Edward Dorn: A Vague Love

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Pocatello: photo by Julie Stokes, 8 January 2010

Bannock people, Idaho: photographer unknown, n.d.; image by Edulix, 4 July 2006

The Bannocks stand by the box.
They sway to the music.
A California truck driver
in with a load of pianos
shoots pool.

Their women
are not beautiful
they are not

but their eyes
have deep corridors in them
of brown hills of pain and
indecision and under every
lash

is a question no man, not
even their own
can answer.

Where is the deer?
That is not the question.

tic tok, stop de clock.
sings Fats Domino.

We all stand swaying.
it's someone's turn to shoot.

Fats Domino singing "Blueberry Hill" on the Alan Freed Show, 1956: screenshot by Matthew Paul Argall, 29 March 2010



Home of Fats Domino, New Orleans (Marais Street side of building), with graffiti from the period after rumors surfaced that he had died in the post-Hurricane Katrina flooding. Later, it was reported that he had escaped with his life: photo by Infrogmation, January 2006

Edward Dorn (1929-1999): A Vague Love, from Geography (1968)

Fats Domino's Stop the Clock (Imperial 5875, b/w Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?) hit #103 on the national charts in September 1962

Writing and Fashion: Some Time Dodgems

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Louis A. Caulfield, 37 Belfort Street, Dorchester. Delivering a heavy type-writer about a half a mile. Works for Model Typewriter Inspection Co. Says he is sixteen years old and gets $6 a week. Taken on Boston Common, Boston, Massachusetts: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, January 1917 (National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress)



Wife of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, writing on typewriter. Through union activities the family has developed a desire for higher education. The typewriter is to them a symbol of that education and as such is the most prized family possession. Creek County, Oklahoma: photo by Russell Lee, February 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Chimpanzee seated at a typewriter: photo by New York Zoological Society, 19 May c. 1906 (Library of Congress)



Young woman with typewriter, FSA project, Pocatello, Banning County, Idaho: photo by Russell Lee, July 1941 or 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Woman at typewriter: photo by Howard Liberman, September 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



A government secretary in the U.S. Office of Emergency Management, cleaning her typewriter: photo by Marjory Collins, February 1943 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



The Stenographer: photographer unknown, 5 March 1923 [?] (Library of Congress)



Typing address labels on a flat bed typewriter at the W. Atlee Burpee Company, seed dealers, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: photo by Arthur S. Siegel, April 1943 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)



Blind children from the Maryland School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind coaching Senator Claude Pepper, of Florida, of Senate Committee, Washington, D.C., in the art of operating a braille typewriter (left to right: Frances Wright, 8 years old, reading a braille book; Andrew Birmingham, 10 years old; Dr. John W. Studebaker, U.S. Commissioner of Education; Senator Claude Pepper): photo by Harris & Ewing, 9 April 1937 (Library of Congress)



Robert Kit[...] at typewriter made by Joseph Alsop for Hartford Courant: photo by Harris & Ewing, 15 November 1937 (Library of Congress)



Typewriting department, National Cash Register, Dayton, Ohio: photo by William Henry Jackson, c. 1902 (Library of Congress)



Irene Cornyn at a typewriter, wearing a prosthesis on her arm, possibly using a modified typewriter: photo by Bain News Service, between 1910 and 1915 (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)



Co-op enterprise office, Manzanar Relocation Center: photo by Anselm Adams, 1943 (Library of Congress)



Rose Fukuda and Roy Takeda, Manzanar Relocation Center: photo by Anselm Adams, 1943 (Library of Congress)



Indian stenographers: photo by Harris & Ewing, c. 1919 (Library of Congress)



Fanny Howe, Washington, D.C.: photo by Tom Raworth, 2010



Charles Bernstein, Bloomsbury, London: photo by Tom Raworth, 15 May 2008

[W]ord processor ideology reinforces the idealization of "clean copy" -- a defleshed, bureaucratic and interchangeable writing.

-- Charles Bernstein: "Blood on the Cutting Room Floor", from Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984)

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To understand the work of Charles Bernstein, one needs to think hard about fashion, in clothing and in print(s). For Bernstein, unlike his self-proclaimed precursor, Laura (Riding) Jackson, even nakedness is disguise, and power is at once naked and hidden by the audience’s desire, if not under actual or metaphorical cloth. The poet, quite simply and comically, can never take off his clothes:

Should I choose to take my tie off, the one with the embossed seals that is so carefully knotted over my Adam’s apple, I do not fall into a state of undress. I remain clothed, in some fashion or other, until I am without clothes and indeed then my skin still encloses me, until I disappear. (The real moral of "The Emperor’s New Clothes" is that power is always naked and by force of that concealed by the modesty of a people who cannot bear to look at the spectacle without mediation: the Emperor is clothed, that is, by the self-protective squeamishness of the collective subconscious. (Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984)

