This is the rather longish poem I'll be giving a guided tour
through up tomorrow at, is it 12:30, Mark, at the--
at the Student Union, right?
It's a poem about writing poetry.
It's about how I came to write poetry,
my own struggle with language.
And I think it might be helpful and useful to people
any age of writing themselves.
There are few foreign words in it that I'll just throw out
translations to-- the word "nomen" which of course,
means noun in Latin, and "mundus nominalis,"
the word of the noun, the realm of the noun.
For years, I had a writer's block.
For years, I found that nouns predominated in my work,
but the verbs hadn't come to the forefront,
hadn't come to dominate the verses.
I think it has to.
Nouns have a tendency to star, to accumulate,
they're stations of the static.
And if left to their own powers, I found that they stultified,
they blocked the logical force of the poem forward.
It was finally in developing the verb, and the verb as part
of process, the verb as a means of distribution,
the verb as lyric, I finally came to my own verse.
There's a smattering of Provençal.
Quouro lis estello brihon forço means simply
when the stars are shining bright.
There's a smattering of German from a poem of Hölderlin's that
was being translated in a little cave in the rocks by Heidegger
and a group of Heideggeran philosophers.
And there's a little phrase in Latin toward the end. " Salva,
salva terram," which means as I'm sure you know, "Save,
save the Earth."
The poem is called "A Portrait of the Self as Instrument of its
Syllables."
And it has a little epithet at the beginning.
As when milk is bound by the juice of the fig,
from Empedocles.
And the poem is dedicated to Robert Duncan.
Part one.
It was dark finally, crossing the Crau
before the first blossoming almonds caught in the headlights
flickering pink from under.
Cupped flame that frozen sequence was what I'd hold to:
the instant looped, bezzled, set, now into sound.
The narrow orchards as they isle, rise,
the possibility at least of isolates.
The hissing of walls, reeds, windbreaks.
The running conjugate of the uninterrupted
was what brought me first a bag and briefcase.
The possibility at least, of stations, intervals,
of somewhere with the numbers might knot,
and the taut white boulders in their breath lines eddy.
Would lie there, the full length of that murmur.
Not stillness, said, but the movement traced, gathered.
The loose skirts of the flame in folded.
Mint and japonica brought quartz like to focus.
A where, whereby the fibers might run refluent into hip,
ankle, tongue.
Part two.
Within the circle that, hand stamped,
canceled the square: Lacoste, fief of oak smoke and iris,
of moons and nettles, of the black wind
pitted cells of its ramparts.
(What the South wind scooped and the long mistrals chiseled.)
There, concentric, at its quarried heart,
where the cobbles fork and hollyhocks stand sentinel,
went under.
Where the lamp might root and the low room glow,
bright as burst straw--
brought the broken swarm of my syllables,
a pulse beating against a diaphragm of shadows, a face
as if poured (so many facets) into the depth-less mask
of its hands.
That it take, that sunken the damp vocable sprout.
A here huddled against the where-less workings
of a scuttled Earth.
Bed, bottles, and chairs, that each thing, as it's uttered out
of its breath, smoldering, bud.
But didn't, wouldn't.
For 10 years, the rocks wandered, wouldn't stop:
the shelled meadows nor the knuckled trunks of the stump
sycamores.
Drifted Pisces and Equuleus.
Unbound, unthreaded from the slender wefts of syntax,
floated Sagitta, ashen.
Slipped, what could trace the weight of its own fingers.
Bring the meager egg of echo--
its stray body's-- to bear.
For 10 years, reigned nomen, preponderant.
Wouldn't fit, lay broken, the phrase,
in its meted progressions.
Split, severed, what the verb had woven.
A wave through its slack waters shot by its troughed rhythms,
driven.
Adrift now in so many spent components.
In nomen, the mundus nominalis, each thing onto itself invested.
Each its sole and inflexible referent.
Like unto like, the limbs unmixed.
That vision Empedoclean, the fusion
of the elements under strife, riven.
Shadows lapping against chalk.
For 10 years, the breath went dismembered.
Erred bone, erred measure.
Through the nomen in its cellulated wastes
the poem moved, disassembled, unspoken.
Part 3.
Hung there, a damp bulb, a plump fire from underneath the tangled
coils of her hair.
Whorled taut, each brittle inflammated node,
to a flushed bud, each knot.
Then slack relapsing again, a loose effusion, a heat,
run undulant through its rhythmic lymph rippled grain.
Rung, and rung to that that draws and involves me;
pulls, centripetal, from shank and tongue.
Urges its glowing, unsustainable image.
Its imprint in me through that narrow draft,
tendon of my own annunciations.
Brings thus each word to resonance,
each breath to reception, leads the least increment
into that tissue, that globed air, that begets.
Brings thus the poem forwards of which
I am merely its instance, prefix for setting substance
to syllable, for bringing the unworked images,
damp bulb, plump fire, forwards into their linked and sonorous
betrothals.
For the words wed as they weave.
Lithe, the morphemes couple, as the self un-selves, and sends
its eye moving, deft, through mineral; its breath,
meshed, through pine.
Mixes flame, flower, and water, eschews stasis, abets rhyme,
binds the goat's milk fast to the fig's thick juices.
