Michael Franco
A Note on "A Book of Measure"
[originally composed for Patricia Pruitt and her students in Istanbul, Turkey]
Michael Franco, "An Imaginary Curtain for a Little Theater of Wonders" (c. 1988)
April 16th 2011 [additions in California May 24-28th 2011] and August 2015 @Oxford St
Normally were I there with you I would make note of where I was...that is to say where my thinking was on the day on which I was with you; in this case in regards to "A Book of Measure" but always to Poetry itself: Immediate and not cleansed and tidied up for presentation but In the moment of working.
Art for me is the revelation of Mind in its continuous movement: Not a picture of an idealized mind but Mind. Complete. Whole. Constant. Changing. Lost. Wrong. Correct. Found.
Poetry is then, with the Poem, with the Language that is coalescing within the Poem, a search for that Place which will open that revelation.
Stumbling through my foggy mind this morning to write something that might be a clarifying addition to these selections from A book of Measure for you, I find my self moving in two directions at once: The first would be the simple proposition which I have arrived at in working the area opened by the act of working on the text for what will be twenty-four years this fall: When pushed by a friend as to what I thought I was doing I suddenly blurted out: “I am creating a Landscape”. But it is a landscape, not a landscape painting nor a snapshot of a landscape but a Landscape complete (which of course means that it is never to be complete.
It is an ongoing field of activity, I need but enter, within which to work: And to actually enter it then is the work.
A couple of months ago I was sitting with my notebook on the couch in my living-room. It was snowing, or rather pouring snow outside- the flakes alternating between professed intensity and a wonderfully dizzy dance of spills and flourishes side-ways sidelings and breathtaking plunges. The fire in the wood stove had achieved a comforting roar and as I settled in, once again opening the text, the feeling was most certainly that of....anticipation: of wanting “to see what would happen” as with the next chapter of a book being read or the sequel to a movie...the next episode, or the next emergent Season. I was soon sitting amongst the residents of A Book of Measure, listening again to the emerging story.
What came to me on that snowy morning was this question to myself: “What more do you want than this. The privilege of working. The familiarity, the stories, the instruction in/of Language?” What more indeed.
In my twenties I had, in struggling to simply find the time to do my work... plagued by the intrusion restraints and intrigues of my “job” [by which I mean the thing I was doing to accumulate money]; constantly it seemed either interrupted or called by some pleasure here or there or else finding my mind as blank as the page before me; I longed in those days to just be Working, to just for once in some way... know what I was doing. In this period of my life my poetic practice was waiting for the descent of Inspiration to take hold of me. This most certainly did occur & with a strength and penetration into my self that was nothing less than habit forming. But Inspiration such as this occurs quite on its own schedule. My Art, as I then saw it, was that of waiting and readiness. [And I would add the rereading of my self here– the idea of readiness far exceeded any thought I might have had as to what I should actually do to be ready...]
Today I find my art is that of entrance: To move each day into this landscape and to listen, observe and record and still most assuredly to wait....
This is now what I do. My cat bumping my leg my son calling out “papa come look” from upstairs, my wife wondering when dinner will be made, the traffic outside, the ring of the phone the wind the rain the sun’s return– are no longer interruptions: They are all small arias of the landscape calling me to come home: A Landscape which I am permitted to enter and which I do and have each day then for twenty-four years.
When I was 17 I so clearly remember here as I write hearing Robert Duncan read the lines at the beginning of "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow."
This was then and remains for me an immediate and commanding Call from the Language to my heart: Directions for following: a summons for Entrance.
*****
The desire for a different Form for a more Open way of proceeding, for a Form that might move with our contemporary sensibility: the changing of a channel, the swift movement of a film edit, the influx of information from the ‘net, the comfort of a good story, the intrigue of the unknown, which might all combine into a Narrative that would at once renew, hold and continue my time across time on the page: This was my articulation of the Poem I was seeking to enter/had entered and was now roaming within.
But a couple of weeks ago in searching out a pronunciation guide for The Lord of the Rings, (which my son and I were reading aloud together at bed time), I stumbled upon an article by Richard C. West titled “The interlace structure of The Lord of the Rings”. In this he rather wonderfully notes:
It was I believe, George H. Thomson who pointed out that to produce “a detailed yet panoramic view
of a whole world in movement and turmoil”, Tolkien had used a structural technique similar to that of
medieval interlace. This was a narrative mode of such complexity and sophistication that until recently
modern critics could not detect a coherent design in most medieval romances. Over two hundred years
ago Bishop Hurd observed that Spenser’s works and their gothic models were “intertwining ...several
actions together, in order to give the appearance of one action,”.... [this became noted as the interlace
technique as time passed MF]
The nature of the interlace technique becomes clearer by contrasting it with the modern structural
technique of “organic unity”... Organic unity seeks to reduce the chaotic flux of reality [my emphasis
MF] to manageable terms by imposing a clear and fairly simple pattern upon it. It calls for a progressive
and uncluttered narrative line in which there is a single major theme to which a limited number of other
themes may be related so long as they are kept subordinate. The main theme which grows from a
clear-cut beginning through a middle which develops naturally (“organically”) from the beginning to
a resolution [my emphasis MF] which is the product of all that preceded it. It is considered preferable
to have a limited number of characters and to have no more than one or two dominate the action. Any
single work should be self-sufficient, containing within itself everything that is necessary to it and
excluding [again my emphasis] everything that is not necessary. In other words, the organic work is
indivisible in itself but divided from everything else. The principles of organic unity are summed up
in the dictum of the Queen of Hearts: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then
stop.” [I would argue that this last quote whilst enjoyable is a miss use of the Queen’s command. MF]
“INTERLACE” West continues,
by contrast, seeks to mirror the perception of the flux of events in the world around us, where
everything is happening at once. Its narrative line is digressive and cluttered, dividing our attention
among an indefinite number of events characters and themes, any one of which may dominate at any
given time and it is often indifferent to cause and effect relationships. the paths of the characters cross
diverge and recross, and the story passes from one to another and then another, but does not follow
any single line. Also the narrator implies that there are innumerable events that he has not had time
to tell us about; moreover no attempt is made to provide a clear-cut beginning or end to the story.
We feel we have interrupted the chaotic activity of the world at a certain point and followed a selection
from it for a time, and that after we leave, it continues on its own random path. The author, or someone
else may perhaps take up the story later and add to it at beginning, middle, or end.
Yet the apparent casual form of the interlace is deceptive; it actually has a very subtle kind of cohesion.
No part of the narrative can be removed without damage to the whole, for within any given section there are
echoes of previous parts and anticipations of later ones. The Medieval memory (lacking modern information
retrieval systems and therefore necessarily greater than ours) delighted in following repetitions and variations
of themes, whether their different appearances were separated by scores or hundreds of pages. Musical art
gives analogous aesthetic pleasure and shows a similar structural binding (I think this is why C.S.Lewis
called Spenser’s interlace “polyphonic narrative”), but in literature the interlace structure also allows
detailed examination of any number of facets of a theme.