___

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Laura Riding made important arguments against professionalism, equating professional behavior with "fashion" and style of dress, and attempted to denude herself of these encumbrances and so to arrive at "truth." This sequence itself derives from the notion that spareness of voice equals authenticity, that fashion is suspect; it is, in some ways, an anti-feminist argument, hardly surprising in view of the masculine will to power in modernist circles, including her own. It is interesting that Bernstein begins from a similar place, arguing against professional poets and critics for their attending more to fashion than to thinking, which is of necessity an unfashionable activity in a consumer society. And yet Bernstein has become the most consummate of professionals; he has a chair at SUNY-Buffalo; he has edited numerous books on poetics; he has published three volumes in which his own criticism is reprinted; he has published a couple of dozen books of poems. He is, even more importantly, and as a result of these successes, the creator and propagator of a style. His work has, in recent years, become fashionable. Like many poets, he has arrived at the point where his is a recognizable style -- albeit a pluralization of styles -- associated not just with himself but with a "school."

Unlike Riding, however, and more like Gertrude Stein, from whom he takes more than from any other writer, Bernstein relishes his position and destabilizes it at every turn. Like Stein, he uses his criticism (much more standard than hers) to advertise his poetry. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent Bernstein is able to maintain his anti-fashionable status at the moment when fashion is catching up with him, or if his strategy of disavowing fashion by indulging in it succeeds in dismantling other, more ready-made styles. I will end this essay with a final paradox: Bernstein does not so much disavow authority in his work as reconceptualize it. Given a climate in which authority is a suspect term, Bernstein realizes that the only way to have it may be to disavow it.

from Susan M. Schultz: Of Time and Charles Bernstein's Lines: A Poetics of Fashion Statement, in Jacket #14, July 2001

# 657 (Brighton): photo by Tom Raworth, 2 August 2011

Distance

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Cherry orchards, farm lands and irrigation ditch at Emmett, Idaho: photo by Russell Lee, July 1941

There we are, and I don't know
where we are
being taken, but
I hope it's not too far
from where we started
to look down into the gently
sloping sparsely wooded
green valley, and see
the far dry mountains
fading into vague towns
of cloud, in the stillness
of distance

Farming land as seen from Whitebird Hill, Idaho County, Idaho: photo by Russell Lee, July 1941



Highway scene, Idaho County, Idaho: photo by Russell Lee, July 1941



Main Street, Twin Falls, Idaho: photo by Russell Lee, May 1941



Sandlot baseball game, Twin Falls, Idaho: photo by Russell Lee, May 1941



Irrigated farming land with mountains surrounding, Canyon County, Idaho: photo by Russell Lee, June 1941



Bicycle racks, Pocatello, Banning County, Idaho: photo by Russell Lee, July 1942

Russell Lee photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

The Elysian Fields: Trodden Upon

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Tom Clark: Baseball and Classicism, plaque on pavement, Addison Street, downtown Berkeley, California: photo by O. Bermeo, 9 July 2008

One morning, about 10,000 years ago, in that small window of dwindling opportunity just after the Dawn of Time and before the first thumping footfalls of the Epoch of Deconstruction, one was dawdling-about, as per the custom of the period, under a faint cerulean glimpse of sky that had momentarily opened up in the overhanging marine cloud layer adjacent to the spiky tips of the branches of a large cypress tree on the dirt margins of Nymph Road, just off Cherry, when the fair and gentle Eurydice returned from her underworld voyage to the roadside postal box with the day's mail.

A postcard from a total stranger, dispatched from a remote quarter of this large and mysterious land. Well, in fact, from Conesus, New York. Perhaps not so remote -- these things are so subjective -- if you hailed, as had Vic Raschi, from New Jersey.

The card contained a brief, but, to one whose routine daily existence was at this time almost entirely uneventful (ah, the bliss!), most interesting message.

"I showed your poem 'Baseball and Classicism' to my neighborhood liquor dealer, Vic Raschi...", this unfamiliar correspondent began.

Naturally one held one's breath. For heaven's sake, the last thing one had ever intended was to offend Vic Raschi.

"...and he loved it!"

That was nice. It made the morning brighter. As the years went by, moreover, whenever recalled, less and less frequently perhaps, but still, over the trundling-on of the decades, every now and then, accidentally summoned to the night courts of curious remembrance, it made the increasingly ponderous expiring passages of the century more friendly, more forgiving, somehow.

The world has changed a lot since those mornings. What ingenues everyone must have been, then. Everyone is so much smarter now. "People" have "learned" to Distrust Strangers. The police chief of New York boasts of the power and intent to shoot down any airplane that appears the least bit out of the ordinary. Never trust a stranger. He (or of course She) might be a Terrorist. But to Hell with all that. One takes one's Elysian Fields where one finds them, gratefully. And with humility. If also a bit of confusion.

Unsolicited correspondent from Conesus, may you still live and breathe!

