Zinzin

Poetry

Words have no size: the corny magic of Ed Ruscha

Another Hollywood Dream Bubble Popped, Ave. Of Disgust, Baby Jet, Bliss Bucket, Bloated Empire, Dirty Baby, Easy Weepers, Fat Boy, Fly-Proof, Guacamole Airlines, Heavy Industry, Hot Rip Stop, Ice At Nice Price, It’s Only Vanishing Cream, Japan Is America, Lisp, Molten Polyester, Nothing And Everything, Pay Nothing Until April, Porch Crop, Smells Like Back Of Old Hot Radio, Public Stoning, Street Greed, Texas Hairspray, The Act Of Letting A Person Into Your Home, The Ancients Stole All Our Great Ideas, Tool And Die, Vital To The Core, Wall Rockets, Wazza Problm?, Whiz Kids, The End, are but a few of Ed Ruscha’s word paintings that have inspired me over the years.

And if you needed yet another reason to visit Omaha this spring, consider this: “Word/Play: Prints, Photographs, and Paintings by Ed Ruscha” is on view at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, through May 6, 2018.

Lou Reed – Perfect Day (Later w/Jools Holland, 2003)

Here’s to the late great Lou Reed (March 2, 1942 – October 27, 2013), a true American original, seen and heard above on the BBC Two show, “Later… with Jools Holland,” from 2003. Who could ever replace him? Who will give us the next “perfect day”?

Here’s another version: Lou Reed and Elvis Costello performing “Perfect Day,” sometime around 2008-2010(?):

Brion Gysin’s Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success

1966_Antony Balch

“Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You’ll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It’s not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up.”

~Brion Gysin, “Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success.”

Here is a link to a short film from 1966 titled The Cut-Ups by Antony Balch which is archived on the Gysin website. The screenplay was written by William S. Burroughs and the film features both Burroughs and Gysin.

What do Gertrude Stein and JAY Z have in common? Picasso, baby.

Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923). The artists gets artisted upon. Upon the artist. Visited by she who by her by she who by words visits upon. She who by words. Artisted upon visit upon by words she who by words unpaints his paint.

If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.
If Napoleon if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon. Would he like it if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him if Napoleon if Napoleon if I told him. If I told him would he like it would he like it if I told him.
Now.
Not now.
And now.
Now.
Exactly as as kings.
Feeling full for it.
Exactitude as kings.
So to beseech you as full as for it.
Exactly or as kings.
Shutters shut and open so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so and so and also.
Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance, exactly and resemblance. For this is so. Because.
Now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all, now actively repeat at all.
Have hold and hear, actively repeat at all.
I judge judge.
As a resemblance to him.
Who comes first. Napoleon the first.
Who comes too coming coming too, who goes there, as they go they share, who shares all, all is as all as as yet or as yet.
Now to date now to date. Now and now and date and the date.
Who came first Napoleon at first. Who came first Napoleon the first. Who came first, Napoleon first.
Presently.
Exactly do they do.
First exactly.
Exactly do they do too.
First exactly.
And first exactly.
Exactly do they do.
And first exactly and exactly.
And do they do.
At first exactly and First exactly and do they do.
The first exactly.
And do they do.
The first exactly.
At first exactly.
First as exactly.
At first as exactly.
Presently.
As presently.
As as presently.
He he he he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he and as he is and he and he and and he and he.
Can curls rob can curls quote, quotable.
As presently.
As exactitude.
As trains.
Has trains.
Has trains.
As trains.
As trains.
Presently.
Proportions.
Presently.
As proportions as presently.
Father and farther.
Was the king or room.
Farther and whether.
Was there was there was there what was there was there what was there was there there was there.
Whether and in there.
As even say so.
One.
I land.Two.
I land.
Three.
The land.
Three.
The land.
Three.
The land.
Two.
I land.
Two.
I land.
One.
I land.
Two.
I land.
As a so.
They cannot.
A note.
They cannot.
A float.
They cannot.
They dote.
They cannot.
They as denote.
Miracles play.
Play fairly.
Play fairly well.
A well.
As well.
As or as presently.
Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