Moreover, though events are in flux there is a pattern underlying them. ... we do not limit ourselves to
any single meaning for any happening while “unified” narrative generally isolates a single cause of an
event to achieve a frequently powerful and intense effect, interlaced narrative usually assigns numerous
causes for any event thereby reflecting the complex interrelatedness we actually see in life...
Out of this movement toward singleness came the modern novel, which remained for the most part
associated with the structural techniques of “organic unity” until recently when writers like Joyce,
Proust, Grass and Faulkner once again began experimenting with varieties of the interlace.
[Richard C. West, "The interlace of The Lord of the Rings," in A Tolkien Compass, new edition (Chicago
and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 2003), p. 75-78. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author.]
Now I could go on it seems quoting this to you at even greater length.... for he arrives later at notations on originality wherein the concept of Originality is not the currency of the poet ...rather it is the Poet’s participation in the ongoing revelation of The Interlaced Texts that is his or her charge as a Poet. [& it was in fact a similar concept of Originality that attracted me so strongly to the work of Robert Duncan in my late teens. “I am not an original poet” he maintained “but Derivative: I draw myself from the world and a language which I did not make”]. Yet always for me we seek to make that world to make that Language our own. But rather than seeking the sleight of hand which will reveal something which until then was not there, i.e. the original object painting or poem, I search to enter the grand succession of Stories and Tellings.... the interlace of events in Time. This is my daily living in my art. This is the Landscape which I enter each morning.
I cannot offer you a frame for reading A Book of Measure that would be more evocative than this. And in reading Mr. West for myself, (and I am typing it out today, including it here for you when I would normally be recording it into a notebook for myself to go back to again and again when I am lost or despairing that anyone will ever understand what it is that I am up to), I would argue that this structure which Mr. West describes would wonderfully inform a reading of Robert Duncan’s Work, Olson’s maximus, Stein’s wars I have seen and most certainly Miss Dickinson’s work; (especially if taken, Letters Poems and notes, as a Whole which is after all the way she left it for us to find, rather than isolating it into a tidily bound publication); and even more certainly the Melville of the whale and the Whitman of the Whole of Leaves of Grass published across forty years of his living it.
It also begins to solve the problem of how to approach the interlaced text as a community of readers (and I mark this as very different from the approach of a single isolated reader. The single reader resides within a text as you or I reside within the “flux of events” that make up our lives): Where the experience of the text trumps the readers’ ability to “report” to us that single strand of “what happened”. If we then approach from the view point of an interlaced structure seeking to be in flux, we might then as a group of readers find a ground upon which to begin a conversation.
This then is the Field of A Book of Measure.
Part II
transatlantic interview via email with Patricia Pruitt
Monday 11am 25th April 2011 @Oxford St
yrs in & here are my thoughts:
1. Length: 10 Circumferences. of which # 1 & 10 are not numbered... to date aprox 300000 words/500 pages [the finished book is actually about
The Circumferences run in sets of 7 paragraphs. This is actually more arbitrary than it might sound...it just happened in the "first C" i.e. I noticed that the text was forming in groups of 7 paragraphs after which there would be a space break. When I looked a little closer there were 4 sets of 7 paragraphs in that first C which I saw then as 4x7=28=1. (i.e. the number of Paragraph sets, sets which I had not designed but noticed were there, became further occurrences in the emerging narrative) I then decided to add one set to each Circumference rather like the rings of a tree: the 'second then was to have 5[x7=35=8] & this I saw as declarative. The "first Circumference" being something "prior" & TWO being its own "beginning".... ALL this gave me a form which simply lets me have a measure as I move in the text as to where I am. The Paragraphs are variable length some are huge others a couple of lines.
The whole thing then has this form
VOL 1 {1/8/6/4/2/::
VOL 2 {9/7/5/3/1::
No "meaning” in any of this other than that I noticed & continued to notice & make use... (or be distracted by when nothing else is perking... )
Where on the classification list do you place your work: Well I might now start calling it medieval but in truth I have worked rather hard to make it unclassifiable. Early on I argued as you will recall that it was a Poem, taking up RD's note that "poem" meant simply " a thing made". And it is most certainly "made up": Everything then being real despite its origins. CF here the Etude with apologies in the last Circumference.
Is it fair to identify the man who kept bees as Duncan, or based on Duncan or mostly invention? Does it matter to you how the reader does identify him?
The Bee man is most certainly NOT Robert Duncan in any way.
That said I would am no more capable of "controlling the reader's identifications than Proust was!
4. Besides Duncan what other major influences have you incorporated in the BoM? Clearly one runs into Proust. But others?
Stein... esp. Wars I Have Seen Zukofsky "Heart Us Invisibly Thyme Time" from 80 Flowers: Mahler [use of his symphony form throughout: Olson... Corbett & Jess (referred to & the by the concept of narrative locals within the paste up... [text] (which again is that Interlace concept above) Darwin, Muir et al
5.Why has it been so important to tell "you"--your reader generally-- as well as specifically everything? Since you have spoken of ending does that--an arbitrary stopping point --cut into the everything turning it into some things as in a selection? Does it matter?
1 Telling: I want an actual picture or experience or both OF Time & one level of this is that ABM IS my experience of time... that Other picture ...the ”finely rendered” seems to me if not just plane False as an experience of the real... then dangerous... we measure ourselves against the beauty of an organism that doesn't shit. The ideal can not be the only nectar we consume! (I would not banish the ideal just include it in the pantheon of daily events....towards which Notice is the currency)
I want the Reader to move at the point of experience /discovery/failure/success/story/ WITH me: a tidy narrative beginning middle end does not accomplish this {which is not to condemn it as an experience .... I can find great pleasure in same ...but this is not what I wanted to create. RD talked of Olson's respect of disruption & I really took that notion to heart I think... I should also add that I feel dearly the push (pressure) "to just clear out the gunk" & the disruption OR that to not do so is somehow lazy... not "good writing" But then I think of the Craftsmen's Movement where one would let the joins be visible as well as including the nature of the material being used as Elements of composition.
OK "let that swirl" & if you have more I am here... ditto for the students if they have the interest...
