Dove Sta Memoria:  Conclusion

Jack Foley

Question:

Given that you live in the locale of the San Francisco poetry renaissance, how do you feel your work connects to that of poets of that time? As a development from it? Or are you doing something else entirely from different sources? Or is it a mixture?  What I am looking for is a way of placing your work relative to the work in the area that was largely the last significant development in the art, at least until your work.

How do you feel your work connects with Projective Verse?  I mean relative to Olson’s essay, not what has been made or unmade of it since.

Response:

Oakland-born Robert Duncan was a marvelous presence here in the sixties and seventies. His books, The Opening of the Field (1960) and Bending the Bow (1968) made an enormous impact on me. Duncan lived with his lover, the painter and collage artist, Jess, in San Francisco’s Mission District, but you could see him often in the book stores in Berkeley. He also gave readings and lectures—always of interest. Duncan’s work led me to Olson and “Projective Verse.” Olson’s Maximus IV, V, VI (1968)—which I discovered in the UC Berkeley undergraduate library—was a genuine revelation. Both poets seemed to have achieved a marvelous freedom while simultaneously maintaining an intense interest in tradition and, in Duncan’s case, in traditional modes.

Both men were also extraordinary readers of their poetry. (That the word “spirit” is by etymology “breath”—and so the concept is rooted in a fundamental fact about the body—is of enormous importance to Olson.) I heard Duncan read and lecture in person. Olson I saw on film—an out-take from a series made for public television by Richard Moore. Olson read “The Cow / of Dogtown” from Maximus IV, V, VI, and the reading took one to the very center of his vision: his understanding of the world, his interest in the syllable, the “bigness” of his poetry. The enormous figure of Olson—well over six feet tall—stomped around the Dogtown section of Gloucester and recited:

She leans
from toe to tip of hands
over the earth,
making the Cow-sign
with the earth
 
(she is the goddess
of earth and heaven and sea)

one could live in the night
because she has to do with it,
encompasses it
in the day on Dogtown the day
is as close as the sky

her air
is as her light
as close
one is not removed even in passing through

the air, moving around, moving from one place
to another, going even across the same field 

                 Nut is in the world

 (The poem, like the title of Duncan’s book The Opening of the Field, contains the important “Projective Verse” word: “field.”)

My wife Adelle and I frequently read multi-voiced pieces, with both of us speaking, sometimes simultaneously. We were asked, along with a number of other poets, to participate in a tribute to Robert Duncan. Each poet was asked to recite a poem of Duncan’s and then a poem of one’s own and, if possible, to demonstrate the influence. I chose the beautiful title poem of Bending the Bow, which Adelle and I read as if it had been written for two voices. As far as I know, Duncan did not write any of his poems to be recited by two voices. But there is so much doubleness, so much contradiction in Duncan’s work, that it is very easy to score it in that way:

We’ve our business to attend Day’s duties
bend back the bow in dreams as we may
til the end rimes in the taut string
with the sending. Reveries are rivers and flow
where the cold light gleams reflecting the window upon the
   surface of the table,
the presst-glass creamer, the pewter sugar bowl, the litter
   of coffee cups and saucers,
carnations painted growing upon whose surfaces.  The whole
composition of surfaces leads into the other
                                current disturbing
what I would take hold of...
 
            At the extremity of this
                 design
“there is a connexion working in both directions, as in
            the bow and the lyre”—

We immediately followed Duncan’s poem with the conclusion of my choral poem, “Chorus: SON(G).” The “connexion”—to use Duncan’s spelling—was obvious. Michael Palmer remarked to me afterwards, “Robert would have loved it.”

