SOME THOUGHTS (BARTHES) FROM LAST YEAR

3/11/19

I was thinking this morning of how the type of account I want to write should begin with a statement of main themes, that it’s not enough—as I tend to do in lists—to enumerate proper names with maybe a tagline to indicate critical orientation. Then, having had a look-in yesterday at Baudrillard’s Conspiracy of Art, I picked up this morning Barthes’ “Myth Today,” which includes, as perhaps ultimate inspiration or challenge, the lines: “In a word, I do not yet see a synthesis between ideology and poetry.”—with the two seen as “two equally extreme methods”: “either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or, conversely, to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poeticize.”

For me, the true poeticization is something like “Metro Lace” where language serves the purpose of asserting arbitrary relations to the subject and object—it is a bridge between two things, each with its own status, and the poem approximates moods only, making the capacities of language register presence—thus a sensual act because the writer is a locus of senses and sensory impressions in the act of operating language.

But a critical language needs history—which is biographical first because the utterance has to be placed in time and because the evaluation is retrospective. “Entirely permeable to history”—though—is more extreme than what I had been considering. And that’s where reading Barthes’s very lucid discussion may be crucial at this time. For I begin to see that what has hung me up all along is what I might call the particular vantage of my intervention. I’ve wanted it to be “autobiographical” or “lyrical” criticism, a story of becoming, à la Nietzsche’s “How One Becomes Who One Is,” but that is fraught with the difficulty of articulating who and where and what one is. The account creates its author, I don’t doubt, but that’s an intimidating prospect. As “lyrical,” the account allows for a love story, of sorts, and that might too easily become fan notes or the glib appreciations the internet is rife with. But Barthes’s concept of myth brings me to something I’ve been trying to suggest with such formulations as “exile,” “pursuit,” and “flight.” The point is that the perspective has to be one willing to excavate the myths built into the objects by their context (the historical imperative) and to witness the myths of becoming that each object bequeaths.

Here, then, we’re engaged in true critique, the type that would extract principles of becoming, not so absolute as an interrogation of essence by means of substance, or of form by accident—since I don’t think I will uncover Platonism at the heart of the endeavor, nor phenomenology, but rather a Nietzschean or possibly romantic irony, a gesture, in other words, toward art/poetry by other means. But if I am attentive to the myths built into, or incorporated by, the reception of the object, and how that reception creates or stimulates a certain subject—the subject as receptor/receiver/reader/viewer—then the point of the writer in the equation (what Barthes calls the mythologist) is to delineate the ideology at work each step of the way because, in Barthes’s terms, revolution does not occur. The failure of revolution is the real failure, or the failure of the Real. The arts are, at best, a gesture toward emancipation, but that impetus only exists to end up in art. So that even a “revolution of the word” or a revolution of ways and means within the artform still stops short of eradicating the art world and the history of art. This particular confrontation, compromise and concession has to be acknowledged within the objects, but also within the spectator—as observer, not actant. We are always watching a pageant go by, that’s the nature of the condition. What Barthes points us to is acknowledgment of the degree to which we take the “nature” or naturalness of our condition from the bourgeois world that dominates all critique and tables each intervention. As such, protest is always theater and acting out, unless one sets aside representation and manifests overthrow; that, at times, is the context by which the object is informed, but that gesture becomes encoded into its subsequent reception, into its status as a historic break or defeat.

See Barthes: “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types . . . . So it cannot rest until it has obscured the ceaseless making of the world, fixed this world into an object which can be forever possessed, catalogued its riches, embalmed it, and injected into reality some purifying essence which will stop its transformation, its flight toward other forms of existence. And these riches, thus fixated and frozen, will at least become computable: bourgeois morality will essentially be a weighing operation, the essences will be placed in scales of which bourgeois man will remain the motionless beam. For the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions. Thus, every day and everywhere, man is stopped by myths, referred by them to this motionless prototype which lives in his place, stifles him in the manner of a huge internal parasite, and assigns to his activity the narrow limits within which he is allowed to suffer without upsetting the world: bourgeois pseudophysis is in the fullest sense a prohibition for man against inventing himself. Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. For Nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalized, is nothing but a Usage. And it is this Usage, however lofty, that they must take in hand and transform.”

