INSIDE UNDIVIDED (8)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, and Context by Dara Wier

It almost seems as if it’s an emergency to write down that one of the wonders and finest things about fiction (I mean genre names, such as stories, like novels (& plays and pictures and music, too) is that it is all bluster and distraction and at one and the same time getting us to forget (everything) and illusiifying us (trancing us, hypnotizing us) into believing we remember, that is, to practice the brain activity called remembering. Suddenly it seems suddenly that is what fiction is, it is all about nothing but getting us to forget about Time.  We choose to be in a fiction (which can be in a poem) and we are transported into other dimensions which can be most often most easily understood as other dimensions in time.

(even when any time is called an illusion, it isn’t, not really) (perhaps sadly, maybe unfortunately)

And maybe then does this mean poetry serves another purpose.  Not really. I can’t imagine it might.

Though poetry’s precincts being what they are, are never so much overtly illusory.  Maybe they are metaphorical but that isn’t illusory. That’s a real as anything not an illusion is.

Roaming thoughts gathered up for us by our miraculous brains’ constant activtity come bidden and unbidden, come fast or come slowly in drips and in flocks and schools and whirlwinds.

Passing thoughts show up as part of maintaining a constant relationship with being at once in this world and alarmingly not of it.

How fast do you think?  Can you do anything about the speeds by which you think?  Could there be some circumstances in which to think in slow motion might provide a better outcome, a more complex or clarified momentum.

It is funny to think of a thought as an outcome.  As if a thought could be static.

As if a thought could be isolated.

Sometimes it seems it appears we isolate a thought in a word or a phrae or a sentence. And there-by harden it or cause it to lack animation.

Maybe this is why sentences are almost always a little odd.  They play opposum.  They act as if.  They stay composed.  They keep all sorts of things in play within their borders.  They just about always point forward, but sometimes do refer us back in time.  In order to understand this sentence one needs to have followed (followed?) some earlier sentence.  Writing and reading require endless willingness to let our agile brains

For instance, say I hear this proposition and I’m asked by a friend to say something about it:   The United States is too big to be a coherent nation conducive to humanity’s necessary adjustments to changing circumstances.

Some core of New England qualifies.  Bands of the Northwest fit this bill.   I think someone has recently published a book saying there are at least 11 possible regions of quintessential character within U.S. borders.  At least.  Possibly a few million.

Those for whom Occupy has offered a crack in what has otherwise seemed recalcitrant ignorance ,a willful and adamant ignoring obvious inequities and swindles just about everywhere we look (education, finance, medicine, energy and so on); in spite of Occupy’s detractors it is coherent and does cross many traditional lines and heavily guarded areas of political debate.

I do not understand how the line that Occupy is not coherent enough (they do not have a linear line to a fixed outcome, so I heard someone say on the radio) came to be so pervasively spread without warrant.  There is no linear line to a fixed outcome, that is ridiculous.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I propose to give you my undivided attention.

I hear myself saying this as though it is a shockingly personal declaration.  Undivided attention requires such a great effort of concentration.

For instance:

‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day’

________________________________________________

Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, theAmerican Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.

INSIDE UNDIVIDED (7)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, and Context by Dara Wier

________________________________________

About writing, what can't be transformed by other means

by mental-more and visceral-less means

(video from Theo Jansen's STRANDBEEST)

Robert Walser as written about by W.B. Sebald:

What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps, coincidences?  Are they rebuses of memory, delusions of the self and the senses, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which is beyond our comprehension?

When Sebald writes about Walser he says:

His ideal was to overcome gravity.

He says he thinks of Walser as the clairvoyant of the small.

Is it possible to talk about something without talking about something else?

Is it possible to talk about one thing without talking about other things?

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

I’ve been asked by the generous and galvanizing editors of TELEPHONE to translate not Shakespeare’s sonnet typed in above but CVI: When in the chronicle of wasted time…………….and I’m completely impeded with stock-still shock staring me down (of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow…….is one line in the original)

____________________________

Leaving this aside because it eludes me everytime I start to attempt to do what I was asked to do, here, instead, I’ll type in this poem by Laura Riding:

You or You

How well, you, you resemble!

Yes, you resemble well enough yourself

For me to swear the likeness

Is not other and remarkable

And matchless and so that

I love you therefore.

And all else which is very like,

Perfect counterfeit, pure almost,

Love, high animation, loyal unsameness—

To the end true, unto

Unmasking, self.

I am for you both sharp and dull.

I doubt thoroughly

And thoroughly believe.