Not stillness, said, but the movement, traced, gathered.
But sphairos, the Earth bound, taut, to its paired releases.
Part 4, which deals with reading.
Reading first, landscape, and then reading text.
Over Goult, with lavender farms, and lizards
through the dry thyme sizzle, read rocks, read walls,
saw interstice manifest.
Followed the low overlapping play
of the stones, their adjusted intervals.
Past Les Maquignons, clustered in its crumbling rust
red ochres, entered the trellised air,
the wind scored orchards.
Not cadence, had said, the fixed fall of its quartered staves,
but the wire drawn, the lines run
rhythmic to the folds of the broken ground,
pliant to the Earth's undulant lay.
Not form, then, but form as extension of content,
but gestaltung, each wave in its throe,
the gaudy heave of its countless facets, a fresh annunciate.
Nights, would read, quouro lis estello brihon forço.
Within the tall, lime washed rooms of that abandoned,
dry stone cocoonery, read Blake, read Char, my first masters.
The flames rose in fat needles through the lamps' glass
sleeves.
With the least breeze, the slack shadows throbbed.
Read Sappho and Pindar, Anacreon and Catullus, came birds,
came reeds.
Out of Isaiah sprang summer, Parmenides, night.
From Dante, that ore, that ben intellecto, and Ibn ' Arabī,
those suspended, reciprocal stars, came winds, salt,
marrows.
For the lines, as they run transparent into dawn,
into light, bring to each substance
its qualities, each reflection its light, proffer their mettle,
both temper and refine.
Came thus the rivers, came fish and the rain-shaken lilies.
From the T'ang, the moons, and the Sung, mirrors.
From Mallarmé that rush of crushed shadow,
and Shakespeare that pearl, its black sphericity, came thunder,
came tin.
From Traherne, the psalm, burnt to a glass whisper,
from Hopkins, the bow, and Wordsworth,
verdurous, the quiver.
For the lines as they come now unwritten,
as they run, pellucid, into world, infuse, instill,
the syllables fill.
From Williams, thus, so many wind-petaled wildflowers,
while from Duncan, air, that ayre exultant, and Oppen,
unrelenting, that wheel maker's flame.
From the linguists, now, Whorf, Sapir,
how the least shift in syntax, tense, perception
would reset the heavens, bring a boulder
to tremble in the wrapt tissues of a breath,
would bring us uncentered now onto those very first fields,
those released phrases of dust and dragonflies,
adjunctive now to that deeper space, unto
that far heart, a people, crepuscular, who point.
And the last part, subtitled, "The Translation of the Waves."
That air not end, nor flame gutter,
that Earth not coil, ingested, into those nounal hoards,
but verb herded, be given, offered forth, wind unto
wind, foam unto foam, be pitched sonorous
through each meted particle, transmitted.
For certainly, to own is to interrupt, to stock, pile,
separate matter from its own innate motion, its thrust unto,
to truncate and kill.
Was what brought me, then, a blue shadow
moving against the glass-headed light,
a mumble across the pruned luminous
oblongs of the terraced orchards,
up over Venasque, where asters float to the fields' very edges,
climbed.
Lavender, olive, quince in laddered octaves,
came at last to those waves in the rocks,
that cave with the waves hung from the poem's high scaffolds.
Eine Pracht-- that splendor--
das Werk der Wogen. Where all morning they'd amassed,
lay gathered towards their own translation, abeyant
upon the brief: schlägt es: the sea in Hölderlin's poem
all morning, pendant.
Of the way, the various ways, angles, tensions,
the waves might break, fan against the coastline,
foaming, Fédier and Beaufret, all morning, tested predicates.
Heidegger withdrawn, opaque, a block of dark crystal,
its rays bent inwards, elucidated the verb alone:
its clipped, arrested movement.
The back of his hand slapped flatly at the dry shadows.
Eine Pracht all morning, that splendor,
that cave, no certainly not Plato's, where
the waves in their great watery greenhouses accumulated:
a waited transition, in their high,
fluttering aviaries, their transit,
as if in that vocable, all Europe,
all air that long morning were held suspended,
as if finally in the blue involuted wheel
of that verb transfigurant in all verbs, all mornings
finally, the breath would slip accelerating towards passage.
Wave unto wave, surf bursting against shore,
each thing unto its deep imbedded mirrors projected
unto the running parallel, its referent deferred,
that thus returned unto the inviolate,
at last restored, each thing might in its turn regenerate.
Out of that lost language, that buried resonance,
might bud, spring fresh that twofold, the Earth be by breath
alone its own recourse, both store
and sow, receive and diffuse, articulate
its reciprocal spaces, that it break thus
from that ultimate hypnosis, the ultimate Gorgon's
white monodic gaze, from its gases be saved,
from that flash and its instantaneous white fires:
salva, salva terram was what the waves sang, sang save, save,
what the bells off the tops of the tall waves beat,
flung backwards in hard tokens, fat hammered froth.
What brought me, then, over the low ledges,
brought that I bring, impelled that I urge, herd,
drive the words into that luminous salvage
and stand there in those linked shadows, thus lit?