It’s clear to me, from the above, that for too long I’ve entertained the idea of enumeration, the weighing in the scales—this is more significant than that—for the purpose of creating “the universal order of the hierarchy of possessions”—to create that eternal analogue of my former life, the life I lived within the objects as “worlds” to explore. But I see in Barthes the challenge to objectify the myths of the things themselves, to write as a means to “take in hand and transform the Usage”—where the “usage” is the values gained from the museum, the library, the archive, the collection, the syllabus, the news bulletin, the ad, the prospectus, and the transformation has to come from the twin actions of ideologizing and poeticizing—where history is the autobiography (a life in time) and lyric is the acquired language/taste of a life lived in art.

RE: METRO LACE IV

The fourth part of Metro Lace is where things take a turn toward the more immediate and more personal.  The immediacy comes, in part, from the fact that the Part consists of five different Days, so that each has its particular occasion.  Each—until the fifth Day—is very contained, a short poem, in essence.  And that means there is much less opportunity to roam. The effort begins to write every other day or so, which is broken up by a trip taken to PA, and a return.  It’s the time of year when the semester is breaking up and there are gatherings. The trip is signaled by 5.7, written on an Amtrak to Philadelphia. The decision to register what the days themselves contain makes the poem morph in a new way, at first, but that was not apparent at all on 5.3, when Part IV commences.

That segment—5.3—shows a playfulness with form but, I think, a deepening of content.  Or at least a “return” to Part I, in the sense of describing how I feel without making the particulars too clear.  There’s a spirit animating 5.3 that makes the tone of it hard for me to register.  It’s rueful about something that hasn’t happened.  It’s not the regret over what one has done, but the regret over what one has not done, and probably never will.  I don’t think it’s despairing though.  This is a poem, after all—does anyone actually write a poem of despair?  So, then, though it’s regrettable that something has not occurred, there’s yet the chance that something will occur.

There’s a very definite sense, in IV, that at least some of the regret has to do with “her.”  There are any number of uses of the female pronoun in the entire poem, and it would be foolish to think that they all apply to someone in particular, or to anyone in particular each time (see discussion of eros here).  And yet at times “she” is a definite figure. This gets explored somewhat in 5.13, III, where a long list of impressions of different “hers” flows past like a litany of glimpses.  It could be said that some such denouement is already implied in the opening of Part IV.  If we want to give a name to the main “her” of Part IV, we could call her Lucy, the name used to address a particular “her” at the close of 5.3.

My recollection of writing 5.3 is that I felt the poem might be becoming very elliptical.  That there would be no more distracting its mood with the fun stuff I’ve been mostly doing since Part II.  I was taking my cue from Side A and Side B, both of which indicated that something had passed—call it the semester, if you like.  I would have to be somewhere else, mentally, shortly.  And where would I be if not the past, perhaps settling old scores or something.

But I swerved from that task, as one says, and let 5.5 be a very careful discourse on my mood walking around town.  My impending departure, in a day or two, for a visit to my wife gives the day the clarity of leave-taking and that’s all I’m registering, but with the imagined possibility of a more open-ended escape—without giving too much away, I can say that I’m still thinking of a pursuit.  Imagining as well, it seems, a last minute visit to offset my own departure.  When next we see me—5.7—I’m the one on the train and I’ve become the rather demonstrative voice one overhears while traveling in Business Coach.  This segment is all business and a glance out the window at words printed on the side of a building gains me my eventual title: Metro Lace.

Then comes a gap, as I write nothing while away.  On 5.12 I’m back and simply taking stock of my mood as I resume.  I think the overall burden here is looking for “the charm” that finally gets mentioned in the last line.  That will have to do for a finish, though I have the nagging sense that this Day wanted to go much further afield.  Which does in fact happen on 5.13 where all bets are off.  We’re going to have-at this thing till we get somewhere and get this Part over with.  It’s as if I’m letting go to make up for the poems that didn’t get written while I was out of town.

