Dunes
--A. R. Ammons

Taking root in windy sand
..is not an easy
way
to go about
..finding a place to stay.

A ditchbank or wood's-edge
..has firmer ground.

In a loose world though
..something can be started--
a root touch water,
..a tip break sand--

Mounds from that can rise
..on held mounds,
a gesture of building, keeping,
..a trapping
into shape.

Firm ground is not available ground.

Don't have time to read The Woman in the Dunes? Then watch the film! It is equally as good.

From a 2006 essay by David Mitchell in The Guardian after re-reading The Woman in the Dunes:

For this reader, the novel flaunts its symbolic and literal point and counter-point in its title. The woman is the animate; the mortal; the flesh; the impetus for sex; consolation in the cell of the unendurable. The dunes are the inanimate; the eternal; what confines us; the unendurable itself. Sand permeates the novel like a third major character. Sand gets in the food, the house, in clothes, into clocks. It is while brushing sand off each other's bodies that the man and the woman are ushered into sex. The sand of these dunes, laden with dampness, does not preserve but rots everything it touches: wood, leather, fabric, "morality". Like time itself, "Sand not only flows, but this very flow is the sand". To combat its voracity is what requires hapless men to be held captive in the first place. Sand is the prison: literally, symbolically; and not just for the man. We, too, are down in this burning sandpit. We, too, must spend a lifetime doing a job as meaningless (to the universe at large, if not to ourselves) as shovelling never-ending deposits of sand into buckets, getting nothing for our pains but the barest essentials. As we read about the man's predicament, existentially speaking, we are reading about our own.

[Dunes, Oceana; Edward Weston, 1936]

Sand, of course, was not a liquid. There was no reason, therefore, to expect it to be buoyant. If one were to toss something on it with a lesser gravity, say a cork stopper, and leave it there, even the cork would sink. A boat that would float on sand would have to possess much different qualities. It could be a house shaped like a barrell, for example, which would pitch and toss. Even if it heaved over a little, it would shed whatever sand had fallen on it and rise at once to the surface. Of course, people would not be able to endure the instability of a house that kept revolving all the time. There would have to be a double-barrel arrangement on an axis, so that the bottom of the inner barrel would always have a fixed point of gravity. The inner one would remain steady; only the outer one would turn. A house which would move like the pendulum of a great clock...a cradle house...a desert ship...

--from The Woman in the Dunes; Kobo Abe

[Aya Fujioka]
(via wood s lot)

The newspaper was the same as usual. He wondered if there had been a gap of a week, for there was almost nothing new to be found. If this was a window on the world outside, the glass was frosted.... There wasn't a single item of importance. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of important things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaningless of existence, sets the center of his compass at his own home. (93-94)

--from The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

Here’s the basic setup for Kobe Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes: A teacher by profession and entomologist by passion plans a brief getaway from the daily routine to collect insects in a sandy region of Japan near the ocean. Only, after missing the bus home, he finds himself taken care of through the initial hospitality of a small outlying village, but only later to discover that he’s been placed at the bottom of an enormous sandpit, where awaits a 30 year old woman, a rotting hut and the necessary task of shoveling sand every night to avoid their burial from the constantly shifting and collapsing walls of the pit.

An unrealistic story but perfect for a philosophical allegory, one not unlike the Sisyphus myth. And in some respects, the less said the better because the joy in reading The Woman in the Dunes is the play in perspectives and concepts that work in and out of the text. An overall quality that’s permeable rather than definitive, so contradictory premises our quite at home in a person’s reading, which is what makes them all the more challenging. Who’s more ‘free’, the woman who accepts her fate or the man who never gives up on the dream of escaping? Is this a story that criticizes or is in support of domestic cohabitation? Does sexuality liberate individuals from their social contexts or does it only bind them? The questions and possibilities are meant to be expansive rather than reductive, whether it be with broader philosophical notions or examining the social structures that we, more often than not, willingly submit to as we live our lives.

How the book is written is worth noting as well. Initially, the events are largely factual and make this unrealistic tale believable. Abe works the narrative forward by giving step by step accounts as to the physical details of the story as well as the internal emotions of the trapped man as he begins to realize the situation he’s in and desparately wanting to get out of. In contrast though, as the book moves along, the writing falls into more abstract paragraphs that rely upon associative connections rather than the logical progression that is largely relied upon at the beginning of the book. And this is what works to open the book up for its myriad implications and repeated readings. Endless possibilities.

