Poetry Friday: Cage's Mesostics

I'm taking a brief respite from the world of doo-wop today, for a quick plunge back in the world of John Cage. Our department has a competition--with a fairly substantial cash prize--for best dissertation chapter, so I'm doing a little editing and cleaning of my Cage chapter. Part of the editing resulted from finally reading Carolyn Brown's memoirs. Brown was an early member of the Cunningham troupe, and also the first wife of Earle Brown. She spent her whole life hanging around with Cage, and was present at the premiere of 4'33", which is of course the subject of my chapter. I was hoping there would be some juicy detail, but unfortunately the book is very thin on these early years. With a few exceptions, I suspect that she refreshed her memory by looking at the same old secondary sources all of us know. Oh well! I imagine, though, that the book would be extraordinarily useful for those looking at later Cage and Cunningham stuff.

Anyways, it's Poetry Friday, and I realized I've never posted anything by Cage. From the seventies on, Cage almost exclusively wrote in a poetic form he invented called "mesostics." Basically, you take a word, and arrange it vertically. Then you find other words to go across each letter, the main rule being that you can't repeat the vertical letters. So if you chose the word "vertigo" because of the "t", you can't have another "t" until after the next vertical letter.

Cage did these mesostics in many different ways. Sometimes he chose letters and phonemes at random, and then also used chance procedures to randomly change the size and typeface of the letters, as in 62 Mesostics Re: Merce Cunningham. (See an example here. I have a different one of these mesostics tattooed on my back, largely to intimidate other Cage scholars at conferences.) Other times, he more or less wrote in readable prose, but still arranged in the mesostic system.

Why did he do this? In Empty Words, Cage writes that he was inspired by a remark of Norman O. Brown, who pointed out that the word "syntax" is military in origin. And also by a comment of Thoreau, who once wrote that when he heard a sentence, he heard the marching of feet. It was also in this period that Cage did some of his most overtly political music. Cage's politics were always a bit fuzzy, and often annoying, but some of the work of this period is remarkably effective. In the Lecture on the Weather, for instance, is a piece for twelve men, ideally twelve Americans who became Canadian citizens to escape the draft. The men read aloud selections of writings by Thoreau, while recordings (by Maryanne Amacher) of weather sounds blast in the background, and a film (by Luis Frangella) projects photographs of Thoreau's handwriting in negative so that it appears like flashes of lightening. It is a grim, and aggressive, work. It's a little later than Crumb's Black Angels, or middle-period Curtis Mayfield ("(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below We're All Going to Go"), but shares obvious sympathies. Grim times.

At any rate, here's a slightly more cheerful piece, the beginning of "Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegan's Wake. Cage loved Joyce, and decided to improve upon Finnegan's Wake by destroying its syntax even more. The words are chosen from the book, with an emphasis on Joyce's made-up words, and the vertical spine is simply "James Joyce." If you read it aloud, it's quite lovely in its own way.

wroth with twone nathandJoe
                        A
                        Malt
                      jhEm
                        Shen

                     pftJschute
                       sOlid man
          that the humptYhillhead of humself
           is at the knoCk out
                   in thE park

A bunch of my friends are taking or about to take their qualifying exams. Good luck out there! Illegitimi non carborundum.

Poetry Friday: Yeats

It has been a long week, but a good one. Today Mary took her American board exams. They went well enough, but she won't know if she passed for another month or so. For those of you keeping track, these are the same exams all veterinarians must take to practice in the United States. Some individual states also have addition boards, but not Pennsylvania, where we hope to move this fall. If she was going to an American veterinary school, the boards would count as her final exam, and she would basically be done now. However, she still has to go back to the UK next week and finish up her courses there, and then sit through more exams to receive her degree. That's the downside, but the upside is that when she finishes all this, she will have both a "DVM" and a "MCRVS" (Master of the College of Royal Veterinary Surgeons") after her name, which is pretty cool.

The other good thing about this week is of a subject I shan't blog about. But suffice it to say, I'm in a good mood. So with that, I leave you with the poem of the week! A little Yeats for April, by special request.

William Butler Yeats, "Cloths of Heaven" (1899)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Poetry Friday

I am pleased to announce the return of Poetry Fridays. I have not been avoiding them on purpose, it's just that I keep forgetting. So in keeping with my earlier post on those darned Anglicans, I give you some T.S. Eliot. I read this poem in high school, and really loved it for some reason. My copy is all marked up with little high school scribbles, where I pointed out to myself with awe that the three trees symbolize the three crucifixes. (You know, Jesus and the Two Thieves. Sounds like a doo-wop group.) I think it is the intense foreshadowing that really impressed my seventeen-year-old self; I have always really loved anticipating something that you know is coming. Even if it's, you know, a crucifixtion.

The Journey of the Magi (1927)

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Poetry Friday

For some reason, I have been in the mood for the metaphysics. So with a hearty exhortation for everyone to go read Richard Rambuss's Closet Devotions, I present to you some John Donne to celebrate the last day of the quarter, when we all feel a bit battered indeed.

Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter My Heart (c.1635)

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

Poetry Friday

Who doesn't love a little Roethke on a Friday evening in November?

“For an Amorous Lady”

“Most mammals like caresses, in the sense in which we usually take the word, whereas other creatures, even tame snakes, prefer giving to receiving them.” From a Natural-History Book

The pensive gnu, the staid aardvark,
Accept caresses in the dark;
The bear, equipped with paw and snout,
Would rather take than dish it out.
But snakes, both poisonous and garter,
In love are never known to barter;
The worm, though dank, is sensitive:
His noble nature bids him give.

