The fall issue of OnandOnScreen is out, with works by Bill Berkson, Rodrigo Toscano, Emily Dickinson, and of course yours truly the antediluvian progenitor of the text-reel poem.

The birds aren't here, because I can't hear them. I am thinking about myself, they should know that, not clear on what they know, not because I have to, because I want to, now that is, it is too late for the birds, their ideas, I am not ready for them, especially here. Where are the birds?

Making the rounds as result of Roberto Bolaño's new New Directions collection is his reaction to Mallarmé's "Sea Breeze," one of the most straightforward and rhetorical of Mallarmé's poems. Mallarmé's first line [“The flesh is sad – and I've read every book”] is both catchy and imprecise, the sort of declaration – like the lines that Rimbaud crossed out - that you wouldn't find in later Mallarmé, which gives Bolaño the opening to take him to task in his edgy stylistic evocation of Céline and the Beats which the Anglophone world can't seem to get enough of:

How could anyone declare that the flesh is essentially sad, that la petite mort, which doesn’t last even a minute, casts a pall over all lovemaking, which, it is widely known, can last for hours and hours, and go on interminably? If the line had been written by a Spanish poet like Campoamor, it might have meant something like that, but such a reading is quite at odds with the work and life of Mallarmé, which are indissolubly linked, except in this poem, this encoded manifesto, which Paul Gauguin, and he alone, followed to the letter (as far as we know, Mallarmé himself never listened to the sailors singing, or if he did, it certainly wasn’t on board a ship bound for an unknown destination). And the claim to have read all the books makes even less sense, because although books themselves may come to an end, no one every finishes reading them all, and Mallarmé was well aware of that. Book are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace. And what is left for Mallarmé, in this famous poem, when he desire to read and the desire to fuck, so he says, are all used up? Well, what is left is travel, the desire to go traveling. And maybe that’s the key to the crime. Because if Mallarmé had concluded that the only thing left to do was pray or cry or go crazy, maybe he’d have come up with the perfect alibi. But no, what Mallarmé says is that the only thing left to do is travel—which is like saying “to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary,” a sentence I used to be able to quote in Latin, but that’s just one of the many thing I’ve forgotten with help of my liver’s traveling toxins—in other words he sides with the bare-chested traveler, with Freedom (who’s bare-chested too), with the simple existence of the sailor and the explorer, which isn’t so simple when you get right down to it: an affirmation of life, but also a constant game with death, and the first rung on the ladder, the first step in a certain kind of poetic apprenticeship. The second step is sex, and the third, books.

“Sea Breeze” was written by Mallarmé when he was 23 and had married Maria Gerhard two years previously, who'd given birth to his daughter Geneviève: “Nothing can hold this heart steeped in sea-/ not my lamp's desolate luminosity/ nor the blank paper guarded by its white/ nor the young wife feeding her child..” He was in this period both an apprentice poet imitating elders and the poet he was becoming, formulating his own poetic revolution, as his first draft of The Afternoon of a Faun was written at about the same time. A year and a half later he would write: “I am terrified because I have to invent a new poetics, which I could best express in these words: 'Paint not the thing itself, but the effect it produces.'” As Walter Benjamin has written, the representation of consciousness was a project set forth by Baudelaire, a project that Mallarmé indeed created a new poetics to realize.

This poem "Sea Breeze," however, is a rather clumsy and unoriginal amalgamation of poems and sentiments of Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier. From Gautier we get a romantic maritime drama of what the soul requires: Mallarmé's poem ends with “..my soul, listen to the sailor's song!” which may contain Gautier's longing in “Sea Gloom” for the sound of the ocean to take pity on his soul and transform it and his grief into a shipwreck. Mallarmé paints a scene in “Sea Breeze” where “storm winds buckle above shipwrecks cast/ away.”

Starting a new sentence in line 10 with “Un Ennui, ..” is about as Baulelairean as it gets, as the term occurs with emphasis and famously as the conclusion of "To the Reader" but also several times in "Le Voyage," which Gauguin did, in fact, cite in his journals, the poem that appears to be the most direct antecedent to “Sea Breeze.” Baudelaire's uses of it here are crucial: it illustrates both the naïve wanderlust of the tourist and the realization, at the end of the poem, that “the world's monotonous and small; we see/ ourselves today, tomorrow, yesterday,/ an oasis of horror in the sands of ennui!”

