on the piano. Although he had said that last year's engagement would be his final one, he reversed himself in June and extended for 2005, the 50th anniversary of the club.

Over the years, Mr. Short transcended the role of cabaret entertainer to become a New York institution and a symbol of civilized Manhattan culture. In Woody Allen's films, a visit to the Carlyle became an essential stop on his characters' cultural tour. He attracted a chic international clientele that included royalty, movie stars, sports figures, captains of industry, socialites and jazz aficionados . . . .

His social status sometimes overshadowed his significance as a jazz pianist, singer and scholar. Mr. Short dedicated himself to spreading an awareness of the African-American contribution to New York's musical theater. In his pantheon of great American songwriters, Cole Porter stood side by side with Duke Ellington, Eubie Blake, Fats Waller, and Waller's sometime lyricist Andy Razaf, who wrote the words for "Guess Who's in Town?", his unofficial musical greeting.

You can read the Times obituary by clicking here. (Use mediajunkie as your name and password.)

Apocalypse Then

For anyone in the "downstate Illinois" area, there's a terrific exhibit at the Krannert Art Museum, "Apocalypse Then: Images of Destruction, Prophecy, and Judgment from Dürer to the Twentieth Century." From the museum website:

Presenting five centuries of art inspired by apocalyptic writing and thought, this exhibition includes woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer and interpretations of the Book of Revelation by Dürer, Gustave Doré, and Odilon Redon. Other works in the exhibition reveal how apocalyptic imagery was used by artists as diverse as Georges Rouault, Rockwell Kent and Philip Guston to illustrate their political, social, and personal reactions to war and revolution, and William Hogarth, William Blake, Pablo Picasso, and Jasper Johns reacting to the inevitability of evil and death.

Organized by Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

For me the most exciting thing was unexpected--Jasper Johns' Skin with O'Hara Poem (1963-65), a print that I've known only from relatively tiny reproductions.

The Krannert Art Museum is located at 500 E. Peabody Drive in Champaign, Illinois (phone 217-333-1860). The museum is open on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 9 to 5; Wednesday from 9 to 8, and Sunday from 2 to 5. Admission is free, with a suggested $3 donation. The exhibit closes on April 3, 2005.

Speak, Memory

Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say, Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be converted into a sentence. The first card of the triplet is encoded as a person, the second as a verb, and the third as an object. For example, when Cooke sees a three of clubs, a nine of hearts, and a nine of spades, he immediately conjures up an image of Brazilian lingerie model Adriana Lima in a Biggles biplane shooting at his old public-school headmaster in a suit of armor. The more vivid the image, the more likely it is not to be forgotten.

From an article on the U.S. Memory Championship. You can read the entire article by clicking here. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Near South

The Chicago-based magazine Near South just published its fifth issue (Winter 2005), a mixture of poetry and prose, including eight poets and one dramatist responding to "Blue in Green," one of the five pieces on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. My contribution, a poem called "Early Music," is dedicated to my dad, who had me listening to Kind of Blue when I was a three-year-old kid in 1959.

In this issue I especially like Evie Shockley's blue and green lines:

                 blue spring grew green a cash crop ::
ballads fuel a blown fuse future--

There's no website for Near South, but a copy of the magazine ($5) can be had from

Near South
c/o Garin Cycholl
3617 W. Belle Plaine
Chicago, IL 60618