I stand on my back deck staring at fallen leaves, listening, building a sense of place, attending to sights and sounds generated by neighboring beings: birds, squirrels, planes, trees, automobiles. A small bird lands beside me and sings to me, dancing in rapid increments. It pecks, it eats, it leaps, flitting to and fro. Capitalism encloses us in its habitus, its time-discipline, its states and estates. Yet there in its borders and interstices, in its gutters and margins, fugitive life proceeds apace. Imaginary bagpipes drone betwixt dueling leafblowers. A sound blown in honor of comrades who died 40 years ago today in the Greensboro Massacre. Mysterious books call out to me, rise off shelves and land in my hands, ready to be read. By these means, I happen upon The Knee of Listening by Franklin Jones, aka Da Free John, sensing immediately in his use of language evidence of a fellow head. Jones began graduate study in English at Stanford University in 1961. He must have been part of Ken Kesey’s cohort. At the very least he volunteered as a subject in the same drug experiments as Kesey, MK-Ultra experiments run out of the Veterans Administration hospital in the early 1960s.
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Saturday November 2, 2019
Autumn colors, seasonal regalia. The day’s peaks include cat sightings, walks, the cries of squirrels. Upon stepping outdoors in the a.m., I spy in my front lawn a cluster of wild mushrooms, causing me later in the day to see the new documentary Fantastic Fungi at the local cinema. As if the thought had been “planted.” Karma earned from the university of life.
Friday November 1, 2019
I shift rooms, staring at books, feeling indecisive. Trick or treaters come to the door. I take this as a sign. Time to stand outdoors drinking whiskey cider from a solo cup, chatting with neighbors. Afterwards I return home and cue up It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Trippy, scary stuff. Poor Linus, persecuted by others for his scribblings regarding “religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.” The others disguise themselves with masks and sheets, whereas Linus prefers sincerity.
Thursday October 31, 2019
Lionel Hampton’s Golden Vibes dances through me, my skin resonating like keys beneath Hampton’s mallets. During Tuesday’s performance, percussionist Sandy Blocker stood from his drums and played a balafon. Meanwhile I got bills to pay, roles to play, life pregnant with life. In the Renaissance occult imagination studied by Frances A. Yates, an “umbra” is a shadow formed by the light of the divine mind — light we can only ever seek “through its shadows, vestiges, seals” (The Art of Memory, p. 268). One of these days, I tell myself, I should track down the Nock-Festugière edition of the Corpus Hermeticum along with Norman O. Brown’s book Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. I sit in a dark room for a few moments, in a hat and a cape, observing shadows, thinking about stars and moons, ancient debates between Egyptian and Greek philosophers arising again from memory, debates of great consequence, much of it still hidden. For Renaissance occultists like Alexander Dicson, the roots of the art of memory lie in ancient Egypt, not ancient Greece. “And if it is separated from Egypt,” he writes, “it can effect nothing” (as quoted in Yates 272).
Wednesday October 30, 2019
Sympathy and sympathetic identification. “Sensitivity.” Being-with, being-toward, relating. Chip to Grudge: Lay Off. And suddenly I’m in the presence of a bunch of smart, wise musicians, and beside me a brilliant mythmaker-griot, all of us conversing about ouds and masonic lodges and memory palaces; binary code drum patterns used to initiate uploads and downloads between orishas and human beings; the Order of the Eastern Star. Nate and Sandy recommend Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Dorian and Vattel note the ideas of Pythagoras. I feel at times like I’ve been inducted into a society of secret-sharers, Mackey’s Mystic Horn Society made real. With his cane, I realize, Mackey reminds me a bit of Papa Legba.
Tuesday October 29, 2019
A kid interrupts my wondering about my relationship to Language Poetry. Leaning over a low fence as I sweep leaves from my back deck, he hails me with a “Working hard or hardly working?” or some such commodified, scripted banter, then tries to sell me an alternative media provider. My response is “No thanks, capitalist roleplayer. You bore me,” thus in no uncertain terms sending him on his way. Back to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Why have I never taught any of that material, venturing only so far as poets with whom they conversed? Ginsberg, Olson, Mackey, et al. I suppose I’ve lacked courage — though opportunities to do so also never materialized, really, until this past year or so. Perhaps it just felt a bit too rarefied. Work that makes demands, with comparatively little gain. When does one have time enough to keep up with contemporary poetry? Apparently I did, if only for a brief moment, during my first years out of college, during my stint as a “text editor.” Back when I used to sit at a computer all day listening to early recordings from PennSound and the Kelly Writers House.
Monday October 28, 2019
I’m having lunch this week with the poet Nathaniel Mackey. Excited by the thought of our conversation, I play Kenny Dorham’s “Blue Bossa” and begin Mackey’s Blue Fasa (2015).
Words going as music goes. Mackey is writing two intertwined, ongoing serial poems, both mythologically conceived. I’ve been invited, in other words, to share a meal with one of the greatest and most accomplished of living poets, a Winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. I’ve read some of the early sections of the first of Mackey’s serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou. I haven’t yet explored the second, a work called Mu. In the preface to Blue Fasa, Mackey writes, “the long song, the long poem, particularly the serial poem, culls and extends a field of sympathetic resonances, lingering while moving on by way of recursiveness and feeling-with. To borrow a phrase from Rahsaan Roland Kirk (whose album Boogie-Woogie String Along for Real also pertains), it wants to be a vibration society. This has been and continues to be the practice of Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu” (xi). Dwelling upon Mackey’s words, I decide to build a playlist. Trance-inducing chants. “To pull the song,” Mackey says, “is to be taken over by it…to be taken over and taken afar” (xiii).
Sunday October 27, 2019
From there the cameras lead us, unless we use language otherwise. Don’t just aim for the middle of the box. See inside it. Aim for somewhere beyond it. A utopian poetics found in old books, old journals, old trance-scripts. “The gift is to the giver,” noted Whitman, “and comes back most to him — it cannot fail.” “In circling twice in this way,” adds Lewis Hyde, “the gift itself increases from bread to the water of life, from carnal food to spiritual food. At which point the circle expands” (The Gift, p. 11). In an anonymous scrap heap of Things, our lives are finally joined.
Saturday October 26, 2019
Snoop Dogg plays a DJ character in the new Netflix flick Dolemite Is My Name. A man named Rico enters the record store, (“yo, for real”), introduces himself as “A Repository of African-American Folklore.” He tells tall tales, plays the Signifying Monkey. From there the cameras lead us to the Dunbar Hotel. Junkies and wine. “Rhyming,” “down-and-dirty,” “rat-soup-eating.” Rudy Ray Moore invented a character both old and new. The Godfather of Rap. Put some swing on it. Formulated a critique and used it. Declared showtime, made an album. Called it “I ain’t lying: a comedy record.” A live recording. Storytelling veers from “write what one knows” to “welcome others to the Dolemite world of nightlife, streets, and clubs.” Behold: blaxploitation squared. The Dunbar Hotel remade as a movie set. Some of us absorb reality, a character says, while the rest of us act it and reflect it: a cine-magical Metafiction. Stereotypes, myths. Social fictions with consequences. Plus kung-fu armies, and funny as hell.
Friday October 25, 2019
Students and I discussed Allen Ginsberg’s “America” today. What if instead we had taken the poem’s use of apostrophe — America addressed as though it were a person — and performed it together as a class? What might we have said to one another? Would any of us have dared to be as candid as Ginsberg?
Trance-Scripts 