And here is the promo video of JAY Z,’s “Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film”:

…Eventually the pendulum swings
Don’t forget America this how you made me
Come through with the ‘Ye mask on
Spray everything like SAMO, I won’t scratch the Lambo
What’s it gon take for me to go
For you to see, I’m the modern day Pablo, Picasso baby

“Picasso Baby” is from JAY Z’s new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, and “Modern day Pablo” or not, it has a great cover design:

JAY Z - Magna Carta Holy Grail - cover

The sculpture shown on the cover is from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which recently texted JAY Z’s source: Alpheus and Arethusa by Battista di Domenico Lorenzi (Italian, ca. 1527/28–1594):

Alpheus and Arethusa, by Battista di Domenico Lorenzi (detail)

Notes the Met’s page for this sculpture:

In Roman mythology the river god Alpheus pursued the nymph Arethusa until Diana changed her into a fountain. This group was carved to go above a fountain in the villa Il Paradiso at Pian di Ripoli, near Florence, which belonged to Alamanno Bandini, Knight of Malta.

Who knows? Maybe this is JAY Z and his muse, Beyoncé, many many lifetimes ago. Here is the full, nearly life-size sculpture:

Alpheus and Arethusa, by Battista di Domenico Lorenzi

Wind on a willow: from Primrose to Primrose Hill

Frank Auerbach - Primrose Hill
Frank Auerbach, “Primrose Hill,” oil paint on board, 1967-8. Collection: Tate, London.

Though they likely never met, British painter Frank Auerbach (b.1931)  and American poet William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)  are seen here walking the primrose path together up and around Primrose Hill.

Primrose
By William Carlos Williams

Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow!
It is not a color.
It is summer!
It is the wind on a willow,
the lap of waves, the shadow
under a bush, a bird, a bluebird,
three herons, a dead hawk
rotting on a pole–
Clear yellow!
It is a piece of blue paper
in the grass or a threecluster of
green walnuts swaying, children
playing croquet or one boy
fishing, a man
swinging his pink fists
as he walks–
It is ladysthumb, forget-me-nots
in the ditch, moss under
the flange of the carrail, the
wavy lines in split rock, a
great oaktree–
It is a disinclination to be
five red petals or a rose, it is
a cluster of birdsbreast flowers
on a red stem six feet high,
four open yellow petals
above sepals curled
backward into reverse spikes–
Tufts of purple grass spot the
green meadow and clouds the sky.

Escudero Etchebaster Solidad Casals: Style, by Marianne Moore

This morning serendipity caused me to trip over and into this wonderful poem by the great American modernist poet Marianne Moore, “Style” (c. 1956). Revel in the language and the waltz of words. Revel, I say. Revel too in the names of Moore’s characters and allusions, some of which Ms. Moore elaborated upon in end-notes to her poem; I’ve added my own explicatory revelations and links at the bottom of this post.

Follow the plumbline past the tilted hat…

STYLE

revives in Escudero’s constant of the plumbline,
axis of the hairfine moon–his counter-camber of the skater.
No more fanatical adjuster
of the tilted hat
than Escudero; of tempos others can’t combine.
And we — besides evolving
the classic silhouette, Dick Button whittled slender–

have an Iberian-American champion yet,
the deadly Etchebaster. Entranced, were you not, by Soledad?
black-clad solitude that is not sad;
like a letter from
Casals; or perhaps say literal alphabet
S soundholes in a ‘cello
set contradictorily; or should we call her

la lagarta? or bamboos with fireflies a-glitter;
or glassy lake and the whorls which a vertical stroke brought about,
of the paddle half-turned coming out.
As if bisecting
a viper, she can dart down three times and recover
without a disaster, having
been a bull-fighter. Well; she has a forgiver.

Etchebaster’s art, his catlike ease, his mousing pose,
his genius for anticipatory tactics, preclude envy
as the traditional unwavy
Sandeman sailor
is Escudero’s; the guitar, Rosario’s–
wrist-rest for a dangling hand
that’s suddenly set humming fast fast fast and faster.