PART THREE
[FURTHER NOTES from the Stein Show, San Francisco, May 24th ‘11 & “lunch” with Duncan’s Olson lecture whilst waiting to go in:] additions August 2015
from Duncan on Olson CCNY Lost & Found 2011 pg 25: “Have you come across this – have you begun to be– to know– like one poet after another how the dreams take place in your work? [emphasis mine]
::: which excites me greatly and returns me to my notes on A Book of Measure. I have thought this process to be occurring for some time now. Indeed to extend this idea: The occurrences of the books within my book each with complete texts and publication history (and author information as well, which seeks to push them out of a frame called “reference” as these are not texts referred to but texts whose composition is occurring within the composition) came forward in a like manor to Duncan’s note about dreaming within the text. Because of the amount of time it has taken me to write ABM, because of the very literal amount of time which I have indeed spent living in A BOOK OF MEASURE I have been able to relax and reside there to an extent which has allowed the work within the work to surface in exactly the same fashion as it would in my daily life outside of my working in ABM. In other words: my self which resides each day in the book it is writing (which is my experience i.e. that I “go there” each morning, every day and live with the Bee Man, listening to the Narrator, reading the Journals of Maria Torres or attending the five acts of the verse play the Library of Dr Dee [the latter being composed as the Narrator is seeing it. Indeed the Library had been started a decade earlier yet it was not until the narrator of the book of Measure arrived in the theater that I was “actually” able to see the play through to its end]) this is then a Book that in Duncan’s sense, I am Dreaming. So then that Self in this process has also begun to Dream and write whilst In the composition. . . and again I suspect that this has been allowed by the very length of time which I have given myself to work the text of ABM [i.e. 10 years per volume more or less. It is also instructive to me here that the sum of all these parts, of which Time is one, are as in dream a sum which far exceeds the Whole. As with the Interlace narrative there is always information, (the “actual life of the here “fictive” John Dee), Tales, experiences, remembrances and mis remembrances ...the real (my travels in Portugal) and the experience of them resurfacing in an infinite rearrangement of what actually happened. So then living within A Book of Measure each day over time it seems obvious that it i.e. writing would also occure within the time of the work as just as it does in the daily living of the work: This then Duncan’s notion of dreaming in the work.
So I would then add this sense of Duncan’s Dream Time to the Interlacing as a Primary fact of its compositional possibilities ( I am purposefully avoiding here the idea of it being any kind of “advantage” let alone a breakthrough: I am describing my experience of this composition) .
One might also note the sense of Robert Duncan’s perpetual rime of “Back of” this or that as a figure of importance in the realization of mind or existence. (And a prime figure of the Interlace Narrative as well. One need only consider his Passages for example where their very placement (or as I would prefer occurrence) within the context of a book of “other” poems which then come forward into the Passages as a Central Figure “back of” the emerging poem.
That we are always in some sense seeking what lies “outside” and his importance to this is in always pulling this into the composition as a central Figure in the dance of the work.
APPENDIX:
To finish I will append here an account of the initial writing of ABM which I was preparing for Askhold Melnyczuk at AGNI magazine shortly after the birth of my son...but never delivered.... there were other things to do...
This then is a draft from that time with a few contemporary additions:
one: ENDLESS PROVOCATIONS: notes and whys regarding a book of measure[i]
the work is not a progress but an endless provocation
Robert Creeley
In the fall of 1991 while visiting Janice Knight in Chicago, I borrowed her new and at that time exotic lap-top computer, sat down at her desk overlooking the court yard of her Hyde Park 1920’s era apartment building and spontaneously wrote what were to be the opening lines of a book that twenty four years later I would still be residing within.
we enter again gain or regain or lose our own madness...
. . . it was late -midnight to be exact- and Ms. Knight had gone off to bed, leaving me to practice the opening and saving of files. The following morning I awoke with those lines still lingering in my head. It was far earlier for me than usual but I was forced awake by the persistence of the line. I found my file and sat as I remember for some time staring at and repeating out-loud those words- letting my tongue and pulse measure their vowels and beat, which remained distant; objects foreign and confused. . . irritating. I made some coffee returned to the computer and at once started in again.
lame words to rely so close upon [I NOTED]
we wake up. come down from dream. thee to name intimacy rests close to the bone locked arbitrator I name here Habit. we can not rest. reality is frame. the picture moves against its own central habit of relocation. everything is foot-note to a syllabic dos. there will not be enough memory. improper shut-down will result in loss which can not be defined.
& there I had it: my set coordinates. Habit. Time. Memory. Language. The Four directions which I had indeed been flirting with for years, set down, declared, reduced, moving: A command. Yet already there was a quiet unintentional revolution underway, for absent here (and I would note absent from the very start and indeed startling to me even as I worked), was the articulated caesura which I had leapt upon with my discovery of the poetics of Robert Duncan, and taken up as the central practice of my own art. From my earliest acquaintance with his work I found his measured articulation of the line to be a revealing force of Language whose measured silences were to be taken in duration, rhythm and meaning potential as equal to the dance of words and their sound and meaning clusters.[ii]
I had grown restless within my own work. I can see this now so clearly throughout the text of how to live[iii] where as early as 1988 (and not coincidentally- shortly after Duncan’s death that year) in such poems as Parallel Lines or later Essay, my normal line had begun to break down. What seemed to be prose sections as well as actual stories emerged into what had normally been lyric songs and passage work.
I consciously wanted --a bit desperately-- something new, something different for my work. I had come to a place in my thought where the forms that I read, that I worked in and with great pleasure could not bear my thoughts just as earlier (and in honesty at times today), my abilities and discipline could not carry them: It was as if I were trying to wear suits . . .no! that is not it -but it is close to the mark: What is lurking here is what I felt as a child when my mother would dress me in a little suit and take me for a pony ride or to Disneyland, (I have pictures of this as evidence). I would then be a participant, whose clothes, which had to be kept “nice”, always remained outside the circle of play. So I had come to this feeling within my own work. It was time for change.
From the beginning of writing [at 16 or so] I loved Language and all its guises. I can still remember the excitement of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King which was read aloud in my sophomore english class and I still find a very certain deliciousness in a contemporary poem encountered orally at that time which I heard as doing much the same thing as the Tennyson:
When the still sea conspires an armor
and Her sullen and aborted currents breed tiny monsters
True Sailing is dead!
Morrison, Horse Latitudes
So from Stein (discovered thanks to my high school teacher Fran Claggett, in my senior year, along with Duncan and Olson, Wieners and Creeley) to Chaucer, Camus Freud and Proust ( all gifts from my first and dearest college professor, Mary Lou Fitzgerald), from Melville to Welty[M&IPF1] I had arrived at last in my thirties[iv] at a place where the depth of revelation, the techne of craft the mastery with words (which to me means the ability to ride the flow of words with a trust that they will reveal) regardless of the form used, were what mattered : A conviction which I had so vehemently taken up at the first hint I got of it in the work of Robert Duncan; a conviction that well into my thirties I assumed it to be common ground for anyone pursuing the Poem).
But to return to A Book of Measure: I wanted now, I kept saying to friends, to write a book that I would want to curl up with a lap-full of cat and a large french-press of coffee and read in that same absorbed way I had been taken up with Proust Stein or Duncan. Something to both intrigue and wallow in as well; and what I was doing would simply not cut it any longer. After numerous times of repeating this particular statement I finally heard it.