And Vic Raschi, your mortal frame now twenty-three years in the grave, here's to you, wherever you are! Your spirit yet lives. Your name is etched in stone upon the pavement of a faraway city you were perhaps fortunate never to have known. Now everyone in the world is able to tread upon your good name!

Vic Raschi: 1951 Bowman baseball card

Orphée ramenant Eurydice des enfers: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1861 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

This post dedicated to Angelica, conducted out of the underworld without benefit of rational consent

Petrified Forest: Some Glyphs

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Petroglyph (mountain lion), Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Petrified Forest Ranger, 14 January 2011 (U.S. National Park Service)

My first experience of the Petrified Forest occurred at the age of four, in 1945, in the back seat of an automobile traveling though the large mysterious darkness of the Midwestern prairie night. The radio drama adapted from Robert Sherwood's 1936 stage play was airing on the Lux Radio Theatre, that night, with Ronald Coleman, Susan Hayward and Lawrence Tierney in the lead roles.

My earliest datable memories all come from this same period. There is the memory of the front page of the Chicago Tribune with a banner headline announcing VJ Day, 15 August 1945. The newspaper had been left upon a small table on the screened-in porch of a house in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. I was given to understand that this headline meant the war was over. And that this was to be regarded as good news.

Imperial rescript from Japanese Emperor Hirohito ordering Japan's capitulation and end of War II; written 14 August and announced 15 August, 1945: image via U. S. Army Center of Military History

Beneath the headline was a cartoon depiction of a rising sun, setting.

Petroglyph, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Petrified Forest Ranger, 14 January 2011 (U.S. National Park Service)

I think it was around the same time that, curled up in the back seat of my parents' car, I "saw" the Petrified Forest. I had no idea what a petrified forest was. Indeed, as a small unknowing child, the very words terrified me.

The customers of a diner at a remote location in the Arizona desert are taken hostage by a dangerous gangster in flight from the law. The American night bristles with tension and menace. Apart from the sound of the radio broadcast, there is silence in the car. The small boy huddled under a blanket in the back seat is supposed to be sleeping. He is not. The night is a great invisible looming forest. Written upon it in vague watery letters is a story he is not meant to be reading. Captive in it, he is petrified.

Trailer for the film The Petrified Forest (1936): cropped screnshot of main title by Rossrs, 8 June 2007

Six years later, in another car, I rode across the actual Petrified Forest. This time it was not a noirish terror zone of shadows and looming dark clumps of infoliated threat. It had colours, bright sedimentary bands of ochres, ambers, burnt siennas, pinks, bloody reds, blending together across the distancing highway vista into a uniform harsh dried-orange-peel shade, bleached-out by the hard blows of an all-but-blinding desert light. Beyond the visible landscape, within it, and all around it, there was only that brutal midsummer Petrified Forest light.

Written upon it there was nothing.

Except its own indecipherable history, from the ghost-haunted unknown epochs preceding the white Imperial wars.

The Tepees, Petrified Forest National Park, northeastern Arizona : photo by Finetooth, 4 October 2010

Painted Desert badlands as seen from Tawa Point in Petrified Forest National Park, northeastern Arizona: photo by Finetooth, 27 September 2010

Petroglyphs in Petrified Forest National Park, northeastern Arizona: photo by Finetooth, 8 October 2010

Painted Desert badlands as seen from Tiponi Point in Petrified Forest National Park, northeastern Arizona: photo by Finetooth, 26 September 2010



Petrified logs, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Petrified Forest Ranger, 15 January 2008 (U.S. National Park Service)



Cut and polished petrified log, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Laban712, 12 July 2007



Petroglyphs, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Petrified Forest Ranger, 23 August 2011 (U.S. National Park Service)



Petroglyphs, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Petrified Forest Ranger, 23 May 2005 (U.S. National Park Service)



Petroglyphs, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Petrified Forest Ranger, 23 May 2005 (U.S. National Park Service)

Hatch5, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Petrified Forest Ranger, 18 June 2009 (U.S. National Park Service)

Breaks2, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Petrified Forest Ranger, 26 August 2011 (U.S. National Park Service)



Rim Trail, Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona: photo by Petrified Forest Ranger, 1 May 2006 (U.S. National Park Service)

Ed Sanders: Light Show of the Gods

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Lightning and lava flows over Eyjafjallajokull: photo by Olivier Vandeginste, Sunday 18 April 2010

You don't need me to tell you
that it all might be an hallucination

or some sort of Light Show of the Gods

I mean, take another look at
the 9th book of Plato's Republic

Or you might say that even the
concept of "home" is risible

Maybe all of us have to sing a blues tune
from nursery to nursing:

"Delude me, baby,
Delude me all night long!"


.................................4-4-07

Lightning and lava flows over Eyjafjallajokull: photo by Olivier Vandeginste, Sunday 18 April 2010