Zara & the Ghost of Gertrude

My fourth full length from Oneiros Books. Here it is at Lulu, & here it is at Amazon, 110 pages for $10. 

Dessutom så finns boken till salu i Sverige här på Adlibris för 93 kr. 

The book is composed of poems that respond to more or less short quotes from Gertrude Stein that are innocent of any relation to the content or preoccupations of the poems. See this demonstrated below: it is indicative of a refreshing semantic contingency that lets poems reside in syntactic distress & fuck meaning.

serene length

A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it
(Gertrude Stein)

night falls the longest dress conceivable
all the indistinguishable, all cats a grayness
a sudden change of place, all cats grayness
shifting subtle shape

crackles because entropy is disparate
bastards, a dress is electric blue
memory forever/ they have outworn
their murder

only the black & the red are eternity
and smell like unsubtle sugar/ sutures
and sexuality/ where the face was put
the front of some skull & a selective

scent/ elective is not infinite affinities
but there is nothing we call death
in us, ever/ there is this longing/
the longest possible dress

guns and butter

A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous
ordinarily
(Gertrude Stein)

if everything were red it would be better/
animals that see different colors
or just none/

guns & an extent of ordinary butter
with nothing neglected;
and nothing with no red in it

means the same as living

repression

A transfer, a large transfer, a little transfer, some transfer,
clouds and tracks do transfer, a transfer is not neglected.
(Gertrude Stein)

it is innocence & capacious
raucous suffering smelling not at all under heaven/
a somnolent zombie smoking beside a railway track
turning memories back into facts/

or repressed impossible sexuality therapy
Fridays before they ever invented cake:
for there was nothing dead as yet/
no such thing as a face

Thanks to Dave Mitchell & Oneiros for doing the books & to Michael Mc Aloran for the cover art.

Now an awesome review & a monstrous admission. Sometimes we draw a huge blank. I have no idea who wrote this review, & would be grateful to be able to thank the writer of this erudite piece. 

“it is incomplete, one silence

and the luscious almost nothing coming
tickling the blood to acquiescence
and the breathless presence
of death, confusion, sex,
whatever it is coming next

and all our absences are adequate to us:
we are boring corners

where worlds come to touch”

David McLean, “Rumbling Nothing.”

The poem has a darkness which is also an accuracy. “We are boring corners / where worlds come to touch” is a very accurate statement. Notice how it has a certain precision of rhythm, with the emphasized stress overlapping the hard “o” sounds at “boring corners” and there is the very clear stressing at “come to touch,” “BAH buh BAH.” The content is at first glance, negative dark, truthful, minimal. It is not illusioned poetry. You can’t exactly say it is disillusioned, because he still writes. Someone who was absolutely disillusioned would not write poetry, would they? (or would they?).

The poem is one of a little series indicating a reading of Gertrude Stein. She always seemed very dry to me, I could never really “get” her, except as a catalyst for many other artists. Lew Welch wrote a thesis about Stein which I have never read, except for a bit of it here: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/welch/from_stein.html. I think of Stein as, maybe, an example of what Oscar Wilde hypothesized as “the critic as poet.” Welch delves into that in his analysis of Stein. She is definitely a catalyst for artists.

“We are boring corners / where worlds come to touch” – so here, the self has become emptied-out and hollowed-out. But, it is also the place, where worlds come to touch.

It might be helpful to back out of all this and think about the general situation of the poet. That is, the general situation of someone, when he writes. It is a poem: therefore, the person has backed out of all instrumental use of words, all of those normal “prose” uses where the words dissolve into their purpose, where the words do not exist for us to look at them, but rather to look through them at what they are about, at the referent.

The poet, the person in that situation, has as it were, backed out of the normal word-use situation where the words dissolve into their use, and so now the acoustical and other properties of words as words, start to matter. Here, you can see this in the clearly marked rhythms, as well as the foregrounding of sound properties in places, as with the panoply of “o” sounds in the last two lines.

Also, by backing out of normal “prose” use, suddenly it places the poet, as thinker, in a very weird place. All of the stereotypical deep questions come up: why are we here? Is there a god? What is? What does “is” mean? Etc. Again this is related to how we have pulled back from words as a means to an end, we are no longer writing the words as part of an instruction manual on how to use a lawnmower or the like.

The poet’s situation: the thoughtful, reflective function of the mind, no longer dissolves into a particular task at hand.