And now with one night and a morning’s work the field at last had come into view:
Loss relates habit facilitates search. life shuffles through accumulations- old papers stuck together. layers of sedimentary vanity. vane moves -finger run up into air- to recall original direction is to lose original direction. cock twirling at the end of metal pole. squeekcaw challenge to circular habits repeated in the face of eminent storm never not once not even a little successful. forestalling the inevitable. rain starts. strong with repeated hesitation. gains a certain control through intensity. ends. rivers of accumulation carry glass eyed city rainbow of oil-slick and twisted toward storm-drain run off catch-basin of would-be seascape by intentionless painter who finding no movement was condemned to paint tides.
accumulated rain on upper surface of leaves brushed by wind scatters showers without apparent announcement. the story emerges and we enter. we enter and the story emerges.
so Memory then is stitched. an overtone threading between habit and loss. a thief working the locks of the essential door. maddening the scratching sound lingering beneath conversation beneath sleep beneath falling in love. the extreme of mixt metaphors. Memory. never above nature. always measuring.
hear it. all ways measuring.
biology eats at the stitches. a divine corruption of intention that lingers until a snap is not heard. unannounced occurrences are history. history is stitched. a child playing at the boundary of an adulthood marvels at the knot. picks at it. wondrous dexterity is tradition.
growth not progress but the assumption of assumptions.
measure to measure added. not if but how. if not if then how. simple math made complex by the addition of numbers. population. control. birth. all habit. thin-skin of life stretched over resounding eternal drum.
each tide as it rises or recedes a knot in the conception of what is taken to mean. hand noticed from periphery of attention. negative capability. always wondering what was taken. what will be missed. of what was alluded to that is attempting to run against the line of the ocean’s rising. light trail of foam wavering over foundation of sand is emerging history.
feet wet -crouching- he dipt his hand into the water and brought the ocean to his nose. deep breath of salt. return to studio.
when everything listens who will sing. when every thing sings rain will come again. the forest will return to its place. houses will fall. air will clear. companies of small quick colored birds will rise up from deep green turn and approach us again. we will know. we will hear. we will know enough not to speak. [v]
and a few weeks later as the text began to truly veer into the open for me the following was added as the first narrative thread emerged:
he kept a plate of bees in his kitchen simply he said because he liked it. it was extraordinary. a large plate. clear glass with gentle possibly even gracefully sloping sides covered completely with bees –all of them moving constantly moving each one of them plump and yellow- distinguished.
each morning he took the glass plate of bees down from the high shelf of an old glass-doored white china cabinet where the bees spent the night and placed it on a wooden counter that while out of the way was still quite visible. they would busily depart and return as bees are apt to do. this gave to the room a soft delicate hum and particular musky smell- and each evening he would return them carefully carrying the clear glass plate across the kitchen- quietly slipping it on to its shelf for the night.
he did this each night at or around dusk or before company would arrive so that the bees would be well out of the way- and yet in doing so he would always leave the door slightly ajar -so that they could have a little air I suppose- allowing a few of them to continue to make circumnavigations of the room which then extended their curious presence into the evening.
the net effect of all of this especially in the summer at the end of a hot day when -with the light lingering as it does without shadow stripped of its heat- I would sit settled into one of the overstuffed chairs in his living-room surrounded by plants and all but overwhelmed by the deep smell of the dark coffees that he constantly brewed in a large glass melior infuser which he would slowly plunge quietly causing the light brown water to turn by some alchemy of his hand a redolent mahogany- was a feeling of being overwhelmed slightly annoyed slightly curious overcome a feeling not unlike that of being held when not absolutely sure that you want to be.
returning from the little kitchen where the bees were kept -where he disappeared throughout the evening into a whir of kettle whistles and grinder noises always returning within moments -it seemed certainly not long enough to complete these preparations- with a plate of always strange cookies which would be neatly if not geometrically arranged and then rearranged each time anyone dared extract one from the plate -the result of course being that if I actually dared to remove one- which I was- in repeated counter-point to this seemingly impenetrable geometric prison that they were held within -constantly urged to do- the process of figuring out which of the cookies -when removed- would inflict the least chaos- could take quite some time as I would quietly and not without some measure of silent panic bring to bear all of my analytic power fueled by the immeasurable desire for chocolate. the sense of joy mixt with that of accomplishment at having actually achieved this near impossible goal -which was indicated by his merely almost absent-mindedly flicking the offending cookie back into its proper position with the end of his cocked finger- nearly equaled the pleasure -now finally grasped so to speak- of the taste of the little cookie itself. the net effect then was of being suspended in this constantly mutable arrangement of which I was now a participating part settled as I was into this enfolding chair.
I dipt. we all dipt. the coffee was that good almost thick. the added decadence of the chocolate causing almost perceptible smiles on anyone present no matter how often the experience was repeated. to just sit there together whether alone or with his other friends either talking or in complete silence -sound of a bee hum off in the near distance.
It would not be until the following June of 1992 that the work of Maria Torres, Portugal and my friend Graça Capinha’s talk of a Portuguese poet named Pessoa who at that time I took up as more of an idea to me, certainly not as a poet whom I had read; would all emerge into the text enlarging it beyond any imagining of it which I could have at that time.
But I was off: The text carrying me with the force of a necessity which on the best mornings still has me anxious to get going and see what is going to happen.
[i] A BOOK OF MEASURE VOL. I [1992-2000] is made up of first five completed Circumferences all under the title THE JOURNALS OF THE MAN WHO KEPT BEES.
Selections issued as follows:
“A BOOK OF MEASURE” containing part one [dromenon press, 1993]; THE JOURNALS OF THE MAN WHO KEPT BEES, {Second Circumference, complete}[lift Books, 1995]. TALES FROM THE PORTUGUESE [dromenon press 1996]. Other random selections have appeared in AGNI, lift, The Blind See Only This World [Pressed Wafer/ Granary 2000] KEY/satch, TALISMAN, POESIA DO MUNDO [Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal; and in various broadsides from dromenon 1992-2015.
Volume Two titled THE BOOK OF THE NIGHT SKY was completed late summer of 2014.
[ii] a quick example here. In the Emily Dickinson poem “gentian”, Mr. Johnson’s rendering reads “my departing blossoms”, connecting blossoms to the earlier flower images where if we turn to the manuscript books we find in Dickinson’s hand the line to actually read: my departing blossoms : the articulated caesura delivering then to the wonderful pun of “one below this morning” in the following lines where one below this morning now in the grasp of its measure reads as both a remark on the temperature as well as a reference to the unnamed person who has departed and now lies buried: “where the feelings are” is not cold (yet is of course the overtone here of “zero at the bone”), but with “one below” The departing that blossoms is now revealed...all resident and released in the caesura.
[iii] how to live as a single natural being the dogmatic nature of experience, [Zoland, Cambridge, Ma. 1998]
[iv] I had not found my contemporaries- that is those companions whose work emerging just ahead of, with or behind my own not only inspires but instructs in primary revelations of how what or why: [Seidman or Feidt in painting, or Corbett, Lansing, Auster; Torra, Barrett, Pruitt, Sawyer-Lauçanno, Mackey, Howe Mlinko, Dunn or Behrle in poetry
[v] A BOOK OF MEASURE I, 1 conclusion of the opening paragraph set.