This is the complete text of “Chorus: SON(G)”:

CHORUS: SON(G)
for two voices

beginning
              his first consciousness/was an immense nostalgia—an awareness/of “passage”—
the universe is running down—always in the direction of increasing entropy—
the brutality of the word “tu-meur”     be careful here is intelligence at work
self-hatred   masochism—he spoke of the dog as “dominant”—
it would be necessary to give a full account of the present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, could not be determined without pointing out in what manner language and the human mind act and re-act on each other, and without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone, but like of society itself.  —What of all these
“voices”?
The language poet orders “tongue”—
how can we look
to words?—how can we look?—the two
of us
       stranded, touching, telling—
“I’m just beginning to reach the point where I—”
                —what you’re objecting to in my poem is not its style but thought itself, its
                shifts, its evasions, its magical ability to function in many contexts at once—
it was the rock star—nerves jangling—veins open—who could tell him anything?
the news /
                paper
    which had been folded over flat on the ground      
          yes/
    terday is now
                        wide open—
     the wind reads it—
To say that a poem is “about” self-consciousness is not to say that it is only about
self-consciousness. There may be poems which are “only” about poetry and maybe ________
wrote some of them, but if so that is an extremely limited
conception
of poetry
             Self-consciousness
is by its very nature expansive, passionate, interested, anxious to discover
resonances
of itself
            at large in the world—
this desperate obsessive need to talk—
I walk through the house alone this morning—Song—
—Dry island.  —Embattled sky.  —Voices of the sea.   —Strange flowering.
To tell you the truth I enjoyed chasing after you. Perhaps we could do it a couple of times a month.
passing by—her hands in her pockets—
what are your hands
                               doing?
to be one, to be only, to be lone—
There was an electronic tuning test at the Bell System exhibit in Disneyland. By pressing buttons you could hear either a tone of fixed frequency or a tone whose frequency you could adjust, but not both at the same time. After you had matched the frequencies as closely as possible, the machine scored your performance. My wife, who is a musician, did much better than I. 
I sit in the car in the exact middle of the front seat. I hear the announcer’s voice as a compact sound source dead ahead, midway between the two speakers. As I move to the right the sound source at first becomes diffuse. As I move further right, all the sound clearly comes from the right-hand speaker—

[With the paragraph beginning,  "I sit in the car,”  my wife begins to speak. As she speaks the last lines she moves to the right]

I have said that, if a sound reaches us with equal intensities from two sources, we hear all of it as
coming from the nearer source if the difference in distance is about a foot
or greater.     to dabble here—to wander—
“i before e except after c” tested by the word “atheist”
like cutting a path through the jungle
                          with a bureaucrat

Tempête dans un bénitier	Tempest in a   holy-water     basin
Le Souverain Pontife avecque	The Pope with
Les évêques, les archevêques	His bishops   and    his archbishops
Nous font un satané chantier.	Makes a devilish mess for us.
Ils ne savent pas ce qu’ils perdent	They don’t know what they’re losing—
Tous ces fichus calotins	All these wretched priests—
Sans le latin sans le latin	Without Latin without Latin
La messe nous emmerde	The Mass is shitty—

jnds of frequency or intensity—
se change en eau de boudin—changes into black pudding water—
The precedence effect, the fact that a sound seems to come from the direction from which it reaches us first, is bad for stereo, but highly desirable in everyday life. When someone speaks to you in a hard-walled room, you hear all the sound as coming from his or her
                                  mouth            [speaker indicates mouth]
even though much of the sound that reaches you has been
                                reflected
                                    from the walls—
her power over me is (what is the word?) silence—
whistles arrow from whirlwind—rain through his heart—
           say what I’m called
        and who rouses & calms my
                                        power!—
It is characteristic of the mass media that the figures in them are all absent, not there, can’t be touched. This is also true of books, which were in a sense the first of the mass media. Speaking to G.P. Skratz, I extended this idea to the Catholic “Mass” as well. The Mass is still another “mass” medium, an attempt to reach as many people as possible. At the beginning of the Mass, Christ is (and remains) profoundly absent, has not returned—and the Mass is, precisely, a fictional assertion that this is not the case, that Christ is in fact “present.” (“Faith” = “the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for.” Fiction!)
—the possibility that her disasterous relationships with men arise out of the desire to prove her mother right. “Men are such beasts—”
Too bad you didn’t come with us to the restaurant. We found it (with a little trouble) & had just been seated when suddenly in pops Ishmael & Callahan & Alta & everybody so we all sat down together & ate too much Italian food & had a very nice time
What crazy birds
these crows who saw cut slice
the sound & good old branch
of the cross where they have perched
The name Cohan still has magic. The mere mention of it was enough to unleash a stream of talk from the two of them.
 