[The Lone Tenement; George Bellows, 1909]

I found Kelly Reichardt’s newest film, Wendy & Lucy, to be a masterpiece. On the surface it’s a simple, short work about a young woman who loses her dog after her car breaks down in a dilapidated Oregon town while traveling cross country. But its this simplicity, one which relies upon meticulously subtle emotional gestures, that allows the film to be become so much more. Reichardt provides enough clues to speculate upon the background of the young woman and to what extent she may or may not be able to get back up on her feet and move on from her difficulties. So to this extent, it’s a coming of age tale about the final transition into adulthood. Equally plausible though, Wendy could be seen as a stand-in for a large percentage of the population within the United States that have found themselves disadvantaged and vulnerable because of the economic changes that have occurred over the past decade. Finally, Wendy & Lucy could be watched for no other reason than enjoying the artistic use of Americana within a modern setting. Trains, wandering hobos, joblessness, small town kindness, callous fundamentalists, dream-like white picket fences….. a story Steinbeck might have written if he were around today. Check it out. And note that Reichardt’s first film, Old Joy, is equally as strong for many of the same reasons.

A Love Supreme
--Gabrielle Calvocoressi

You beautiful, broke-
back horse of my heart. Proud,
debonair, not quite there

in the head. You current
with no river in sight.
Current as confetti

after parades. You
small-town. Italian
ice shop next to brothels

beside the highway.
Sweet and sweaty. You high
as a kite coming

down. You suburban sprawled
on the bed. You dead? Not
nearly. Not yet.

[Stag at Sharkey's; George Bellows, 1909]

Rumpus: Last question. Put on your sportswriter hat for a minute. Assuming Mayweather and Pacquiao get past their beef and get in a ring, who do you like?

Calvocoressi: Okay. First, I think they will get past it. I know it looks bleak and I think there’s been real damage done to the promise of the fight in terms of what it would do for boxing but I bet the fight will happen in September like some folks are speculating. It’s a bummer but I think it will still create so much excitement. And it will (hopefully) be a great fight for people who don’t love boxing to get a real taste. Everyone talks about heavyweights but it’s just more fun and interesting to watch guys with the kind of dexterity and speed of these two. It will be great. And the cultural aspect. Pacquiao’s incredible fanbase. Just. It’s amazing.

That said. I like Floyd. I think he will win. The odds have him winning and I haven’t watched enough boxing in the last few years to be able to speak super intelligently but I love watching him fight. And I think he can just do a kind of damage. I must say, the moment before Floyd Mayweather knocks someone out will do something to your whole body. Really. You can just feel it, “This man is about to do something very beautiful with his body very quickly and someone is going to get knocked down.” You just feel it rising in you. He’s an artist. In a way, he really is. [source]

Boxers in the Key of M
--Gabrielle Calvocoressi

As in Marvelous and Macho, as in Leon's
younger brother Michael, a name I learned

in Catholic school. St. Michael of the mat,
of the left hook and the deafening blow,

of teeth glistening as they made their arc
to the laps of women sitting ringside.

You don't like to see a man get knocked out
cold? Then you've never lived in Hartford

or any town of boarded windows. Have you
ever gotten hit or thrown against a wall?

There's a sweetness to it, that moment when
your God would forgive you anything. One

punch free as yesterday's papers. Marvelous
the way his body moved on the TV

screen. And me? I moved around the room,
bobbed and weaved. I learned to hold my breath

so I could fight with my head held under water.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is not the most well known poet, however, her first collection, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, was very well received. Her second collection, Apocalyptic Swing, was published last year and based on these two collections, it appears as though her name might become more well known in the upcoming years. I picked up Apocalyptic Swing on a whim at the library last week and I’m glad I did because, at least with this collection, I found a style of poetry that is impacted with swift, tight formal energy while with a broad range of emotions and subject matter.