There is no suitable simile. It is as though
the equidistant three tiny arcs of seeds in a banana
had been conjoined by Palestrina;
it is like the eyes,
of say the face of Palestrina by El Greco.
O Escudero, Soledad,
Rosario Escudero, Etchebaster!

[Read more…] about Escudero Etchebaster Solidad Casals: Style, by Marianne Moore

The Long Road (1996) by Robert Creeley

The Long Road
by Robert Creeley

The long road of it all
is an echo
a sound like an image
expanding, frames growing
one after another in ascending
or descending order, all
of us a rising, falling
thought, an explosion
of emptiness soon forgotten

*

As a kid I wondered
where do they go,
my father dead. The place
had a faded dustiness
despite the woods and all.
We grew up.
I see our faces
in old school pictures.
Where are we now?

Video: “The Long Road” by Robert Creeley, from The United States of Poetry episode, “The Word.” Copyright Washington Square Arts, 1995.

Text/Poem: “The Long Road” by Robert Creeley (1996).

See also: Long Road (1995) by Pearl Jam

The Librarian, March 1966, by Charles Olson

The Librarian
By Charles Olson

The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester,
the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which
(from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe.

In this night I moved on the territory with combinations
(new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader,
my father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts.

My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop,
there should be materials here for Maximus, when, then,
I saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me)

before. It turned out it wasn’t a shop, it was a loft (wharf-
house) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago
came back (I had been there before, with my wife and son,

I didn’t remember, he presented me insinuations via
himself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years.
But never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country.

His previous appearance had been in my parents’ bedroom where I
found him intimate with my former wife: this boy
was now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts!

Black space,
old fish-house.
Motions
of ghosts.
I,
dogging
his steps.
He
(not my father,
by name himself
with his face
twisted
at birth)
possessed of knowledge
pretentious
giving me
what in the instant
I knew better of.

But the somber
place, the flooring
crude like a wharf’s
and a barn’s
space

I was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter
was there—that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I
hadn’t even connected her with my being there, that she was

here. That she was there (in the Promised Land—the Cut!
But there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews
were in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party

I was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped
around. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort.
The Fort was in East Gloucester—old Gorton’s Wharf, where the Library

was. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang
was beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth
of fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking

down. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops
tailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern

The places still
half-dark, mud,
coal dust.

There is no light
east
of the Bridge

Only on the headland
toward the harbor
from Cressy’s

have I seen it (once
when my daughter ran
out on a spit of sand

isn’t even there.) Where
is Bristow? when does I-A
get me home? I am caught

in Gloucester. (What’s buried
behind Lufkin’s
Diner? Who is

Frank Moore?

Credits/Sources:

  • Charles Olson, “The Librarian,” from The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems. Copyright © 1987 by Charles Olson. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.
  • Text: Poetry Foundation: The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems (University of California Press, 1987)
  • Video: Net Film

California Stars, by Woody Guthrie and Wilco

I saw Wilco perform at the Greek Theater in Berkeley a couple weeks ago, and is was a fantastic show. One of the songs they played, California Stars, is one of my favorite Wilco songs, and in the above video they can be seen playing it at the same Greek Theater five years ago.

Today is National Poetry Day in the UK, and the theme is “Stars.” What better way to salute British poetry than with a song penned by a quintessential American folk icon? California Stars is a beautiful poem/song written by Woody Guthrie, but never recorded until Wilco and Billy Bragg put it on Mermaid Avenue (1998), one of two albums they produced of songs created from a sheaf of unreleased Guthrie lyrics. This year, in honor of Guthrie’s 100th birthday,  the two Mermaid Avenue albums, plus outtakes and interviews, have been released in a new boxed set, Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions. Enjoy.