[FIRST VOICE, speaking simultaneously with SECOND VOICE]:

 allied w/ leaves—soft-spoken—“Bend all your bows,” said Robin Hood
“this day at the kirk of Gamry”
 a sudden spasm—monstrous wings—
 can’t walk—can’t talk—furioso—spasm—
  EVIL IS EVERYWHERE TO BE
  SEEN THERE IS NO
  REST FROM IT
  THE POWER OF DEATH
  MULTIPLIES
  THERE IS NO
                         “LIFE”—  
   And just when I might have reproached myself—It was Lucienne’s thoughts, her
   mental attitudes, the plenitude of her being which I encountered. Not one of my
   kisses went astray.
   estranged from that—much can be said—differently—
  All these are promises made at a certain time (yet broken) to Love, which
   stands, wavering in a doorway, speaking words which I can neither hear nor 
                                                                                                                                  love,
  you are endless, sorrowful—
                                            everything
 in nature became fragmented before him—
 “Gae hame, gae hame, good brother John, An tell your sister Sarah”
 “she found him     drowned     In Yarrow”
 fuck you, man     To think of this again: think: forty years ago
 there: my face in the mirror—
 the “hermeneutical situation”—
 for “the letter killeth but the spirit”—the breath—
                               as the wind turns them (leaves)
they seem to say
                         “good-bye”—
soil—
         bridge—
                       stone—
                                   “Auld Ireland is calling”
Thousands of Madrid residents protested President Reagan’s visit to Spain last night by banging on pots
and pans and turning off their house lights—
I tied my drum to the top of my lance—
farewell
            farewell my sweet my
                        g’bye, love,
                                            dark one, daughter—   endlessly
blond dark fair sweet bitter mild soft harsh fiery

  [SECOND VOICE, speaking simultaneously with FIRST VOICE]:

                —It might have been docks, it might have been blocks
                It might have been—surely—the school of hard knocks
                She might have detested all grandfather clocks
                Or declared that she never could bear to wear frocks
                But crossing her leotards (she didn’t wear socks)
                And squinting her eyes till she looked like a fox
                (Ignoring my comment on bagels and lox)
                She whispered obliquely, The subject is rocks.

                We sat in the coffee house breathing the air
                To the casual observer we hadn’t a care
                (It was Cambridge in Spring if you’ve ever been there)
                When fixing upon me her vacuous stare
                And assuming an attitude “born of despair”
                She rather ungracefully fell from her chair
                (The clamor they tell me resounded for blocks!)
                And whispered obliquely, The subject is rocks.

                And now that I’m older and very well read
                It often occurs when I’m going to bed
                That I wonder what could she have meant when she said
                In a voice that might easily waken the dead
                In a tone that was hollow and heavy as lead
                With a tremor that filled me with Infinite Dread
                (There were so many things she might speak of instead!)
                But she grasped at a bundle of freshly picked phlox
                And whispered obliquely, The subject is rocks.

East Oakland’s Eastmont Mall. Eleven p.m., papers strewn everywhere. As I drive by the liquor store in my car I notice two men who seem to be confronting each other. One of them stands in front of the open liquor store. In his hands he holds an enormous rifle. The other is seated on a motorcycle. He is driving the motorcycle (as violently as he can) in small circles before the man with the rifle. Everything seems violent, open, uncertain. I pass by—

                    [The two voices end at exactly the same time. There is a moment 
                      of silence before the concluding lines are spoken.]

articulation of sound—
   memory in the
                        “ear”—
                                    a substitution

   of the
            “audible”
                          for
                              the
                                   “visible”—

to write this day
to insist
           upon it—

This poem, like much of my work, deliberately situates itself in the space between performance and reading silently. Burroughs’ idea of the “routine”—with its suggestion of vaudeville—is relevant here. I want the piece to be read—but I want it to be heard as well. (The cassette tape which accompanies my book Adrift—Pantograph, 1993—contains a performance of the poem, as does the CD which accompanies O Powerful Western Star: Pantograph, 2000.) Silent reading will give you certain things which you could not get from a performance; a performance will give you things you couldn’t possibly get from silent reading. Neither the silent reading nor the performance by itself “is” the poem—which I would resist calling a “performance piece.”