The most predominant theme is boxing. Boxing as metaphor for the persistency of life that gets one back up on their feet after a knock down. Appropriately, many of the poems are written from the dramatic voices of characters, the majority of whom are in or have been in some form of alienation, whether it be from the loss of love, economic class separation or racial intolerance. For source material for her characters, Calvocoressi draws upon specific boxers (Thomas Hearns, Ruby Goldstein), cultural figures (Billy Sunday, Coltrane), events within American history (the KKK bombings of churches in the south during the 60's, the killing of Chancy Goodman and Schwerner) and her own personal life experiences.

Tied with this tribute to the tenacity of the human spirit, though less pronounced but enough to create a backdrop of fogged melancholy behind the fire of Calvocoressi’s prize fighters, is that of the loss of ‘home’, the leaving of ‘home’, the ‘home’ that never was, the hopeful return to ‘home’. And, appropriately, some of the poems involve the restlessness of travel, as working opposite to home and demonstrating the need to persist forward, to either something new or to leave something behind. And finally, while there is a focus within the book of getting back up, Calvocoressi a few times within the collection finds a certain beauty in the fall the precedes the getting back up (Possibly divine? Calvocoressi first studied theology). From 'Box Fugue':

....Your trunks were golden
and the palm trees shook at Caesars

Palace. We are all so beautiful
with our face against the mat.

And from 'Training Camp: Deer Lake, PA':

It was winter, fire engines
idled as she passed. Who

are you to ask for succor
in the face of so much

beauty. Who are you to ask
this world to remember.

These poems are not without their difficulties though when first becoming familiarized with the collection. While quite formal in structure, many are written in an abstracted lyrical mode that freely associates boxing/athletics, religion, sex and gender. But its this dodging play within the poems that brings the tension necessary to ring the reader to the poems, and is what will bring them back again. The title works to this end as well, Apocalyptic Swing also as metaphor for Calvocoressi pushing the poems outward in their meaning, worth risking their destruction rather than letting them sit comfortably with limitations on their understandings.

The Ordeal
-- William Carlos Williams

.....O crimson salamander,
.....Because of love's whim
..............................sacred!

Swim
.....the winding flame
.....Predestined to disman him
And bring our fellow home to us again.
.....Swim in with watery fang,
.....Gnaw out and drown
The fire roots that circle him
Until the Hell-flower dies down
.....And he comes home again.

.....Aye, bring him home,
.....O crimson salamander,
That I may see he is unchanged with burning--
Then have your will with him,
.....O crimson salamander.

One of the great things about Leonard Cohen is that he can be enjoyed on Valentines Day by both singles and couples. And here he is performing Who By Fire with the assistance of the great and legendary Sonny Rollins. Incendiary!

That's an artistic rendition by E. W. Kemble of the original Congo Square, which is located in New Orleans just north of the French Quarter and within what is now recognized as Louis Armstrong Park. Originally the area was where slaves could congregate on Sundays when they had the day off. It also was one of the only two places within the United States where African druming and dancing was permitted from the mid-eighteenth to nine-teenth century. Damn Protestants. The area is still used today for cultural activities. And below is one of the few pictures of Buddy Bolden, who often was referred to as "King", his blasting-ragged rhythms mixed with both traditional gospel and blues (the lord and the devil) to "call his children home".

On occassion Ondaatje infuses the text with list poems that capture the vernacular of New Orleans at the time of Buddy Bolden's life. Here's one which I believe is composed from song titles, dances and other phrases that would be applicable to the music scene:

Don't go 'way nobody

Careless love

2.19 took my baby away

Idaho

Joyce 76

Funky Butt

Take your big leg off me

Snake Rag

Alligator Hop

Pepper Rag

If you don't like my potatoes why do you dig so deep?

All the whores like the way I ride

Make me a pallet on your floor

If you don't shake, don't get no cake.

Within the first couple pages of Coming Through Slaughter Ondaatje provides two excellent paragraphs which tie together Bolden's gift for jazz playing with the tension that arose from his mental illness. First, describing his playing:

He was the best and the loudest and most loved jazzman of his time, but never professional in the brain. Unconcerned with the crack of the lip he threw out and held immense notes, could reach a force on the first note that attacked the ear. He was obsessed with the magic of air, those smells that turned neuter as they revolved in his lung then spat out in the chosen key. The way the side of his mouth would drag a net of air in and dress it in notes and make it last and last, yearning to leave it up there in the sky like a transformed cloud. He could see the air, could tell where it was freshest in a room by the colour.