Normally were I there with you I would make note of where I was...that is to say where my thinking was on the day on which I was with you; in this case in regards to "A Book of Measure" but always to Poetry itself: Immediate and not cleansed and tidied up for presentation but In the moment of working.
Art for me is the revelation of Mind in its continuous movement: Not a picture of an idealized mind but Mind. Complete. Whole. Constant. Changing. Lost. Wrong. Correct. Found.
Poetry is then, with the Poem, with the Language that is coalescing within the Poem, a search for that Place which will open that revelation.
Stumbling through my foggy mind this morning to write something that might be a clarifying addition to these selections from A book of Measure for you, I find my self moving in two directions at once: The first would be the simple proposition which I have arrived at in working the area opened by the act of working on the text for what will be twenty-four years this fall: When pushed by a friend as to what I thought I was doing I suddenly blurted out: “I am creating a Landscape”. But it is a landscape, not a landscape painting nor a snapshot of a landscape but a Landscape complete (which of course means that it is never to be complete.
It is an ongoing field of activity, I need but enter, within which to work: And to actually enter it then is the work.
A couple of months ago I was sitting with my notebook on the couch in my living-room. It was snowing, or rather pouring snow outside- the flakes alternating between professed intensity and a wonderfully dizzy dance of spills and flourishes side-ways sidelings and breathtaking plunges. The fire in the wood stove had achieved a comforting roar and as I settled in, once again opening the text, the feeling was most certainly that of....anticipation: of wanting “to see what would happen” as with the next chapter of a book being read or the sequel to a movie...the next episode, or the next emergent Season. I was soon sitting amongst the residents of A Book of Measure, listening again to the emerging story.
What came to me on that snowy morning was this question to myself: “What more do you want than this. The privilege of working. The familiarity, the stories, the instruction in/of Language?” What more indeed.
In my twenties I had, in struggling to simply find the time to do my work... plagued by the intrusion restraints and intrigues of my “job” [by which I mean the thing I was doing to accumulate money]; constantly it seemed either interrupted or called by some pleasure here or there or else finding my mind as blank as the page before me; I longed in those days to just be Working, to just for once in some way... know what I was doing. In this period of my life my poetic practice was waiting for the descent of Inspiration to take hold of me. This most certainly did occur & with a strength and penetration into my self that was nothing less than habit forming. But Inspiration such as this occurs quite on its own schedule. My Art, as I then saw it, was that of waiting and readiness. [And I would add the rereading of my self here– the idea of readiness far exceeded any thought I might have had as to what I should actually do to be ready...]
Today I find my art is that of entrance: To move each day into this landscape and to listen, observe and record and still most assuredly to wait....
This is now what I do. My cat bumping my leg my son calling out “papa come look” from upstairs, my wife wondering when dinner will be made, the traffic outside, the ring of the phone the wind the rain the sun’s return– are no longer interruptions: They are all small arias of the landscape calling me to come home: A Landscape which I am permitted to enter and which I do and have each day then for twenty-four years.
When I was 17 I so clearly remember here as I write hearing Robert Duncan read the lines at the beginning of "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow."
This was then and remains for me an immediate and commanding Call from the Language to my heart: Directions for following: a summons for Entrance.
*****
The desire for a different Form for a more Open way of proceeding, for a Form that might move with our contemporary sensibility: the changing of a channel, the swift movement of a film edit, the influx of information from the ‘net, the comfort of a good story, the intrigue of the unknown, which might all combine into a Narrative that would at once renew, hold and continue my time across time on the page: This was my articulation of the Poem I was seeking to enter/had entered and was now roaming within.
But a couple of weeks ago in searching out a pronunciation guide for The Lord of the Rings, (which my son and I were reading aloud together at bed time), I stumbled upon an article by Richard C. West titled “The interlace structure of The Lord of the Rings”. In this he rather wonderfully notes:
It was I believe, George H. Thomson who pointed out that to produce “a detailed yet panoramic view
of a whole world in movement and turmoil”, Tolkien had used a structural technique similar to that of
medieval interlace. This was a narrative mode of such complexity and sophistication that until recently
modern critics could not detect a coherent design in most medieval romances. Over two hundred years
ago Bishop Hurd observed that Spenser’s works and their gothic models were “intertwining ...several
actions together, in order to give the appearance of one action,”.... [this became noted as the interlace
technique as time passed MF]
The nature of the interlace technique becomes clearer by contrasting it with the modern structural
technique of “organic unity”... Organic unity seeks to reduce the chaotic flux of reality [my emphasis
MF] to manageable terms by imposing a clear and fairly simple pattern upon it. It calls for a progressive
and uncluttered narrative line in which there is a single major theme to which a limited number of other
themes may be related so long as they are kept subordinate. The main theme which grows from a
clear-cut beginning through a middle which develops naturally (“organically”) from the beginning to
a resolution [my emphasis MF] which is the product of all that preceded it. It is considered preferable
to have a limited number of characters and to have no more than one or two dominate the action. Any
single work should be self-sufficient, containing within itself everything that is necessary to it and
excluding [again my emphasis] everything that is not necessary. In other words, the organic work is
indivisible in itself but divided from everything else. The principles of organic unity are summed up
in the dictum of the Queen of Hearts: “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then
stop.” [I would argue that this last quote whilst enjoyable is a miss use of the Queen’s command. MF]
“INTERLACE” West continues,
by contrast, seeks to mirror the perception of the flux of events in the world around us, where
everything is happening at once. Its narrative line is digressive and cluttered, dividing our attention
among an indefinite number of events characters and themes, any one of which may dominate at any
given time and it is often indifferent to cause and effect relationships. the paths of the characters cross
diverge and recross, and the story passes from one to another and then another, but does not follow
any single line. Also the narrator implies that there are innumerable events that he has not had time
to tell us about; moreover no attempt is made to provide a clear-cut beginning or end to the story.
We feel we have interrupted the chaotic activity of the world at a certain point and followed a selection
from it for a time, and that after we leave, it continues on its own random path. The author, or someone
else may perhaps take up the story later and add to it at beginning, middle, or end.
Yet the apparent casual form of the interlace is deceptive; it actually has a very subtle kind of cohesion.
No part of the narrative can be removed without damage to the whole, for within any given section there are
echoes of previous parts and anticipations of later ones. The Medieval memory (lacking modern information
retrieval systems and therefore necessarily greater than ours) delighted in following repetitions and variations
of themes, whether their different appearances were separated by scores or hundreds of pages. Musical art
gives analogous aesthetic pleasure and shows a similar structural binding (I think this is why C.S.Lewis
called Spenser’s interlace “polyphonic narrative”), but in literature the interlace structure also allows
detailed examination of any number of facets of a theme.