Robert Duncan, great poet that he was, did us all the service of attempting to make an exact equivalence between the poem as “scored” on the page and the poem as read aloud. (In feeling his presence in my poem I am of course “remembering” him.) The suggestion that the typewriter can “score” the poem comes from Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay, but Duncan follows Olson’s suggestion more strictly than Olson himself did. For Ground Work I: Before the War (1984), Duncan persuaded his publisher, New Directions, to print a facsimile of his typescript, so that his careful spacing could be reproduced exactly. Still, when we hear Duncan read the poems, it becomes immediately apparent how little of his voice the page can contain—though the page in itself has considerable interest. As his work makes clear, there is, at best, only a limited connection between the sound of the poem and its visual appearance on the page.

It is in this gulf between sound and print that my poem takes place.

The poem touches on a number of the themes I have been writing about in this essay. When I wrote the poem, I had been thinking a great deal about the work of the composer Charles Ives. Often Ives shifts keys so quickly that, by the end of the piece, we have lost all sense of key signature: the next note can be, literally, anything. Something analogous happens here. When we listen to someone speak, we are usually listening primarily for content. It is only “secondarily” that we listen for the sound of the person’s voice. In my poem we are given so many assertions, so much “content”—and contexts shift so quickly—that finally we are “listening” to nothing but the sound of the speakers, the “articulation of sound” which is going on precisely at this moment. Content draws us away from the present; my poem insists on what is happening right now, forces the listener into a present in which she or he is immediately involved. And what is this “present”? It is the intense perception of a poem being spoken in a room. The poem, directed into the consciousness of its hearers, is in this sense transformational, shifting its listeners out of content and context into the pure perception of sound. When the two voices suddenly stop and pause before going on to conclude the poem, the experience of silence is a deep one. Paradoxically, it is this moment of silence which gives the poem its maximum sense of self-awareness. Hearing “Chorus: SON(G)” for the first time, a friend wrote to me that it “seduced the listener into the willing participation in chaos.” That seems to me an extraordinarily apt description of the poem’s effect: the “chaos” is the chaos of voices—all wildly different from one another—inhabiting the same space.

At the same time, however, I wish the poem to be a display of skill: the idea of craft is by no means entirely subsumed in the idea of transformation. The poem is rehearsed; we are careful in performance that the two voices end at exactly the same time—a fact which the audience always notices and comments on. That the poem is meant as a kind of religious experience is suggested by its constant parallels—somewhat blasphemous ones—to the Catholic Mass. The poem maintains itself throughout in a deep openness—“Voices of the sea”; it contains even a strictly rhymed passage—another deliberate instance of “skill.”

“Chorus: SON(G)” is also, deeply, a California poem—not least because it mentions East Oakland (where I live). The intensity and diversity of the West Coast—even the ocean, which Kerouac attempted to mime at the conclusion of Big Sur—is present in it. It is tender, fierce, and in a certain sense violent: “at large in the world.”

*

The questions and answers discussed here—themselves tests of memory, perhaps fictions—cannot be resolved in a short space. One can ask whether they can be resolved at all. Is visionary experience a memory? If so what is it a memory of? Is memory anything more than “an awareness/of ‘passage’”? In the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads (2^nd edition, 1800), William Wordsworth defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” [I quoted from Wordsworth’s preface in “Chorus: SON(G).”] William Blake, commenting on Wordsworth’s ideas, wrote, “Imagination has nothing to do with Memory.” Jack Kerouac called his creative self “Memory Babe”—a phrase connecting memory to a kind of innocence and to the idea of “telling everything.” In a famous passage at the conclusion of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Is “the past” Fitzgerald refers to anything more than an invention? He is, after all, writing a work of fiction. In Nadja André Breton wittily remarks that “Subjectivity and objectivity commit a series of assaults on each other during a human life...[T]he first one suffers the worse beating.”

Poetry seems to inhabit a space which is at once memory and not-memory, fiction and truth. Mnemosyne may be a mother and she may be speaking the truth, but (in their ceaseless transformative activity) her daughters sometimes lie.

Jack Foley