5.13 begins with a guiding formal principle: find a rhyme for every line ending.  I believe this is still the case, though I haven’t checked. There may have been subsequent revisions that spoiled the effect, but, initially, at least, there was an off-rhyme for each.  The tone of the poem is now taking the long view, something like what surfaced way back in Part II.  Perhaps that’s the default tone of the poem: trying to tell you, dear Reader, what it was like…in those days.  Yet now we’re somewhere closer to the speaker than we were, and in 2. it becomes a bit of a cat-and-mouse game as the “situation” has been lifted from another one of those gatherings that are, it seems, the only charm of these days.

Finally, as 3. begins, we take up “pursuit” through memory: all those glimpses of “her”—where some are deliberately generic and some very specific. What the exact mix is and how many nameable “hers” contribute to the composite, I would never say.  Is glimpsing and telling much different from kissing and telling?  You tell me.  In any case, the saving grace of this unabashed scopophilia, I hope (it’s May in a college town, after all), is the riposte of at least some of the collective “hers” speaking of “him” and his need to make “something” of seeing them like that.  The response is a little hard to follow because the banality of all those glimpses—it can be admitted that “she” does nothing remarkable in any of the glimpses—provokes a sense of having to account for simply being an object of attention.  And how is one to do that, ultimately?  Graciously?  Grudgingly?  And everything in between?

From that we segue into much playfulness, as if to offset the embarrassment of the above with something that either charms or grates.  If you’ve ever amused a child until he or she becomes irritated with the amusement, then you have probably experienced what I’m going for here.  And from that cue—the disappearing listeners—we go somewhere that I still find quite impressive, if I say so myself.

I have to say that to end this Part, I’m going to have to get right up against it.  It’s not so much an exposure or a dropping of pretense.  It’s not my heart on my sleeve, I don’t think, but it’s as near to that as this poem gets.  Each verse paragraph contains a “charm,” so to speak, and what impresses me is that I’m able to say what I mean and not say it, at the same time.  I think that such is the case throughout the poem but here the saying has become more emphatic.  Maybe I’m simply finally claiming the meagerness of my own imagination, but in any case, I definitely come home again.

From “Come take me” to “it smarts” I’m working toward the finish and I can’t seem to get there.  I keep taking new breaths and resuming.  The pursuit now—not meaning to risk comparison with Keats—is being “felt on one’s pulses” as he says.  My heart’s beating as we get to the end of this one, actually fluttering.  I think it’s because we’re back, with a difference, to the “airlifted” moment.  What can be the harm in that, and what can be the nature of the possible and fruitful life to come?

Do you recall something about a “purgatorial chair”?  That's where we are as this Part ends.

METRO LACE 'N' ME

I’ve now recorded each day’s segment for Parts I through III, and am almost to the end of Part IV.  There are two parts after that, which will equal, or almost, the same number of recordings that I’ve already done. So, recording-wise, I’m about half-way through. And page-wise, as a single document, the segment I most recently recorded, IV. May 12, is the halfway mark.

Good time, I guess, to take stock of what reading it aloud for digital recording and playback has shown me. For some odd reason, simply working through the document, even with its divisions clearly marked, hasn’t managed to impress much upon me in the way of structure. I think that’s because when I work through the document I am working, trying to weigh each line to see if I still accept it. When I get to the stopping points I simply recognize them as the place to break. This revising mind doesn’t intrude into the recording because if it did the reading would be terrible.  Whenever it does, I have to do another take. In other words, I have to read the words as though they’re someone else’s and I can’t change a thing. That kind of insistence makes for an interesting experience, I find.

To say something else about that: to have that experience is one reason why I’m recording the readings. I mean, I’ve read the poem aloud to myself plenty of times but there’s still a provisional aspect to such readings. They don’t have to be “pitch perfect.” Are the recordings? Well, not quite, but close. Occasionally, listening to the playback, I feel I’ve botched the enunciation, and I can imagine an official reading in which I assigned parts to different readers. But that would only work if they were actors; the kind of people who can be coached and directed. Otherwise, I would be even less content, I imagine, with how someone else treats the lines. What I’m listening for in playback is hard for me to name, exactly, but I’d call it “the right tension.”