McLean is typically an abstract poet when it comes to sensory imagery. However the poems while abstract still have strong emotional tone.

Somehow, he has encountered the topic of nihilism, of nothingness, of no-meaning, void, without leaving poetry. Other examples of this happening: Larkin, Gluck.

Other tonally similar: Ingmar Bergman.

Another one, called “they were forever”:

“they seemed to be a tremulous eternity,
these walking corpses hollowed out
by cruelty and memory,

as if a sadistic sculptor had deigned to touch them

once god was forgotten, as if morality depended on makers
and the threat of heaven;

they seemed to be evident eternity, these wicked
victims, gray skeletons and fragile fetuses of hurt
become sudden lonely ghosts, their hunger

our torture, the tiniest evil disease
crawling back at us from history

and loveless, an insistent want to touch:

they seemed to be tremendous eternity

and nothing much; they had suffered though
so we thought this enough,

memories and roses and dust”

We can see formal order here, and a nostalgia for formal order. By that I mean, here you have the three-line stanzas; you have the clear rhythmic marking of the lines, which is emphasized especially by the linebreaks; you have the very fact of the linebreaks; you have clearly foregrounded musical echoes and repetitions (e.g., the “y” in “cruelty and memory,” the “o” in “lonely ghosts”); also in this one you have the gradually building pressure of the one-sentence structure, demanding a resolution and conclusion, as is also demanded by the use of the by-itself last line. These devices are all traditional, in the sense of, we have seen them in poetry for a while. This poem like the others has this sense of a retinue of traditional devices, and a desire to write a poem, being brought up against a thoroughgoing nihilism, an undercutting doubt which itself invokes a tradition (Larkin, Bergman, Nietzsche, numerous others). However the nature of nihilism is that as Nietzsche noted it can be a historically creeping phenomenon, and the effect with McLean’s poems is like the nihilism has crept in even further, nothingness has established itself even more, and yet there are still these poems.

The poem lacks details but lack of detail is one of its themes. The emotional force of the poem is clear without detail. The poem though abstract is saying things quite specifically: words like “victims” and “fragile” and “tremendous” are very closely literally saying the pressurized emotional flow which the poem is. The poem is looking for tones aside of sadness and horror. The poem reflects a point of view which is looking at ultimate things. In detaching itself from prose use of words it has confronted a groundlessness, like a shocking insight where the presence of heaven or at least its solace as a faith was supposed to be. At the end of this poem, it is as if we crawl back through ghosts to the quasi-details of “roses” and “dust” – it is as if the void which is so close to the theme of Thanatos, hauls us away from things of this world. The dematerialized quality of the poetry relates to what it is about.

Why is it that such an acute experience of void has not snuffed out the poems? For whatever reason, it has not silenced the stream of poems.

Again notice how on the measuring-stick of concrete to abstract, the text is very abstract. This abstraction feels like a stylistic minimalism which is simply a case of the text staying true to the writer’s natural predilections and preferences. He is at the far end on the abstraction scale compared to where, say, Elizabeth Bishop, or imagist poets, or classical haiku poets, would be. Yet this minimalism, which constitutes a shadowy dissolution of objects and sense-images, seems to be very organically tied to the long serious stare at nothingness which is the overall tone of the poems.

His poems violate the core principles of imagism, to wit, no ideas but in things (the rule of thumb that a poem should catch the thing-detail in vivid sensory light). Of course, what it goes to show is that there is no particular principle or rule for poetry. The poems show that use of the sense-detail-image is simply one possible technique for the poem; just as in painting, abstraction is another.

It makes sense, that things are so minimized, so much removed, from these poems, given how much their theme is that removal.

In the case of Rilke, we had a poet who, realizing the fuzziness and mushiness of subjectivity and abstraction, threw himself into a crash-course on importing the thing, the sense-detail, the object into the poem. Thus we get his apprenticeship with the sculptor Rodin, and his very deliberate “thing-poems” such as “The Panther.”

With McLean, what you have is the exploration of method for writing poems which does not go back to the sense-detail, the image, the thing. But which at the same time, gives short shrift to the subject, the subjective (the self as nothing but a “boring corner”).

The poems offer an alternative to imagism.