We should consider that Baudelaire's only experience of travel was when at age 20 his domineering stepfather put him on a boat bound for India to apparently separate him from his druggie friends (“the least senseless../ Flee the great herd penned in by Destiny/ And take refuge in a great opium!”) and the boat was damaged by a storm and returned after landing in Mauritius and Reunion, perhaps inspiring a confrontation with death, the final journey of the poem (“to drown in the abyss – heaven or hell,/ who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new.)” Baudelaire begins by saying “the true travellers are they who depart/ for departing's sake” who “dream/of spacious pleasures, transient, little understood,/ whose name no human spirit knows” then describes the soul as a ship in which the voice atop the mainsail cries out “Love.. glory.. fortune,”* “the poor lover of chimerical lands.” He then describes the traveller as they who “gladden the ennui of our jails.” At 21, Mallarmé in his earnest poem “The Windows” uses a dying man looking out the window of a hospital room as a metaphor for his desire to escape his life for art and mysticism: “can I flee with my featherless wings-/ and risk falling through all eternity.” Baudelaire goes on to describe the “monotonous and small” world, in which our travels are a visualization of the race against time, at the end of which “if sea and sky are both black as ink,/ you know that our hearts are full of sunshine.” The equation of the discovery of “the new” with death contains all the irony of his embrace of modernity and everything else.

The “spacious pleasures whose name no human spirit knows” may have taken an entirely new form in Mallarmé's masterpiece The Afternoon of a Faun. The refrain “There, all is order and beauty;/ luxury, calmness and beauty” from Baudelaire's more idyllic “Invitation to the Voyage” appears to turn up in Faun as “..fringes of a placid mere in Sicily,/ plundered” by Mallarmé's “sun-rivalling vanity,/ silent beneath the blooms of brilliant night.” It is also where the soul goes: “void of words and heavy body slowly/ fall before noon's haughty calm.” Wherever Mallarmé was right then, he'd left the others behind.

* If there were finalists for the worst translations of all time, Robert Lowell would field several entries, but his Le Voyage (from the New Directions collection) should merit serious consideration. “«Amour... gloire... bonheur!» Enfer! c'est un écueil!” becomes “"Here's dancing, gin and girls!" Balls! it's a rock!” and “Partout où la chandelle illumine un taudis” becomes “we see Blue Grottoes, Caesar and Capri.” In both cases, his attempts at humor convey the exact opposite of what the poem is communicating, in key moments of the poem.

There was a peregrine falcon here for about a half hour. Passers by, oblivious to its presence, were making a fair amount of noise and it was undaunted by smaller birds flying around it, so I succumbed to the transgression of playing (for it, not me, so I thought) Peregrina on my laptop, as the Kayapó in the Amazon sing to the birds. After about a minute of the song it flew away. The song is not about a bird but uses the bird as a symbol, and the bird-symbol in the song flies away. The song is actually about the feminist journalist Alma Reed, who beat Katherine Ann Porter out for the affections of reformist Yucatan governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto, who established the first birth control clinics in the Western Hemisphere before he was murdered by "supporters of the efforts of the Yucatán's ruling class to regain the henequen haciendas and de facto slave labor they were forced to give up as a result of the Mexican Revolution" in the days leading up to the wedding. While Felipe and Alma were hiking with the poet Luis Rosado Vega, Alma commented on the scent of the nature around her, and Luis said “that perfume is because you are passing by and the earth, trees, and flowers wish to caress you,” prompting Felipe to request a poem.

Cuando dejes mis palmares y mi sierra,
peregrina del semblante encantador,
no te olvides, no te olvides de mi tierra,
no te olvides, no te olvides de mi amor.

More to come on Russian modernism, and thanks to Jerome Rothenberg for posting the first installment.

This much longer piece (than before) from Colombian cumbia legend Lucho Bermúdez is also probably from the mid-to-late 1950's, featuring a series of clarinet solos by Lucho to set up a vertically arranged duet with the trumpeter. More vocals here as well, from a song composed by Wilson Choperena with additional verses calling for togetherness between the nations of Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Panama, or at least celebrating the act of dancing with women in long, traditional Panamanian dresses in those countries, a song which has also been a hit in Peru and has been credited for spawning Mexican cumbia after Lucho's time there in the early 1950's.