That’s all that drives the poem, I’m realizing as I record it and listen to it. The great discovery in writing the poem was that that “tension” is potentially endless. It simply became the quality of my life and mind at the time. And not in any burdened way. I was living alone at the time. To see my wife, I made a couple visits to her son’s house in PA, where she was convalescing after an accident.  Those visits are very clear to me in breaks in the poem, but they don’t occur till after the semester ends. The poem commences when the semester is almost over but not quite. The end is in sight, and, beyond that, I don’t have any immediate plans. That’s what makes the period of composition so golden. I know I don’t have to do anything except stay “in character,” so to speak. Except for those visits.

I know the catalyst for the day I began—which is to say Part I—was reading a volume of Ashbery.  But which one?  I’m not sure. In fact, at various points, at least up through Part III, Ashbery remained a catalyst, and it would be interesting to me to know if there are traces in what I write that come from the poems I was reading. It seems certain to me that the intonation of certain sections does. What I’m borrowing from Ashbery, then, isn’t imagery or voice, it's tone. But, obviously, that tone gets distorted when I treat it as “mine.” In part because I’m not consciously sure what any Ashbery poem is talking about. So I’m reading them as a direct, unconscious communication. His poem’s voice is talking to me, internally, and I respond in kind. Simple. But I have no idea where that tone is going to take me and what it will make me say. That’s part of the tension I’m talking about. 

Part I is mostly all prologue. It’s taking stock of a situation that makes writing the poem seem “natural.” Something you could easily do. Like anything else you might do that day. But it’s in a defeated tone. It’s almost like a defense mechanism: being as pessimistic as possible so no one can bring you down. It’s not that Ashbery poems ever bring me down, but one does reach a certain saturation point where one says “well, that’s easy for YOU to say, pardner.” At that point you want to shut him up. Just so you can start talking, maybe. And that’s all I’m doing. Introducing my state of mind. Kinda dejected, and if I’m speaking to anyone it’s probably an old friend, someone for whom the details aren’t important—we’ve known each other so long, how could they be—but simply (as Dylan might ask): “how does it feel?” In other words, it’s “confessional” in the sense of revealing how I’m feeling, but without any details specific to my life or events.

Part II, which goes on for some length, is the “fully empowered” part. Now I know I can do this, and I can go wherever I want. That means bringing in absurdist asides and a variety of voices, to have fun. The provocation of Ashbery here becomes more definite. I’m thinking of him in a sort of Proustian way, as this well-to-do aesthete with no end of sophisticated bon mots to shower us with.  I’m trying on roles to play that game, and so this part is less confessional, in the sense of my state of mind, because I’m fully engaged by the task at hand. I’m making an open-ended poem with only one imperative: keep writing till you run out of lines. Or until you get to a “finish.” The day before, April 9, that finish came up pretty clearly. What can you say after “now hush”? So, part of the task on Day Two is to avoid a finish. Just keep going. What becomes evident is that I’ll have to cheat. I’ll take breaks—probably to read more Ashbery—and will have to resume, so this Part will have many breaks. The first occurs with “Breaking the reverie” (which is the start of the second recording on the page). The bit about being air-lifted ends a train of thought but it’s not a big finish. You can follow it after a beat…but with something completely different.

At that point—once I admit a break into the text, a break not caused by a new Day—I’m on a path of discovery. What form will this thing take? Why not a series of separate lines? I like the line in a Mekons song “these lines are all individuals and there’s no such thing as a song.” A poem of lines that could all be beginning lines or ending lines. Most of them are cliché, some are a bit esoteric as quotations. The point is only that they come unbidden, immediately to hand. Now the tension is not staying “in character” but losing character. And that means other characters will come forward.

I suspect that there’s a reading break right before the part that starts with “Silence those polite foghorns.” The voice is something out of a Warner Bros. cartoon—specifically Foghorn Leghorn—and I’m probably thinking of Ashbery’s “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” one of my favorite poems in Houseboat Days. It could be I glanced through that volume—I have it in the Three Books edition. I like the Three Books volume because those are the books Ashbery published when I was first becoming “a poet,” age 18 to 25. And “A Wave” is one of my favorite poems, and that volume—Three Books—I associate with the final year of my time at Princeton because that’s when I first read it. Anyway.