Another one, “in their coffins” --

“in their coffins they seem to be grinning

because there is no time in them
and every memory is gone missing
to wherever it is the time goes
and where worlds used to be
they have gone to nighttime and non-being
and become nothing and free:
in their coffins they seem to be grinning
but they are not agents today
they have nothing to be;

they have lost the terrible blessing
that is passion and need”

Again notice the abstraction. The closest the poem gets to a sense-image is the grinning skulls in the coffins, but clearly this image is not being appropriated from direct observation in life. Rather, really it is once or twice deferred from life-observation, and it is more a literary conceit, an idea, a symbol (the grinning corpse) than a thing observed in nature. He does not paint from nature; he paints from his thoughts and emotions, which are dominated by the subject of death. It has been said that death is the grand subject of philosophy, and his poetry is close to philosophy.

The poems are allusive to Housman. Both the hints of song or ballad meter, and the hints of rhyme. The overall tone is definitely like Housman in its being equal parts morally civilized and colossally disillusioned. It is also like Thomas Hardy in having a certain determinism. However the poems typically speak from an impersonal and solitary zone as opposed to the miniature character studies and short stories and drama scenes of Hardy.

Phrases such as “terrible blessing” and “passion and need” can be read as allusions back to traditional rhetorics. It is as if the poems represent continuations of a tradition into a present moment which is even more disillusioned, more nihilism-confronted and nothingness-haunted, than before. Each poem always has this feel of being the first realization of this fresh shock of this new full realization, this fact of (for lack of a better word) death, which is always more radical than any idea of it, more chilling and painful than any prior conceptualization of it. There is a sense of trauma overloading the circuits, really a subject which is “too much” to be said; an overwhelming insight which chases away all subsidiary insights. (So it is in form of a poem because the prose version of this would be silence?) A phrase like “terrible blessing” differentiates the text from regular speech and links it back to prior exemplars, such as Yeats’ phrase “a terrible beauty is born.” The poem helps us remember the past, even as it denies any transcendental saving of the past.

(Nietzsche also conveyed that very well, that sense of western nihilism as something always more freshly, shockingly realized than before. In a sense his tonal journey was a series of holding actions against an insight which came more and more freshly until it jarred him from his own sanity.)

On the Dickinson-Whitman scale, McLean is over at the Dickinson end.

One gets the sense of a specific historical moment when reading his poems. It is the moment when a previously established and believed-in belief system is undercut by a nihilism. Nihilism achieves its scariness and darkness, when viewed in the context of a happy belief in presence which it replaces. Nietzsche wrote of how it is relative to the degradation and collapse of Christian religious belief structures, that nihilism gains its force. If one could fully forget the god-construct that the religion posits, then one might not feel the darkness of nihilism, because one would no longer feel like something has been removed. Nihilism for Nietzsche was like a vacuum created by the removal of Christianity: if the removal was far enough away that one did not feel the vacuum anymore, would one still feel the nihilism anymore?

(Compare western conceptions of void to the Zen Buddhist version. There are passages in Buddhism which have a sense like what Nietzsche’s “western nihilism” could be if they did not have the tremendous collapse and vacuum of the lost xtian system to deal with at the front end.)

One more, “drums and puppies” --

“drums and puppies fighting deadly serious
like one irresolute genuflection
and some dismal demiurge nowhere
all the gods running around being homeless
Rizlas and stupidity

because world is vacant paper

and no sky ever was angry
or even a substantial subject -
in the scholastic sense -
horrible hypokeimenon
where we swim listless like fish

this smoky dusty nothingness

where worlds live, drums
and angry puppies -
nothing to forgive”

“Rizlas” is a name for cigarette rolling papers. “Hypokeimenon” means “the underlying thing.” Here we see the dramatic power that occurs when details make it into the poem. The peculiar details – drums, puppies, rizlas, hypokeimenon – these are all the more noticeable, given as the default setting of these poems is minimal at the level of such things.

Where it says, “and no sky ever was angry / or even a substantial subject” – You can see here how the sensory barrenness or minimalism of the poems seems somehow to be necessary, somehow of a piece with what the poems are about. The skeptical inquiry as to the sky’s status as a “substantial object” is close to the core of these poems. The question, when the sky contains no god, is whether the sky can even contain itself any longer. McLean is hauntingly aware of “this smoky dusty nothingness.”

Precursors:

“SEYTON:

The queen, my lord, is dead.

MACBETH:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

Shakespeare, from Macbeth.

“As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

*What means all this?

*Death hangs over thee: whilst yet thou livest, whilst thou mayest, be good.

*Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.”

Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations.