Caballero Solo

The homosexual young men and the love-mad girls,
and the long widows who suffer form a delirious inability to sleep,
and the young wives who have been pregnant for thirty hours,
and the hoarse cats that cross my garden in the dark,
these, like a necklace of throbbing sexual oysters,
surround my solitary house,
like enemies set up against my soul,
like members of a conspiracy dressed in sleeping clothes
who give each other as passwords long and profound kisses.

The shining summer leads out the lovers in low-spirited regiments that are all alike
made up of fat and thin and cheerful and sullen pairs;
under the elegant coconut palms, near the sea and the moon,
there is a steady movement of trousers and petticoats,
and a hum from the stroking of silk stockings,
and women’s breasts sparkling like eyes.

The small-time employee, after many things,
after the boredom of the week, and the novels read in bed at night,
has once and for all seduced the woman next door
and now he escorts her to the miserable movies,
where the heroes are either colts or passionate princes,
and he strokes her leg sheathed in their sweet down
with his warm and damp hands that smell of cigarettes.

The evenings of the woman-chaser and the nights of the husbands
come together like two bed-sheets and bury me.
and the hours after lunch, when the young male students
and the young women students, and the priests are masturbating,
and the animals are riding each other frankly,
and the bees have an odor of blood, and the flies buzz in anger,
and cousins plan strange games with their girl-cousins,
and doctors look with rage at the husband of the young patient,
and the morning hours, when the professor, as if absentminded
performs his marital duty, and has breakfast,
and still more, the adulterers, who love each other with true love
of beds high and huge as ocean liners,
this immense forest, entangled and breathing,
hedges me around firmly on all sides forever
with huge black flowers like mouths and rows of teeth
and black roots that look like fingernails and shoes.

Fine and dandy: but, so far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality. If poetry were anything — like dropping an atombomb — which everyone did, anyone could become a poet merely by doing the necessary anything; whatever that anything might or might not entail. But (as it happens) poetry is being, not doing. If you wish to follow, even at a distance, the poet’s calling (and here, as always, I speak from my own totally biased and entirely personal point of view) you’ve got to come out of the measurable doing universe into the immeasurable house of being. But if poetry is your goal, you’ve got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about selfstyled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum an remember one thing only: that it’s you — nobody else — who determine your destinity and decide your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else. Toms can be Dicks and Dicks can be Harrys, but none of them can ever be you. There’s the artist’s responsibility; and the most awful on earth. If you can take it, take it — and be. If you can’t, cheer up and go about other people’s business; and do (or undo) till you drop.

The above is excerpted from e.e. cummings’ coruscating effort in lightness and introspection, i: six nonlectures. Pay inattention to the title, for cummings is as much a nonlecturer as he is a nonpoet; he maneuvers analogous innovation and beauty into all his speaking, from portraits of his parents and himself their son, to acclamations of his ignorance (which is never appearing), and one of the most magnanimous defenses of poetry I’ve yet read.

i: six nonlectures

“Sometimes I look about me with a feeling of complete dismay. In the confusion that afflicts the world today I see disrespect for the values of life. Each second we live in a new and unique moment in the universe, one that has never been before and will never be again – and what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four and that Paris is the capital of France. When will we also teach them what they are? We should say to each of them, do you know what you are? You’re a marvel, you’re unique, in all of the world there is no other child exactly like you. In the millions of years that have past there has never been another child like you. Look at your body, your legs, your arms, your cunning fingers, the way they move – you may become a Shakespeare or Michael Angelo or Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel and when you grow up can you then harm another, who is like you, a marvel? You must work; we all must work to make this world worthy of its children. What extraordinary changes and advances I have witnessed in my lifetime. What amazing progress in science, industry, the exploration of space and yet, hunger, racial oppression and tyranny still torment the world. We continue to act like barbarians. Like savages we fear our neighbors on this earth, arm against them and they against us. I deplore to have lived at a time when man’s law is to kill. The love of one’s country is a natural thing, but why should love stop at the border? Our family is one; each of us has a duty to his brothers. We are all leaves of a tree, and the tree is humanity.”

- Pablo Casals

Taken from Glenn Gould’s, “Casals: A portrait for radio“, Albert Khan speaking this excerpt in the interview can be found here.

“Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada;
a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada;
knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: Dada;
abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: Dada;
of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: Dada;
every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: Dada;
abolition of memory: Dada;
abolition of archaeology: Dada;
abolition of prophets: Dada;
abolition of the future: Dada;
absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: Dada.”

Taken from Jaap’s bibliography which appears on his wonderful website, “Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in Woerden, Holland) is a self-taught composer, performer and poet. He went to university for mathematics and musicology but did not finish those studies. In the late 1970s he took up saxophone and started to compose music. A few years later he discovered his potential as a vocal performer, at first in reciting poetry and later on in improvisations and his own compositions. For almost two decades the voice was his main means for the discovery and development of new sounds”.

This video is a performance of Kurt Scwhitters‘ Ursonata, which is a 20th century concrete poem. The text which appears on screen is a program which detects syllables in real time, developed by visual and phonetic-computer artist, Gavin Levin.

Ursonate is fascinating. Through the use of small motif and mood-changes, a series of emotions expressed through invented linguistic abstractions becomes neat and mesmerizing. I’ve linked an excerpt at the bottom of the post, but I urge you to please view the work in its entire twenty minutes, here.

Ursonography (Excerpts), Jaap Blonk & Golan Levin, 2005 from Golan Levin on Vimeo.

“The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense, and rational dissoluteness of all the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, to only keep their quintessences. Inexpressible torture where he needs all the faith, all the superhuman strength, where he becomes, above all others, the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed, – and the supreme Savant! – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anyone else! He reaches the unknown, and when, terrified, he ends up by losing the meaning of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die of his bound through the unheard-of and countless things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other has succumbed.”

The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
until I go there,
but the black-hatted undertaker

who, passing, saw my heart beating in the grass,
is also going there. Hi, I tell him,
a great squall in the Pacific blew a dead poet
out of the water,

Crowds depart daily to see it, and return
with grimaces and incomprehension;
if its limbs twitched in the air
they would sit at its feet
peeling their oranges.

And turning over I embrace like a lover
the trunk of a tree, one of those
for whom the lightning was too much
and grew a brillant
hunchback with a crown of leaves.

The ailments escaped from the labels
of medicine bottles and all fled to the wind;
I’ve seen myself lately in the eyes
of old women,
spent streams mourning my manhood,

in whose old pupils the sun became
a bloodsmear on broad catalpa leaves
and hanging from ancient twigs,
my murdered selves
sparked the air like muted collisions

of fruit. A black dog howls down my blood,
a black dog with yellow eyes;
he too by someone’s inadvertence
saw the bloodsmear
on the broad catalpa leaves.

But the furies clear a path for me to the worm
who sang for an hour in the throat of a robin,
and misled by the cries of young boys
I am again
a breathless swimmer in that cold green element.

Likely, you’ve heard of Grizzly Bear. You may even have very interesting opinions about which album or set of unreleased revisions or remixes you prefer. Maybe you know exactly how much to swoon when you hear the key change in the middle of Central and Remote. You may even despise their music, denying their attempts to move you by not trying too hard. Regardless of where your opinions lie, recently, Grizzly Bear in combination with some very talented visual artists and directors, have created some incredible music videos.

If Two Weeks is too catchy for you, give the video a shot. It’s confusion and pleasure wrapped around a glossy piano riff and not-too-complex-but-not-too-simple vocal harmonies. The second video, “Shift,” is an acoustic revamp performed in the bathroom of a Parisian hotel. The song originally appears on their 2004 release, Horn of Plenty, recorded and produced by La Blogotheque. The last video of three, “Ready, Able,” is off of Veckatimest, alongside Two Weeks. The claymation work is, as I interpret it, a homage to Frank Zappa’s use of Bruce Bickford in his own movie, Baby Snakes.

I am not sure if anyone knows if music videos are still relevant, but I don’t think that matters. While Shift is certainly artistically filmed, it’s a real-capture of their performance, unity and sensitivity as a group. The other two, certainly music videos, fall equally into the categories of music and visual art. They produce a sensation in me as a viewer which is distinct and different, and not to be measured against the sensation evoked in me while acting as a listener.