I love you doubly,

How well, you, you decieive,

How well, you, you resemble.

I love you therefore.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And one more thing.  Every now and then I have an hysterical discovery of the obvious and it feels both embarrassing and good at the same time.  (this is def. to be distinguished from an epiphany (more on that fine word later)  Here’s one recent blow to my naivete’s persistence.

I was reading something about kitsch.  I was wondering about its origins.  I remembered Walter Benjamin has a piece called in English Dreamkitsch.  So I started looking.  I found first off his piece known by [The Collector] in one of his books of collections of notes, apostrophe’s, quotations, citations, musings, assertions, assembled materials, etc.. The first sentence I laid yes on is this one:

Never trust what writers say about their own writing.

Well, yeah yeah yeah, we’ve all heard this before.  In fact a lot of the last 75 or so years of American writing workshops have often acted as though this must be so.  Resulting in the so-called gag rule.

And it’s often linked to D.H. Lawrence’s report that we should trust the tale not the teller.  (But I think Lawrence is talking about TONE  here, it has not much to do with writers saying things about their own writing, at least that’s what I think about that)

Anyway, I thought yeah yeah yeah that’s a platitude we’re all supposed to believe.  And next thought was, ah ha, the sentence says never trust what writers say [trouble on the horizon] about their own writing [TRUST WHAT I SAY! TRUST ME!]  Finally, I understood the meaning of that idea’s intention.

Trust me not the writer.

This makes no sense as a general principle.  There have been and are and will be plenty writers who are perfectly articulate about what they are up to, what’s concerning them, what’s behind or around or before or during what they’re writing.  Some of them are esp. articulate about it in interviews (just think of the popularity of the PARIS REVIEW interviews, for years, Jackets growing list of great interviews, and interviews you can find everywhere else:

http://jacketmagazine.com/rev/interviews.shtml

&

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews

And some writers even write pretty well about their own writing.  Seems sensible. I once heard Geroge Saunders be absolutely perfectly beautifully articulate, humble and probably accurate, as he described his steps toward gaining an understanding of the writer who he now is.

Also seems sensible that some writers do not under any circumstances want to talk about their own writing and that seems just as fine as otherwise.  (my work speaks for itself has always been a pretty acceptable means to bow out of this conversation’s implications and knotty passages)

I seems okay for cooks to talk about cooking.  And car mechanics to talk about their craft.  And the captains of ships to talk about sailing.  (though perhaps there is probably some superstition involved in that world as much as in poetry’s) And doctors to talk about medicine.  And farmers to talk about farming.  And pilots to talk about flying.  And lawyers to talk about law.  And so on and so forth.

And finally, here is the American composer John Adams (Shaker Loops, Doctor Atomic, On the Transmigration of Souls, Naive and Sentimental Music and a lot more) saying something about music after he realized he wanted to elaborate his virtuosity v.v.harmony:

(it’s in his book about his music:  HALLELUJAH JUNCTION):

………vaudeville and show music of the first two decades of the twentieth century, while bouncy and cheeky, was harmonically bland and lacked the power to portray any serious range of human behavior and emotion…..

We don’t want that to happen again!

_______________________________________

Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, theAmerican Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.

INSIDE UNDIVIDED (6)

a series of fragments & notes about Chance, Fate, and Context by Dara Wier

When one passes along roadways and streets and lanes and sidewalks, one comes across now and then hand-lettered signs that say FREE.

Usually beside or around or behind or in front of these signs there are a few things someone wants to be rid of.

Some time ago, I don’t remember when exactly, I decided to take these signs literally, not literally.  Since then I’ve been collecting photos of an assortment of these hand-painted signs.  I think by now I have maybe a couple or three dozen of these, ranging in size from about as big as a car’s license plate to about as big as half a sheet of standard cut plywood.

Many of them are plywood.  A few are made of tough cardboard.  One is sheetmetal (16″h x 40″w), its paint is tomahawk red and flaking.  Most of them are FREE in black or blue paint, with no embellishments otherwise.  All of them are free style hand printed, non-standard, idiosyncratic:  FREE they all say, that’s all they usually say.

I’m writing this the day before one of our recurring national celebrations comes around.  Already there are reports, literal reports, of explosions off in the distance.  A little bit of jumping the gun, a little bit of practice with fireworks. Once it’s dark tomorrow the explosions will begin in earnest, and there will be a gradual building up to a fine grand finale of explosions and, if I’m nearby, and the weather’s co-operating, and I remember to watch, some kinds of fantastic re-enactments of stellar confabulations, conflagrations.