Moreover, though events are in flux there is a pattern underlying them. ... we do not limit ourselves to
any single meaning for any happening while “unified” narrative generally isolates a single cause of an
event to achieve a frequently powerful and intense effect, interlaced narrative usually assigns numerous
causes for any event thereby reflecting the complex interrelatedness we actually see in life...
Out of this movement toward singleness came the modern novel, which remained for the most part
associated with the structural techniques of “organic unity” until recently when writers like Joyce,
Proust, Grass and Faulkner once again began experimenting with varieties of the interlace.
[Richard C. West, "The interlace of The Lord of the Rings," in A Tolkien Compass, new edition (Chicago
and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 2003), p. 75-78. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author.]
Now I could go on it seems quoting this to you at even greater length.... for he arrives later at notations on originality wherein the concept of Originality is not the currency of the poet ...rather it is the Poet’s participation in the ongoing revelation of The Interlaced Texts that is his or her charge as a Poet. [& it was in fact a similar concept of Originality that attracted me so strongly to the work of Robert Duncan in my late teens. “I am not an original poet” he maintained “but Derivative: I draw myself from the world and a language which I did not make”]. Yet always for me we seek to make that world to make that Language our own. But rather than seeking the sleight of hand which will reveal something which until then was not there, i.e. the original object painting or poem, I search to enter the grand succession of Stories and Tellings.... the interlace of events in Time. This is my daily living in my art. This is the Landscape which I enter each morning.
I cannot offer you a frame for reading A Book of Measure that would be more evocative than this. And in reading Mr. West for myself, (and I am typing it out today, including it here for you when I would normally be recording it into a notebook for myself to go back to again and again when I am lost or despairing that anyone will ever understand what it is that I am up to), I would argue that this structure which Mr. West describes would wonderfully inform a reading of Robert Duncan’s Work, Olson’s maximus, Stein’s wars I have seen and most certainly Miss Dickinson’s work; (especially if taken, Letters Poems and notes, as a Whole which is after all the way she left it for us to find, rather than isolating it into a tidily bound publication); and even more certainly the Melville of the whale and the Whitman of the Whole of Leaves of Grass published across forty years of his living it.
It also begins to solve the problem of how to approach the interlaced text as a community of readers (and I mark this as very different from the approach of a single isolated reader. The single reader resides within a text as you or I reside within the “flux of events” that make up our lives): Where the experience of the text trumps the readers’ ability to “report” to us that single strand of “what happened”. If we then approach from the view point of an interlaced structure seeking to be in flux, we might then as a group of readers find a ground upon which to begin a conversation.
This then is the Field of A Book of Measure.
Part II
transatlantic interview via email with Patricia Pruitt
Monday 11am 25th April 2011 @Oxford St
yrs in & here are my thoughts:
1. Length: 10 Circumferences. of which # 1 & 10 are not numbered... to date aprox 300000 words/500 pages [the finished book is actually about
The Circumferences run in sets of 7 paragraphs. This is actually more arbitrary than it might sound...it just happened in the "first C" i.e. I noticed that the text was forming in groups of 7 paragraphs after which there would be a space break. When I looked a little closer there were 4 sets of 7 paragraphs in that first C which I saw then as 4x7=28=1. (i.e. the number of Paragraph sets, sets which I had not designed but noticed were there, became further occurrences in the emerging narrative) I then decided to add one set to each Circumference rather like the rings of a tree: the 'second then was to have 5[x7=35=8] & this I saw as declarative. The "first Circumference" being something "prior" & TWO being its own "beginning".... ALL this gave me a form which simply lets me have a measure as I move in the text as to where I am. The Paragraphs are variable length some are huge others a couple of lines.
The whole thing then has this form
VOL 1 {1/8/6/4/2/::
VOL 2 {9/7/5/3/1::
No "meaning” in any of this other than that I noticed & continued to notice & make use... (or be distracted by when nothing else is perking... )
Where on the classification list do you place your work: Well I might now start calling it medieval but in truth I have worked rather hard to make it unclassifiable. Early on I argued as you will recall that it was a Poem, taking up RD's note that "poem" meant simply " a thing made". And it is most certainly "made up": Everything then being real despite its origins. CF here the Etude with apologies in the last Circumference.
Is it fair to identify the man who kept bees as Duncan, or based on Duncan or mostly invention? Does it matter to you how the reader does identify him?
The Bee man is most certainly NOT Robert Duncan in any way.
That said I would am no more capable of "controlling the reader's identifications than Proust was!
4. Besides Duncan what other major influences have you incorporated in the BoM? Clearly one runs into Proust. But others?
Stein... esp. Wars I Have Seen Zukofsky "Heart Us Invisibly Thyme Time" from 80 Flowers: Mahler [use of his symphony form throughout: Olson... Corbett & Jess (referred to & the by the concept of narrative locals within the paste up... [text] (which again is that Interlace concept above) Darwin, Muir et al
5.Why has it been so important to tell "you"--your reader generally-- as well as specifically everything? Since you have spoken of ending does that--an arbitrary stopping point --cut into the everything turning it into some things as in a selection? Does it matter?
1 Telling: I want an actual picture or experience or both OF Time & one level of this is that ABM IS my experience of time... that Other picture ...the ”finely rendered” seems to me if not just plane False as an experience of the real... then dangerous... we measure ourselves against the beauty of an organism that doesn't shit. The ideal can not be the only nectar we consume! (I would not banish the ideal just include it in the pantheon of daily events....towards which Notice is the currency)
I want the Reader to move at the point of experience /discovery/failure/success/story/ WITH me: a tidy narrative beginning middle end does not accomplish this {which is not to condemn it as an experience .... I can find great pleasure in same ...but this is not what I wanted to create. RD talked of Olson's respect of disruption & I really took that notion to heart I think... I should also add that I feel dearly the push (pressure) "to just clear out the gunk" & the disruption OR that to not do so is somehow lazy... not "good writing" But then I think of the Craftsmen's Movement where one would let the joins be visible as well as including the nature of the material being used as Elements of composition.
OK "let that swirl" & if you have more I am here... ditto for the students if they have the interest...