Speaking of Colombia, Leonor Gonzalez Mina's brief a cappella “La Violencia.”

Jerome Rothenberg just posted the meaty second part of a 1994 talk on e.e. cummings, ending it with an excerpt from a Navajo horse-blessing song he translated in the 1970s:

(Nnnnn N ghan) because I was the boynging raised ing the dawn & nnnn but some there are mine all (ghan) & some (gwing) there 'rrr mine there

The gerundization of “boy” and “raised” reminds me of Velimir Khlebnikov's “Там, где жили свиристели (Where the Waxwings Used to Dwell),” where Khlebnikov uses suffixes and formed words to convey specific meanings, with the word “momentwill (времирей),” a word he made up which sounds Bergsonian, relating to the joined words around it: “warblewingish,” “waxwings,” “beguilish.” Russian like German has larger words than English, so Khlebnikov is using this composite diction to combine two concepts generally kept separate: time and will, the will of the past enduring, befitting his wish for an eternal present and his belief that language has been a divisive force, which he set out to resolve by way of his zaum language (pdf, p. 33), the sort of representation of cosmological unity that Foucault criticized in Les Mots et les choses.

In addition to works of his composed entirely in the zaum language, Khlebnikov uses made-up words in contexts of existing words that elaborate their possible meaning, as in “Grasshopper” and “Bo-beh-o-bi sang the lips,” assigning a non-connotive language to animals, objects, body parts, and sensory stimuli. Roman Jakobson said “The question of the interplay between speech sounds and letters and the possibility to utilize these interplays in verbal art, particularly on its supraconscious (zaum) level, vividly preoccupied me in 1912-14, and they were intensely discussed in my correspondence of 1914 with Krutchenyk and Khlebnikov."

In a way, the combination of cummings being the major figure of typographic innovation in America and that the content he used it for didn't inspire, may have had some sort of effect on the use of typographic effects thereafter. Creeley spoke of this in a 1963 interview (which I typed out for a conversation with Curtis Faville about cummings last April):

“Cummings' battle with the typographical set of the poem was one in which, once people were willing to admit typography could be variable and could have a useful effect, the particular value was lost... I like some of his earlier poems very much, both the uses of the sonnet and some of the straight wise-guy poems where you get this beautiful jargon and slang, but I feel that he's always been limited by being a real college boy, by which that his thinking, curiously, has never really gone deeper than the kind of, oh! let's say junior, sophomore, college wit... cummings, despite all his insistence on the single identity of the "i," is speaking for almost a class.”

As Creeley found cummings' content wanting, Joanna Drucker complains that Khlebnikov “was not interested in the contents of the individual psyche, but in himself as a priestly figure working in the service of profound truth,” though Julia Kristeva and Jakobson find a stylistic imprint of sexuality in Khlebnikov's frequent use of “mech-mjach” (sword-bullet) as in lines like “mecha stat' mjachom” “(Impatience) of the sword to become a bullet,” a psyche perhaps too impulsive and not sufficiently reflective for Drucker's tastes. Kristeva also credits Khlebnikov among others for the “resurgence of an “I” coming back to rebuild an ephemeral structure in which the constituting struggle of language and society can be spelled out.”

Osip Manselstam said Khlebnikov wrote “one enormous all-Russian book of prayers and icons from which, for centuries and centuries to come, everyone who may will find something to draw on.” Included in everyone are the Soviets and their more religious successors. The Soviet association most likely caused Joseph Brodsky to brand Khlebnikov taboo to the poetic foot soldiers of Reagan-era Cold War triumphalism, but a Khlebnikov revival in Russia seems afoot in the music and theater worlds that see in him a spiritual guide. The composer Vladimir Martynov was recently asked to compose a fusion piece for symphony orchestra and the Tuvan throat singing ensemble Huun Huur Tu and decided to use as his libretto Khlebnikov's creation myth of the Altay region Children of the Otter, and the work premiered in 2009. Martynov states in an interview that he finds in this Asian music and Russian traditions a model for "the end of the era of the composer," the preservation of cultures without humanist authors, a far cry from the “resurgence of the 'I'” Kristeva found in the artist Martynov is adapting.