I will like it.  By which I mean I will take in these gaudy, prismatic, violent, symmetrical, flaming, precise displays,  and think it is all mysteriously fascinating. And a sort of caricature of what’s sometimes going on in my brain.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some of those whose life work involves direct and indirect, literal and analogical, study of our brains–their work is to watch how we work.  Memory & mating are two of their favorite subjects.   Since the mid 1980s there have been studies of what those who study it call transactive memory. This is the memory we share with others, various versions of collective memory.  Storage.  Capacity.  A couple might share this, a family, a band, a brotherhood, a congregation, a litter, a swarm, a mob, a colony, a lounge, a location, a political aggregate, a herd, a household, a corporation, a club, a pack, a society, an order, a murder, a school, a pandemonion, a bed, a nest, a den, a flock.  A timeframe: a minute, a day, a night, a season, a year, a decade, a quarter of a century, an era, a period, an age, a generation.

The Social Fabric

The social fabric The social fabric

as it hangs as it hangs

with the help with the help

of nine old-fashioned of nine old-fashioned

pine & wire pine & wire

clothespins clothespins

as it does now as it now does

on a plain length on a plain length

of cotton rope of cotton rope

strung between strung between

two trees two trees

north of our house north of our house

is holding up is holding up

alarmingly well. alarmingly well.

Often when it’s raining, I wonder from how high up is this water that’s soaking me to the bone falling.  Sometimes I’d like to know.

Why?  Because I guess I know someone somewhere can and maybe does know and he or she could tell me. And they never do.  I’ve yet to meet the weather report that let’s me in on this secret.

I doubt it has anything to do with national security.

FREE signs never say this much.  (I would never collect (steal?) a sign such as this one.  (this sign could easily be interpreted (translation necessary) as some kind of secret sign directed toward someone who can decipher its secret message)  Collecting and stealing, hoarding and protecting, accumulating and eroding, building up and tearing down,

(though I have loved Big Bird, how can one not?)

My First Day Without You.

That’s literal.

As is

My First Day With You.

How we take what is literal as rock bottom always metaphorical.  How not to disperse these two as though they were otherwise not the same.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Memory as collection.  Collecting in memory.  Cluttered up memory collections.

Memory collects and stores in arranged depositories such complex material one should always be shaking with awe over our capacity for memory.

And capacity seems especially telling.  What’s your memory’s capacity?  By what means can that be measured?

I spent some time this past week with someone who several times admitted that  he has a really good memory. Sometimes he seemed almost alarmed by this understanding.

And I spent some time with people who were in various stages of reminiscing about some shared, some over-lapping, some adjacent experiences.  It made me feel as if I were some kind of spectre, lacking substance, lacking the required net of memory to catch and hold so much detail.  I loved the listening and did not regret my lack of recall.  In fact, I liked the sensation of feeling something begin to come back to me. It seemed very much to allow me to feel things in my brain coalescing and joining in a series of recoveries from distant corners.

Much as what happens when disparate (well not really, I just thought so) sounds, signals, signs, words, syntax, images, phrases, half toned ideas, half or quarter or barely a sliver of an inkling, a piece of something, join up with a part of something else and suddenly there is something, really something.

I know they say that the farther away from one another two pieces of thought come to join one another, the more likely their potential sudden combination might produce something, another sensation, of revelatory impression.  It feels just like a sudden awakening.  And those are so strange because then they always feel as if one’s known this all along.  And that’s where eternity and timelessness and unraveled and raveled walk in the door.

I just found this:  It’s in a review of Heather Christle’s new book THE TREES THE TREES:

Christle’s poems use techniques more akin to those of landscape painting than the typical, confessional  quasi-portraiture of her generation—both presenting and representing the more playful world beyond the laborious myth of artist-as-externalizer of majestic inner states. Instead, these poems “launch sideways,” parallel to the world, not out of it or at it, with Christle’s signature bright devotion.

The part I’m most struck by is “laborious myth of artist-as-externalizer of  majestic inner states.”  And the part I really like is ‘launch sideways.’

_______________________________________________________

Dara Wier is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Selected Poems, Remnants of Hannah, Reverse Rapture, and Hat on a Pond. She teaches in the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets and Writers. Her awards include the Poetry Center and Archives Book of the Year Award, a Pushcart Prize, theAmerican Poetry Review’s Jerome Shestack Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She edits Factory Hollow Press. Visit her author page at Wave Books or read an interview.