PART THREE
[FURTHER NOTES from the Stein Show, San Francisco, May 24th ‘11 & “lunch” with Duncan’s Olson lecture whilst waiting to go in:] additions August 2015
from Duncan on Olson CCNY Lost & Found 2011 pg 25: “Have you come across this – have you begun to be– to know– like one poet after another how the dreams take place in your work? [emphasis mine]
::: which excites me greatly and returns me to my notes on A Book of Measure. I have thought this process to be occurring for some time now. Indeed to extend this idea: The occurrences of the books within my book each with complete texts and publication history (and author information as well, which seeks to push them out of a frame called “reference” as these are not texts referred to but texts whose composition is occurring within the composition) came forward in a like manor to Duncan’s note about dreaming within the text. Because of the amount of time it has taken me to write ABM, because of the very literal amount of time which I have indeed spent living in A BOOK OF MEASURE I have been able to relax and reside there to an extent which has allowed the work within the work to surface in exactly the same fashion as it would in my daily life outside of my working in ABM. In other words: my self which resides each day in the book it is writing (which is my experience i.e. that I “go there” each morning, every day and live with the Bee Man, listening to the Narrator, reading the Journals of Maria Torres or attending the five acts of the verse play the Library of Dr Dee [the latter being composed as the Narrator is seeing it. Indeed the Library had been started a decade earlier yet it was not until the narrator of the book of Measure arrived in the theater that I was “actually” able to see the play through to its end]) this is then a Book that in Duncan’s sense, I am Dreaming. So then that Self in this process has also begun to Dream and write whilst In the composition. . . and again I suspect that this has been allowed by the very length of time which I have given myself to work the text of ABM [i.e. 10 years per volume more or less. It is also instructive to me here that the sum of all these parts, of which Time is one, are as in dream a sum which far exceeds the Whole. As with the Interlace narrative there is always information, (the “actual life of the here “fictive” John Dee), Tales, experiences, remembrances and mis remembrances ...the real (my travels in Portugal) and the experience of them resurfacing in an infinite rearrangement of what actually happened. So then living within A Book of Measure each day over time it seems obvious that it i.e. writing would also occure within the time of the work as just as it does in the daily living of the work: This then Duncan’s notion of dreaming in the work.
So I would then add this sense of Duncan’s Dream Time to the Interlacing as a Primary fact of its compositional possibilities ( I am purposefully avoiding here the idea of it being any kind of “advantage” let alone a breakthrough: I am describing my experience of this composition) .
One might also note the sense of Robert Duncan’s perpetual rime of “Back of” this or that as a figure of importance in the realization of mind or existence. (And a prime figure of the Interlace Narrative as well. One need only consider his Passages for example where their very placement (or as I would prefer occurrence) within the context of a book of “other” poems which then come forward into the Passages as a Central Figure “back of” the emerging poem.
That we are always in some sense seeking what lies “outside” and his importance to this is in always pulling this into the composition as a central Figure in the dance of the work.
APPENDIX:
To finish I will append here an account of the initial writing of ABM which I was preparing for Askhold Melnyczuk at AGNI magazine shortly after the birth of my son...but never delivered.... there were other things to do...
This then is a draft from that time with a few contemporary additions:
one: ENDLESS PROVOCATIONS: notes and whys regarding a book of measure[i]
the work is not a progress but an endless provocation
Robert Creeley
In the fall of 1991 while visiting Janice Knight in Chicago, I borrowed her new and at that time exotic lap-top computer, sat down at her desk overlooking the court yard of her Hyde Park 1920’s era apartment building and spontaneously wrote what were to be the opening lines of a book that twenty four years later I would still be residing within.
we enter again gain or regain or lose our own madness...
. . . it was late -midnight to be exact- and Ms. Knight had gone off to bed, leaving me to practice the opening and saving of files. The following morning I awoke with those lines still lingering in my head. It was far earlier for me than usual but I was forced awake by the persistence of the line. I found my file and sat as I remember for some time staring at and repeating out-loud those words- letting my tongue and pulse measure their vowels and beat, which remained distant; objects foreign and confused. . . irritating. I made some coffee returned to the computer and at once started in again.
lame words to rely so close upon [I NOTED]
we wake up. come down from dream. thee to name intimacy rests close to the bone locked arbitrator I name here Habit. we can not rest. reality is frame. the picture moves against its own central habit of relocation. everything is foot-note to a syllabic dos. there will not be enough memory. improper shut-down will result in loss which can not be defined.
& there I had it: my set coordinates. Habit. Time. Memory. Language. The Four directions which I had indeed been flirting with for years, set down, declared, reduced, moving: A command. Yet already there was a quiet unintentional revolution underway, for absent here (and I would note absent from the very start and indeed startling to me even as I worked), was the articulated caesura which I had leapt upon with my discovery of the poetics of Robert Duncan, and taken up as the central practice of my own art. From my earliest acquaintance with his work I found his measured articulation of the line to be a revealing force of Language whose measured silences were to be taken in duration, rhythm and meaning potential as equal to the dance of words and their sound and meaning clusters.[ii]
I had grown restless within my own work. I can see this now so clearly throughout the text of how to live[iii] where as early as 1988 (and not coincidentally- shortly after Duncan’s death that year) in such poems as Parallel Lines or later Essay, my normal line had begun to break down. What seemed to be prose sections as well as actual stories emerged into what had normally been lyric songs and passage work.
I consciously wanted --a bit desperately-- something new, something different for my work. I had come to a place in my thought where the forms that I read, that I worked in and with great pleasure could not bear my thoughts just as earlier (and in honesty at times today), my abilities and discipline could not carry them: It was as if I were trying to wear suits . . .no! that is not it -but it is close to the mark: What is lurking here is what I felt as a child when my mother would dress me in a little suit and take me for a pony ride or to Disneyland, (I have pictures of this as evidence). I would then be a participant, whose clothes, which had to be kept “nice”, always remained outside the circle of play. So I had come to this feeling within my own work. It was time for change.
From the beginning of writing [at 16 or so] I loved Language and all its guises. I can still remember the excitement of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King which was read aloud in my sophomore english class and I still find a very certain deliciousness in a contemporary poem encountered orally at that time which I heard as doing much the same thing as the Tennyson:
When the still sea conspires an armor
and Her sullen and aborted currents breed tiny monsters
True Sailing is dead!
Morrison, Horse Latitudes
So from Stein (discovered thanks to my high school teacher Fran Claggett, in my senior year, along with Duncan and Olson, Wieners and Creeley) to Chaucer, Camus Freud and Proust ( all gifts from my first and dearest college professor, Mary Lou Fitzgerald), from Melville to Welty[M&IPF1] I had arrived at last in my thirties[iv] at a place where the depth of revelation, the techne of craft the mastery with words (which to me means the ability to ride the flow of words with a trust that they will reveal) regardless of the form used, were what mattered : A conviction which I had so vehemently taken up at the first hint I got of it in the work of Robert Duncan; a conviction that well into my thirties I assumed it to be common ground for anyone pursuing the Poem).
But to return to A Book of Measure: I wanted now, I kept saying to friends, to write a book that I would want to curl up with a lap-full of cat and a large french-press of coffee and read in that same absorbed way I had been taken up with Proust Stein or Duncan. Something to both intrigue and wallow in as well; and what I was doing would simply not cut it any longer. After numerous times of repeating this particular statement I finally heard it.