Martynov describes Khlebnikov's vison of the “super-saga” as “the synthesis of different planes, or as in Children of the Otter, “sails.'” Kristeva describes the drama as “a mother, coming to the aid of her children in their fight against the sun. The Otter's children are squared off against three suns, one white, one purple, the other dark green.”



Also there's a splendid trailer for a new production of Victory Over the Sun, with attempts made by the editor to incorporate the visuals of Kazimir Malevich and others as well as Malevich's costumes:

As the title of this blog used to be All About Your Caste, I think about genre from time to time, a concept that doesn't have the same traditional relation to fate as caste does. Genre is and isn't a private matter, genre is a drama of opportunities and impediments, genre is a imprint of culture and an artist's reaction to it, genre consists of models and aspirations contained within subgenre, genre consists of real limits and the perceived limits of hierarchies. The Venetian Renaissance was a moment when secular patrons enabled painting to be reimagined as limitless, something that, like Elizabethan drama, leads to the genre reaching its summit in a short period of time, the same national tradition of theater that Dennis Potter recently felt the need to circumvent by going into television. People then and now criticize Joyce for his effect on the novel, after he applied the methods of Rabelais who people didn't perceive to be a novelist. Sterne arrived at the beginnings of the British novel.

What I always liked about the comment fields as genre is people don't know what it is yet. It's not that I've wanted genre luminaries to stay away, but I thought something could happen that wouldn't happen otherwise. I have no nostalgia or specific expectations about that genre now, nor do I assume Silliman will keep the comments off or that phenomenon will resituate itself, but history doesn't support the hypothesis that reevaluation, refinement, and 'improvement' of internet discussions will do anything but suck them dry of every aspect that made them remotely interesting. The celebration over their closing by people offering their services as inspirateurs and administrators of poetry that thought they themselves could write better criticism if the comments didn't exist, that discussion will be better if there were fewer discussions, that their delicate appreciation for poetry has been violated, that the condescension expressed by some exceeded their own, indicates to me that the comment fields were sufficiently abhorrent to those that trade in these limits, models of the past that deny its essence.

Genre hierarchy is communicated acutely by these reactions. People don't say that a university press publishes a lot of crap but occasionally has an original idea, a statement that would be accurate nine times out of ten, nor is there much attention paid to religious and gender discrimination of university hiring and enrollment during the 20th Century when every avant-garde artist is being raked over the coals by the university presses for anything that could possibly be interpreted as a slur. It would be inaccurate to say I'm oblivious to genre hierarchy so much as I try to evade the traps that come with the terrain.

So it follows that I have no idea what just happened. Whatever points I made that came off as compelling and different generally seemed too obvious to me to have emotional resonance (like the existence of the avant-garde itself, until recently a discredited notion), and my floated ideas arising from sustained preoccupations have been altered little if at all by feedback. As for Silliman's blog, without question the main influence has come from Silliman himself, the reiteration and elaboration of his fertile ideas grouped largely in The New Sentence, the most important book of poetry criticism of the past sixty years, studied by many but underrated to the point that his contempt for his contemporary counterparts in the critical field is understandable.

The navigation of genre hierarchy is a creative process in and of itself and not a mass initiative responding to ideals of justice, except in situations like France's, a country where Sarkozy has maintained the Culture Ministry but is raiding the gypsy camps, a culture painted by Manet, Courbet, Daumier, Seurat, Picasso, Rouault, so on and so forth. For the first time in a few years I put on Sawdust and Tinsel last night, perhaps the best film ever made about genre hierarchy, its theater director telling the circus performers “you risk your life, we our vanity,” its bear scenes never paid for due to bad box office. The bear's not on Youtube, just an unfortunately clipped opening scene. But there's gypsies (colorful and stereotyped) in the Kirov Petruscka, and the bear arrives in the sixth minute of the third installment.

I wrote up my dream for my blog, but it was such a biting parody of me that for me to print it, whether or not I have the sense of humor to do so, would do it disrespect to suggest I could feign indifference to its brutality, or rewrite it to make that possible.