California Stars

I’d like to rest my heavy head tonight
On a bed of California stars
I’d like to lay my weary bones tonight
On a bed of California stars
I’d love to feel your hand touching mine
And ell me why i must keep working on
Yes, I’d give my life to lay my head tonight
On a bed of California stars

I’d like to dream my troubles all away
On a bed of California stars
Jump up from my starbed and make another day
Underneath my California stars
They hang like grapes on vines that shine
And warm the lovers glass like friendly wine
So, I’d give this world just to dream a dream with you
On our bed of California stars

~Words by Woody Guthrie, music by Jay Bennett/Jeff Tweedy

Kenneth Patchen, The Argument of Innocence

Kenneth Patchen - The Argument of Innocence

The great poet, novelist and artist Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) created a number of wonderful “picture poems” like the one above, which also served as the title of my source for this image: The Argument of Innocence – A Selection from the Arts of Kenneth Patchen, by Peter Veres, The Scrimshaw Press, 1976. The painted text reads,

The Argument of Innocence
can only be lost
if it is won

Veres describes the evolution of the picture poems, and includes an elucidation of their genesis by the artist’s wife, Miriam Patchen (p. 53-60):

Although Patchen’s drawings of beasties and critters dated back to the 1950s, appearing on the handwritten pages of poetry in his silkscreen folios, it was only in the picture poems of the sixties (published by New Directions in black and white in Hallelujah Anyway, 1966, and But Even So, 1968), that the images and words achieved a truly integrated union, a symbiosis.

Patchen’s picture poems are magical, or, perhaps more properly, “fantastic.” They are messages from other lands, spoken in our vernacular by vaguely familiar creatures. Figures and words share a continuum of visual presence and form a counterpoint of meaning, an interchange of energies. Words as images, images as concepts, co-existing without subservience to each other, are combined to create a richer whole.

Patchen made nearly two hundred of these picture poems, all on very old off-white handmade paper, with uneven, uncut edges, all about eleven and a half by seventeen inches, which gives the impression of found, ancient manuscripts. Present in each of them is the spirit of the intensely personal and the intensely direct gift.

Miriam Patchen: It’s like so many things — inventors work all their lives on trying to do something. The thing they’re doing doesn’t happen and yet accidentally something else happens, and they discover or create something they hadn’t planned on.

In a way, this is almost what happened with Kenneth’s picture poems and painting poems. When he was very uncomfortable in Palo Alto [Patchen had an extremely painful, debilitating chronic spinal injury], bedfast and trying to do things, John Thomas, who is now and was then in the Department of Botany at Stanford, brought us, almost accidentally, some very strange old papers.

Kenneth always loved beautiful paper, lovely types, good books. But these very strange old papers were handmade, of great, great age. They were at Stanford and were used to press, or had been holding, botanical specimens that had come from France many, many years ago. Some of the papers literally went back to the days of Napoleon’s army, and John Thomas was rather shocked when he discovered that the paper was being thrown away and burned when they were reclassifying their botanical specimens. So he, too, was interested in paper and had a little press, and he and Kenneth decided that they might do a couple of Christmas cards on the paper or something like that. But he brought the paper to Kenneth, and Kenneth was just really so fascinated by the paper he would pore over it and pet it and look at it night after night when he couldn’t do anything else. Gradually he began to think that it would be a terrible waste not to do something desirable with the paper. Fine to do the Christmas cards and some printing, yes, but this paper should exist, and continue to exist, because it could; since it was pure rag paper, it could continue to exist for some purpose other than just being around.

He experimented a little with this and a little with that and gradually tested it with color, and that began to intrigue him more and more. And began to make him think of painting on the paper and doing color. Then color began to open up his mind to putting color in a sense visually into his poetry. That led to painting on the papers.

He did some black drawing pages on some of the paper, but still that wasn’t satisfactory enough for the paper’s honor. So gradually the painting forms evolved because of these papers.

My copy of The Argument of Innocence has a wonderful ring stain on the top right of the title page that seems to shine like a gray sun down upon on the title farther down the page. I liked this stained page so much I worked a copy of it into a painting a number of years back, also titled The Argument of Innocence. You can only lose it by winning.

See also: Text paintings by New Zealand’s Colin McCahon.