Pete Smith wrote:
> and in line 22 is that Creeley who gets run over with the stasis &
moralisation thus invoked (or do I have the >wrong invocation here?). Don't
have Creeley's 'As I sd to my friend John' to hand.
I'm sure you have the right invocation here, though, as the president might
say, it depends what you mean by Creeley....
_I know a Man_ As I sd to my/ friend, because I am/ always talking,-
John, I // sd, which was not his / name, the darkness sur-/ rounds us, what
// can we do against / it, or else, shall we &/
why not, buy a goddamn big car,// drive, he sd, for/ christ's sake, look/
out where yr going.
The wrap-around angst/ surrounding darkness, underlying sense of the
futility of counter-action and subsequent swift embrace of speed, escape,
would provide a subtext (awful word, no doubt I'm misusing it) for _go-kart
jurisdiction _ and an analogue to both Keston's sense of 'the immensity of
concrete political dissuasion' and Robin Purves's reading of 'egos in the
lines'. If I could extrapolate a 'stance' from Mirakove's poem I think it
would be (without getting too heavy) a sense of the redemptive quality of
'the line', implying a relegation-- if that's what it is-- of 'political
targets' or 'the political' from, to borrow Keston's terms, the sphere of
'evidences' to that of 'intimations' ("M.'s lines are not evidences of an
idea, but intimations of an idea"). That is a particular sense of (the role
of) prosody, originating with Williams, common to Creeley, arguably Joanne
Kyger, and the (pre-political??) John Wieners of _The Hotel Wentley Poems_ :
I had love once in the palm of my hand.
See the lines there.
How we played
its game, are playing now
in the bounds of white and heartless fields. [Poem for Painters]
M.'s exercise of prosodic authority, with its attendant pleasures &
responsibility, (with)in the bounds of her "go-kart jurisdiction" (however
ironized; and 'jurisdiction' itself is both semantically and physically
'hyphenatable') gives me intimations that help offset mortality, not least
of which, 'wind[-]up/clitoris' (the hypehenated kind) contributing to a
sense of something clockwork running down at the end and modulating the
'patch of wind' through phonic archaism into uphill rewinding; or the sense
that (since 'or not' for a split second _can_refer backwards) neither speed
nor 'not-speed' are fun. In a runaway situation the former perception always
has its own special moment & in a cartoon or Hazard County you close your
eyes and as Orbison says 'only in dreams', it all works out more than OK.
This is the moment _somebody_ in the Creeley poem above says 'drive' and
self-preservation (to fight another day??) asserts itself. I've always
assumed the-- was it Jack Nicholson?-- filmtitle _Drive, he said_ was based
on a misreading of the poem so that it's intriguing to see Mirakove
apparently 'reproducing the misreading'. Why does she?
Keston's admiration in M. of 'the speed of impact, the velocity of
contradiction and cutbacks in self-belief' could be encapsulated in
Creeley's 'drive', you can't remember afterwards which one of you said it,
only a second passenger (or passer-by since you might be about to walk into
a lamppost) heard him say 'for christ's sake'.
The last time I heard the self-categorization of 'cause I'm the lazy
quick type' (says a lot about my listening habits) the sentiment was
'Wherever I lay my head.. or (pace Dick Gallup 'hang my hat').
Best,
John
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