And now with one night and a morning’s work the field at last had come into view:
Loss relates habit facilitates search. life shuffles through accumulations- old papers stuck together. layers of sedimentary vanity. vane moves -finger run up into air- to recall original direction is to lose original direction. cock twirling at the end of metal pole. squeekcaw challenge to circular habits repeated in the face of eminent storm never not once not even a little successful. forestalling the inevitable. rain starts. strong with repeated hesitation. gains a certain control through intensity. ends. rivers of accumulation carry glass eyed city rainbow of oil-slick and twisted toward storm-drain run off catch-basin of would-be seascape by intentionless painter who finding no movement was condemned to paint tides.
accumulated rain on upper surface of leaves brushed by wind scatters showers without apparent announcement. the story emerges and we enter. we enter and the story emerges.
so Memory then is stitched. an overtone threading between habit and loss. a thief working the locks of the essential door. maddening the scratching sound lingering beneath conversation beneath sleep beneath falling in love. the extreme of mixt metaphors. Memory. never above nature. always measuring.
hear it. all ways measuring.
biology eats at the stitches. a divine corruption of intention that lingers until a snap is not heard. unannounced occurrences are history. history is stitched. a child playing at the boundary of an adulthood marvels at the knot. picks at it. wondrous dexterity is tradition.
growth not progress but the assumption of assumptions.
measure to measure added. not if but how. if not if then how. simple math made complex by the addition of numbers. population. control. birth. all habit. thin-skin of life stretched over resounding eternal drum.
each tide as it rises or recedes a knot in the conception of what is taken to mean. hand noticed from periphery of attention. negative capability. always wondering what was taken. what will be missed. of what was alluded to that is attempting to run against the line of the ocean’s rising. light trail of foam wavering over foundation of sand is emerging history.
feet wet -crouching- he dipt his hand into the water and brought the ocean to his nose. deep breath of salt. return to studio.
when everything listens who will sing. when every thing sings rain will come again. the forest will return to its place. houses will fall. air will clear. companies of small quick colored birds will rise up from deep green turn and approach us again. we will know. we will hear. we will know enough not to speak. [v]
and a few weeks later as the text began to truly veer into the open for me the following was added as the first narrative thread emerged:
he kept a plate of bees in his kitchen simply he said because he liked it. it was extraordinary. a large plate. clear glass with gentle possibly even gracefully sloping sides covered completely with bees –all of them moving constantly moving each one of them plump and yellow- distinguished.
each morning he took the glass plate of bees down from the high shelf of an old glass-doored white china cabinet where the bees spent the night and placed it on a wooden counter that while out of the way was still quite visible. they would busily depart and return as bees are apt to do. this gave to the room a soft delicate hum and particular musky smell- and each evening he would return them carefully carrying the clear glass plate across the kitchen- quietly slipping it on to its shelf for the night.
he did this each night at or around dusk or before company would arrive so that the bees would be well out of the way- and yet in doing so he would always leave the door slightly ajar -so that they could have a little air I suppose- allowing a few of them to continue to make circumnavigations of the room which then extended their curious presence into the evening.
the net effect of all of this especially in the summer at the end of a hot day when -with the light lingering as it does without shadow stripped of its heat- I would sit settled into one of the overstuffed chairs in his living-room surrounded by plants and all but overwhelmed by the deep smell of the dark coffees that he constantly brewed in a large glass melior infuser which he would slowly plunge quietly causing the light brown water to turn by some alchemy of his hand a redolent mahogany- was a feeling of being overwhelmed slightly annoyed slightly curious overcome a feeling not unlike that of being held when not absolutely sure that you want to be.
returning from the little kitchen where the bees were kept -where he disappeared throughout the evening into a whir of kettle whistles and grinder noises always returning within moments -it seemed certainly not long enough to complete these preparations- with a plate of always strange cookies which would be neatly if not geometrically arranged and then rearranged each time anyone dared extract one from the plate -the result of course being that if I actually dared to remove one- which I was- in repeated counter-point to this seemingly impenetrable geometric prison that they were held within -constantly urged to do- the process of figuring out which of the cookies -when removed- would inflict the least chaos- could take quite some time as I would quietly and not without some measure of silent panic bring to bear all of my analytic power fueled by the immeasurable desire for chocolate. the sense of joy mixt with that of accomplishment at having actually achieved this near impossible goal -which was indicated by his merely almost absent-mindedly flicking the offending cookie back into its proper position with the end of his cocked finger- nearly equaled the pleasure -now finally grasped so to speak- of the taste of the little cookie itself. the net effect then was of being suspended in this constantly mutable arrangement of which I was now a participating part settled as I was into this enfolding chair.
I dipt. we all dipt. the coffee was that good almost thick. the added decadence of the chocolate causing almost perceptible smiles on anyone present no matter how often the experience was repeated. to just sit there together whether alone or with his other friends either talking or in complete silence -sound of a bee hum off in the near distance.
It would not be until the following June of 1992 that the work of Maria Torres, Portugal and my friend Graça Capinha’s talk of a Portuguese poet named Pessoa who at that time I took up as more of an idea to me, certainly not as a poet whom I had read; would all emerge into the text enlarging it beyond any imagining of it which I could have at that time.
But I was off: The text carrying me with the force of a necessity which on the best mornings still has me anxious to get going and see what is going to happen.
[i] A BOOK OF MEASURE VOL. I [1992-2000] is made up of first five completed Circumferences all under the title THE JOURNALS OF THE MAN WHO KEPT BEES.
Selections issued as follows:
“A BOOK OF MEASURE” containing part one [dromenon press, 1993]; THE JOURNALS OF THE MAN WHO KEPT BEES, {Second Circumference, complete}[lift Books, 1995]. TALES FROM THE PORTUGUESE [dromenon press 1996]. Other random selections have appeared in AGNI, lift, The Blind See Only This World [Pressed Wafer/ Granary 2000] KEY/satch, TALISMAN, POESIA DO MUNDO [Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal; and in various broadsides from dromenon 1992-2015.
Volume Two titled THE BOOK OF THE NIGHT SKY was completed late summer of 2014.
[ii] a quick example here. In the Emily Dickinson poem “gentian”, Mr. Johnson’s rendering reads “my departing blossoms”, connecting blossoms to the earlier flower images where if we turn to the manuscript books we find in Dickinson’s hand the line to actually read: my departing blossoms : the articulated caesura delivering then to the wonderful pun of “one below this morning” in the following lines where one below this morning now in the grasp of its measure reads as both a remark on the temperature as well as a reference to the unnamed person who has departed and now lies buried: “where the feelings are” is not cold (yet is of course the overtone here of “zero at the bone”), but with “one below” The departing that blossoms is now revealed...all resident and released in the caesura.
[iii] how to live as a single natural being the dogmatic nature of experience, [Zoland, Cambridge, Ma. 1998]
[iv] I had not found my contemporaries- that is those companions whose work emerging just ahead of, with or behind my own not only inspires but instructs in primary revelations of how what or why: [Seidman or Feidt in painting, or Corbett, Lansing, Auster; Torra, Barrett, Pruitt, Sawyer-Lauçanno, Mackey, Howe Mlinko, Dunn or Behrle in poetry
[v] A BOOK OF MEASURE I, 1 conclusion of the opening paragraph set.