The voices that come in could have gone on for some time, in any number of small segments divided by asterisks. Because at this point there’s no reason to stop, except I’m getting tired, and probably hungry. I know that the part “True, I don’t like the smell of me” comes after a bathroom break. Maybe something about a “transatlantic flight” makes you feel like you have to piss? Or at least I would definitely want to make sure I go before I went, if you know what I mean. In any case, I came back, ready to go on, but then hit a stopping point. The voice that says “A change is coming” knows that I’ve got to change it up and see if there’s water of a different flavor in the well.

So Part III begins, on that same day, with a game change. Now I’m going to write single-page entries, starting with a letter of the alphabet, in sequence. My only constraint is that the first two words of the first line and the first word of the second line have to begin with the letter. This means that every poem begins with alliteration  that “carries over” after the first enjambment or line ending. Simple. Now let’s go.

In some ways I like Part III best, or, put another way, I feel that Part III best justifies the entire project. Someone might ask: well, why not treat it as a stand alone segment? This alphabet thing clearly departs from the rest and so…why is it still Metro Lace? And that’s where the answer to end all questions comes in: It is because I say it is. And here’s why: I would not have done these single-page riffs if I didn’t already know I was in the midst of composing a potentially endless poem.  They would seem too arbitrary to me. Like some kind of homework assignment. But they’re not, for the most excellent reason that they’re part of this whole…a whole that is so formless and open-ended that it can include anything.

It might be true to say that Metro Lace is a “book of poems” like any book of poems: a collection of things written around the same time. And that would be true except for certain built-in reference points: I maintain the dates to keep the poem in sequence, and it’s written over a particular period of time. It can be revised, and has been, but it has to remain in the sequence dictated by that succession of days. That is its modus operandi. And within that context, Part III works, for me, like little musical “solos.” If the rest of the poem is the “score”—the context—Part III is where the instrumentalist steps up and shows what he can do for however many bars he’s got. As analogy it doesn’t quite work because we don’t move from the solo back to the song. We have a series of 26 solos. And there are some gaps, in terms of days with no composition, because now I have to be “ready” to write to a certain letter. Where I stop a Day is still determined by hitting a “finish” (I like best the finish on the first day…I was hot on April 10!), but when I resume I’ve got to do the next letter. That made me keep writing but it also started to irk me because it was too “premeditated.” In some cases, I had to think ahead to what words would meet the alphabetical requirement, which is why “x” is “‘xylophone, x-ray of,’ of course.” Because what else could it be? I should mention here that one of my favorite books in grade school—we didn’t have a copy, so I always had to take it out of the library when I needed it—was Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra. I guess you could say I’ve always had an antagonistic relationship to the alphabet.

When I composed the sentences at the end of “z”—the abcedarian sentences—as prose, I thought that maybe I would switch to prose poems for the next Part. I was consciously at the point of “big finish” and “recommence”—as I’m sure I chose to end Part III on Walpurgis (April 30) and commence the next part on May Day. But May Day is its own poem in a way. It’s not part of any Part. It’s a Side A and a Side B, that I’m pretty sure was written after reading some of the Ashbery books that I had never read before—the three I read during this project that fit that bill are And the Stars Were Shining, Wakefulness, and Your Name Here. I think of Wakefulness as being the one that stimulated me most, but I haven’t gone back to look.

Side A is deliberately of its moment. Already some of that was beginning to happen in Part III, where discrete glimpses of something “real” (something not just in my own mind) was finding its way onto the page—like references to the Housatonic and the bridge over it, or to streets in New Haven—but mostly things are given a distortion that kept “me” out of it. With Side A and Side B, that changes.  Having passed through the alphabet, I was now “closer to home,” so to speak. Which is a way of saying that memory would start to be involved more directly. In Side A, there’s a memory of Dublin, and of the Highline in New York (a later addition, I think), and a reference, current in first composition, to watching shows in the Iseman Theatre at Yale, and in Side B, there’s a memory of being in Chicago in 2008. Memory is its own context, we can say, and that means the poem (the “reverie”) is being violated by actual events and places. It’s been happening all along—the close of Part I recalls a specific theatrical event I attended (but I think that came-in as a revision, once such things became admissible in the later going)—but now I have the sense that I might be using the poem for—to use David Byrne’s phrase—“catching up with myself.”