Have pity on a girl, perdurable, playful,
And delicate as a foal, dutiful, available,
Who is waiting on a bed in a room in the afternoon for God
His Majesty is on his way, who long ago has died.
She is a victim in the kingdom, and is proud.
Have pity on me a thousand years from now when we meet.
Open the mummy case of this text respectfully.
You find no one inside.

– Frederick Seidel, from The Death of the Shah

Open the dust jacket of Frederick Seidel’s latest collection (Poems 1959-2009) and you’re presented with critic Adam Kirsch’s declaration, “[Frederick Seidel is] the best American poet writing today.” Seidel is what you can call a poet of the contemporary. While he has been writing for an incredibly long time, his popularity is probably at its height. Undergraduates everywhere seem to be picking up his books. In fact, it’s the only  book of contemporary poetry that I have stumbled upon when anxiously going over a new acquaintance’s poetry shelf. This has happened twice. It is astounding.

Historically speaking, Seidel can be linked to Lowell, Eliot and Whitman. And he very much is a traditional poet, a formalist. He cares about detail. He cares about structure.

In talking about the actual poetics of Seidel, there’s a reason I haven’t written about him on LADP. I’ve spent a lot of time writing academically about the man, but colloquially, he’s a tough cookie:

I oink when I fuck but have feelings and wings.
Pigs can fly.

– from Song for Cole Porter

Without a doubt, he is one of my favourite poets. Seidel is a type of dark Whitman; he is political, he is solipsistic, he is charming. But while Whitman’s controversy has worn out, Seidel’s exceeds. Reflecting America, like Whitman, Seidel embraces the role of poet as cultural confluence; Late Capitalist America is Frederick Seidel. He is Whitman without Lincoln; he is the poet, without a hero:

They were our gods working all night
To make Achilles’ beard fall out and prop up
The House of Priam, who by just pointing sent
A shark fin gliding down a corridor,
Almost transparent, like a watermark.

– from Our Gods

When listening to the reading that I have attached, remember one thing: Seidel is not to be written off for his shameless and depraved obscenity. His obscenity is good for poetry. Movies such as Paul Anderson’s There Will Be Blood or Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds share Seidel’s approach in their extreme amplification of immoral or traumatic events as means of social commentary. It seems to me to be a characteristically postmodern phenomena that our most shocking and morally bankrupt artistic compositions really are our most compelling and socially progressive.

Following no doubt a slightly different line than the others,
Seeking sexual pleasure above all else,
Despairing of art and of life,
Seeking protection from death by seeking it
On a racebike, finding release and belief on two wheels,

– from The Death of the Shah

Attached is a fantastic reading by the poet himself:
The New York Review of Books, Frederick Seidel Reading

Roger Miller has such a way of singing. If you’re quick, you’ll notice it was he who played the Rooster, wrote and recorded the soundtrack for Disney’s Robin Hood. A movie I remember for the music – I still well up during Not in Nottingham. Little Green Apples has quickly become one of my favorite songs. A member of individual songs that have their own separate meaning, regardless of genre, mood, or style – it’s Written by Bobby Russell, and rearranged by Roger Miller, featured on his record A Tender Look At Love

And I wake up in the morning with my hair down in my eyes and she says hi
And I stumble to the breakfast table while the kids are going off to school, goodbye.
And she reaches out and takes my hand and squeezes it and says how you feeling hon?
And I look across at smiling lips that warm my heart, and see my morning sun.

And if that’s not loving me, then all I’ve got to say,
God didn’t make the little green apples, and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summer time.
And there’s no such thing as Dr. Seuss or Disneyland and mother goose, no nursery rhymes.
God didn’t make the little green apples, and it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summer time.
And when myself is feeling low, I think about her face and go and ease my mind.

Sometimes I call her up, at home, knowing she’s busy.
And ask her if she can get away, meet me and maybe we can grab a bite to eat.
And she drops what she’s doing and she hurries down to meet me, and i’m always late.
But she sits waiting patiently, and smiles when she first sees me, because she’s made that way.

And if that ain’t loving me, then all I’ve got to say,
God didn’t make the little green apples, and it don’t snow in Minneapolis when the winter comes.
And there’s no such thing as make-believe, puppy dogs or autumn leaves, no bb guns.
God didn’t make the little green apples, and it don’t snow in Minneapolis when the winter com

Roger Miller – Little Green Apples