But you, my dearest, have a soul
Encompassing fish, flesh, and fowl.
When amorous arts we would pursue,
You can, with pleasure, bill or coo.
You are, in truth, one in a million,
At once mammalian and reptilian.

Poetry Friday

I'd like to share something about myself. I don't think it's common knowledge; in fact, it's rather personal. It's my favorite poet. A person's favorite poet tells you a lot about them. I'm not sure what exactly my choice says about me; so it always makes me a little nervous to reveal it. But here goes: William Carlos Williams. There. Now you know.

A Widow's Lament in Springtime
William Carlos Williams, 1921

Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband.
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turned away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.

Poetry Sunday

Carlos has reminded me that I forgot last week's Poetry Friday. And not only that, October 7 was the 50th anniversary of the publication of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl." I have always thought that Carlos's name was a Hispanicized version of Karl, as in Marx, but I just remembered that Carlos is also the name Kerouac gave to Ginsberg in On the Road. And given that we suspect Pablo might be a Neruda, perhaps we need to re-think Carlos's alter-ego.

At any rate, in honor of all these things, I present a lovely poem by Ginsberg, written like "Howl" in 1955. It's a little long for a blog entry, but I think it's worth it--although again, I'm really not enjoying the difficulty of formatting poems correctly in Blogger. You can find this in Selected Poems, 1947-1995.

"Sunflower Sutra"

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial-- modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter, and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by oureyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

Poetry Friday

When I was in ninth grade, a freshman in high school, I had an awakening. See, when I was a child, I read a lot. Kind of obsessively, really. When my mom used to take me to the library, I seem to remember that we had a rule that I could only check out a certain number of books at a time, because otherwise I was liable to check out dozens of books. And I still remember looking at the shelves in the children's section, and being really frustrated that there were no more books I hadn't read. If all else failed, I would go over to the handy World Book Encyclopedia my parents had bought, choose a volume, and sit down with a bowl of cereal and start reading.

But at some point in middle school, I stopped reading quite so much. Actually, maybe that's not true. But in craziness of being thirteen years old, reading stopped being such a fundamental part of my identity. I was making half-hearted attempts at being popular, I was learning to play the guitar, I was growing my hair long. Reading didn't overwhelm my life the way it used to.

In high school, tossed and turned by new people and new experiences, I felt a little bit of an identity crisis. And I soon realized that part of my problem was that I had fallen behind in my reading. So I went to the school library, and started looking for new stuff. I think the first book I picked up was Walden Pond, but soon I turned, like every other teenager in the world, to the Beats. Howl came first, I remember reading it aloud to myself in a corner of the library. Then On the Road and Dharma Bums, and the Viking Portable Beat Reader. Never really got into Burroughs for some reason.

So anyways, this is all to introduce the poem for this Poetry Friday. After reading Dharma Bums, I wanted to be Gary Snyder like nobody's business. I still have the copy of Turtle Island I bought in ninth grade, and this was my favorite poem from it. Blogger isn't letting me reproduce the spacing correctly unfortunately, but this'll do.

"Bedrock"

Snowmelt pond warm granite
we make camp,
no thought of find more.
and nap
and leave our minds to the wind.

on the bedrock, gently tilting,
sky and stone,

teach me to be tender.

the touch that nearly misses--
brush of glances--
tiny steps--
that finally cover worlds
of hard terrain.
cloud wisps and mists
gathered into slate blue
bolts of summer rain.

tea together in the purple starry eve;
new moon soon to set,
why does it take so
long to learn to
love,
we laugh
and grieve.

Poetry Friday-ish

Dr. Crazy has a tradition of posting a poem every Friday. I think I need more poetry in my life, so I'm going to to do that too, even though I'm already a day late!

This poem is by Frank O'Hara, and was written in 1958. I first read it as an undergraduate, having been assigned it by my favorite professor in a course on gay and lesbian history. It's a lovely poem, but also a beautiful political statement.

Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets

from near the sea, like Whitman my great predecessor, I call
To the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence

do not spare your wrath upon our shores, that trees may grow
upon the sea, mirror of our total mankind in the weather

one who no longer remembers dancing in the heat of the moon may call
across the shifting sands, trying to live in the terrible western world

here where to love at all’s to be a politician, as to love a poem
is pretentious, this may tendentious but it’s lyrical

which shows what lyricism has been brought to by our fables times
where cowards are shibboleths and one specific love’s traduced

by shame for what you love more generally and never would avoid
where reticence is paid for by a poet in his blood or ceasing to be

blood! Blood that we have mountains in our veins to stand off jackals
in the pillaging of our desires and allegiances, Aimé Césaire

for if there is fortuity it’s in the love we bear each other’s differences
in race which is the poetic ground on which we rear our smiles

standing in the sun of marshes as we wade slowly toward the culmination
of a gift which is categorically the most difficult relationship

and should be sought as such because it is our nature, nothing
inspires us but the love we want upon the frozen face of earth

and utter disparagement turns into praise as generations read the message
of our hearts in adolescent closets who once shot at us in doorways

or kept us from living freely because they were too young then to know what they would ultimately need from a barren and heart-sore life

the beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in
lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions

the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth
and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are.