Parts IV, V, and VI will constitute the kind of catching up that has been led to by Parts I, II, and III. 

ECCE POEM

“To communicate a state, an inward tension of pathos, by means of signs, including the tempo of these signs—that is the meaning of every style; and considering that the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large in my case, I have many stylistic possibilities—the most multifarious art of style that has ever been at the disposal of one man.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” 4.

Early in my teen reading Nietzsche set down a tough act to follow.  Not only for the incandescent jolt of his thought, a way of shaking up a lot of dust and sending the shadows for cover, but for the style of his writing, a way of making words dance and jeer and sing and flout every sort of constraint.  For Nietzsche, everything he meant seriously came under the heading of the Dionysian.  This isn’t a hedonism because one of its staples is, as he just said, “an inward tension of pathos,” where pathos is nothing less than suffering from the conditions of existence, from the given that we all must deal with.  Did Nietzsche have a remedy for such suffering?  No, except to exhort anyone who would keep company with him to stop whining about it!  To become “multifarious” in order to avoid being restricted to one order of “being.”

It should be said that what Nietzsche chose to see as “decadent”—as not serving life or the spirit or anything of much use—is a long list of things that most intellectuals pay lip service to, at one level or another.  As he says in Ecce Homo, his amazing self-evaluation, his “seeing morality itself as a symptom of decadence is an innovation and a singularity of the first rank in the history of knowledge.”  Or: “becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept of being—all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date.”  Or: “I consider dialectic as a symptom of decadence; for example in the most famous case, the case of Socrates.”  And, having named his nemesis from the ancient world, there’s only left his nemesis from the Christian world: the God of St. Paul: “God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers—at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: thou shall not think!”

All this is typical Nietzschean rhetoric, and the fact that he uses terms such as “decadent” and “indelicate” shows that, to a large extent, what he is talking about is a matter of taste.  There is always an aesthetic of the spirit at work in Nietzsche, and that’s what attracted me to him early on.  Repudiating the Christian viewpoint of my first teachers had its part in the initial glee, but that was soon superseded by the fact that, if an artist should need a philosophy in order to make art (blessed is she who doesn’t), Nietzsche was one of the foremost for that, if only because the “becoming” he speaks of is what one engages in the making of art for—maybe also (I would have it) the reason one interacts with art at all.  In other words, if art isn’t adding something to one’s becoming, it’s wasting your time, and if the art you’re making isn’t moving beyond what you already did, then … why bother?

The parts about morality and dialectic and God all to some extent speak a 19th-century language one would like to think we could do away with.  The sad fact that that’s not so is what makes me still think about Nietzsche from time to time.  In America, “God talk” is at its worst in my lifetime, and the bolstering of self-aggrandizing arguments by means of “moral” claims—while I’ve never known that not to be standard procedure—seems even more nakedly the struggle of one will to power against another that Nietzsche always insisted it was.  He was fond of the imagery of emasculation, the sense that Christianity and pious moralism were, inevitably, a way of cutting off a man’s balls (though he never said it that way), and there’s always some degree of truth to that.  He saw Christian morality as “old woman’s morality” for that reason, pointing at the demographic which truly had no use for virile masculine members.  But the same kind of irony I’m treating his terms with is very much of the essence of his irony as well.  He was no worshipper of the phallus as the staff of power, after all.  But he often used its claim to a kind of visceral essentialism as basic to how the systems of power that men have developed for themselves and for women have been understood.

Art was about power of a different kind.  And the place where I was always a bit skeptical about Nietzsche’s claims came in there.  Much of what he would call “decadent” might in fact play its part in a work of art, might in fact contribute—for the beholder—that pathos that, if not Dionysian, was at least akin to its release from convention.  Which might just be a way of saying that Nietzsche never had to confront modernism, or cinema, or rock music. 

But when I read today those lines about style, I heard Nietzsche opening a door for Metro Lace to walk through.  I won’t say that I am “multifarious” or that “the multiplicity of inward states is exceptionally large in my case,” but that, if that poem does anything, it makes manifest many inward states in a tension of tempo and signs.  Which is to say that pathos is the rhythm, the feeling, while the signs—the words themselves—are the melody and the lyrics, or more properly, the voice.  What interests me in that formulation is that such a poem is not about a topic nor a reaction to what has been said or done elsewhere.  It’s an extension of an inner state.  Which is why it’s not something I can do “at will,” but only when seized by that particular pathos that speaks, that needs a voice.

Sometimes I wonder if such articulation is in itself a betrayal.  I mean a) my talking about the poem in that way betrays its intentions, but more to the point, b) the poem itself is a betrayal of something best left unsaid.  I believe at some level I’ve always taken that to be the case.  The poem comes from an effort to take “someone” into “someone else’s” confidence.  I might like to think that it “speaks for” someone other than me, but, if it does, it only does so to the extent that the speaker isn’t me.  I often don’t know who it is, only that it’s a voice that wants to interact with that inward tension, to supply signs that might suffice.

The over-riding contribution that comes from me, from my own intelligence and preferences, is a skepticism about the entire procedure.  And so there is a further tension I would call the tension of ethos, which is to say, a struggle about the “value”—as truth, as judgment, as precision and accuracy—of the “testimony” of the signs.  Do they say what should be said? Can they provide images that do what they should do?  And a further tension is that of eros.  All lyric poetry, for me, is love poetry.  Traditionally, one speaks of “a muse,” saying that this figure for one’s desires and unfulfilled longings dictates what one must say to woo her, to make her lend ear, to bring her to the table or bed or wherever one hopes to meet her halfway.  In Metro Lace there are a lot of figures for such encounters, and the terms by which eros enters into the discourse concern beauty and pleasure.  Who wouldn’t want to show his lover a good time?

These tensions—pathos, ethos, eros—have a further fellow traveler in the search for signs that will suffice.  It’s the dimension that Nietzsche liked to call “the timely.”  Bear in mind that Nietzsche was one who saw “the ‘historical sense’” as a “typical symptom of decay,” “a disease.”  And yet.  There is a strange process by which one’s context, one’s temporal and spatial surroundings, become grist for the mill.  They not only furnish signs—the way people speak in one’s own time and place and the things they speak of—but they furnish an attitude that one is always at pains to engage with, if only to ignore it.  One’s audience, in other words, is an attitude toward speech—whether in poems or other texts—and this “timely” sense is never out of earshot, so to speak.  If I had to be candid about it, I would probably say that a deliberate stretching of such context—by means of diction and the detritus of speech and reading—is what drives the mechanism that makes the poem.

Or rather: a state of pathos—suffering from time itself—sets up a rhythm and what “completes” or “answers” that rhythm is a string of signs that, with whatever blend of ethos (truth value) and eros (desire for beauty), try to trip the light fantastic out on the edge of intelligibility, to prove (“the finding of a satisfaction,” as Stevens says) that language, no matter how debased or disused or derivative, can find resources to make its presence felt … for the moment.

And it’s that momentary aspect of the whole thing that makes me look askance at its ultimate worth.  If I “feel better” for having said “that” on “that occasion,” what merit does reading that statement have at some other moment, or in some other mind—even if only my own mind at another time?

On three to four occasions, Metro Lace has endured my doubts: the original writing of it in 2010, the typing of it into a document, the revisiting/revising of it in 2011, and the revising and posting of it in 2013.  In changing any of its signs, the decision usually goes in the direction of “timeliness”—finding a way of putting into words something that concerns me at that time.  The more obscure aspects of the poem were shaped by a conversion factor—inner state to articulation—that eludes my conscious choice.  Which is to say that the “rightness” of a sequence or phrase has to be left to some factor of pleasure that is peculiar to me and my ear and my tongue when I read the words.

All-in-all, I suppose, poetry for me is simply a manner of speaking, with such “tensions” and “constraints” as one faces whenever one writes, but made more acute by the lack of a definite topic, theme, or purpose.  That makes a poem like Metro Lace utterly spurious and utterly serious, for it has no measure for success or failure other than some nebulous sense of pleasure and necessity—the need “to communicate a state,” to find “a style” acceptable to the pressures of the occasion.