"Obsessed with the magic of air", I like that. The paragraph on the following page then explores Bolden's inner strife:

But his own mind was helpless against every moment's headline. He did nothing but leap into the mass of changes and explore them and all the tiny facts so that eventually he was almost completely governed by fears of certainty. He distrusted it in anyone but Nora for there it went to the spine, and yet he attacked it again and again in her, cruelly, hating it, the sure lanes of the probable. Breaking chairs and windows glass doors in fury at her certain answers.

Billy Bolden was an (enigmatic) but hugely influential jazz trumpeter who’s playing style was essential towards developing New Orleans rag-time jazz at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, read that sentence again and replace (enigmatic) with (heroically tragic) and the lyrical tone for Ondaatje’s fictional biography will be set. While Bolden was blowing the pants off anyone that stepped into the tenor of his horn, mental illness that involved a paranoid form of schizophrenia was increasingly influencing his inner processing, leading to self destructive and anti-social behaviors that resulted at the age of 31 a lifelong tenure in a state mental institution.

The title of the book, Coming Through Slaughter, implies the creation/destruction duality that resulted from Bolden’s life and is an idea that can unfortunately be attributed to many great artists that provided lasting influence in their artistic realms. Within the book, Ondaatje provides another example of this in a minor character that represents a fictional version of John Ernest Joseph Bellocq, a photographer known for his eccentric unfriendliness late in life but whose portraits of prostitutes within Storyville (the then legal red light district of New Orleans) have become highly regarded. While the emphasis of the book is upon the psychological tension that results in personal artistic effort, Ondaatje also places the narrative within a historical context that emphasizes the social problems within New Orleans at that time and what resulted in the culture to rise above those difficulties– art and community.

While it could be argued that Ondaatje takes too many liberties in the romanticization of his characters, I would find this without merit because Ondaatje’s writing style is so obviously poetical it would be clear to any reader that what he is providing is an expressionistic portrait of Bolden and the inhabitants of New Orleans. Additionally, the writing style is fragmented into short interjecting paragraphs to splice the underlying sequential narrative into sudden immediacies only and become representative of how Bolden may have related to the world while succumbing to his illness (which would have been inherently subjective).

However, to contrast the imaginative aspects of the novel, towards the end of the book Ondaatje works within the text factual data concerning Bolden’s life, such as time lines, a transcript of an interview, factual notes and other details that appear as though they could have come from the local county records. I think there’s artistic dichotomy to be found there. On the one hand you have soaring emotional subjectivity that can’t have any reliability other than its own storied presence within the imagination, while on the other hand, Ondaatje provides details so insubstantially dry, they crumble into their own insignificance. What ultimately stands is not Bolden the person, or even Bolden the story, but the Bolden that can be heard through the lasting American art form known as jazz.

And what is the fourth dimension? It is the endlessness of knowledge--

It is the imagination on which reality rides-- It is the imagination-- It is a cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and therefore can never be discovered by its anatomization.

It is for this reason that I have always placed art first and esteemed it over science-- in spite of everything.

Art is the pure effect of the force upon which science depends for its reality-- Poetry

The effect of this realization upon life will be the emplacement of knowledge into a living current-- which it has always sought--

--from Spring and All, William Carlos Williams, 1923

Just This
--W. S. Merwin

When I think of the patience I have had
back in the dark before I remember
or knew it was night until the light came
all at once at the speed it was born to
with all the time in the world to fly through
not concerned about ever arriving
and then the gathering of the first stars
unhurried in their flowering spaces
and far into the story the planets
cooling slowly and the ages of rain
then the seas starting to bear memory
the gaze of the first cell at its waking
how did this haste begin this little time
at any time this reading by lightning
scarcely a word this nothing this heaven

From a June 26, 2009 interview with Bill Moyers:

BILL MOYERS: You titled this new book, the one that just one the Pulitzer Prize, "In The Shadow of Sirius". Now, Sirius is the dog star. The most luminous star in the sky. Twenty-five times more luminous than the sun. And yet, you write about it's shadow. Something that no one has never seen. Something that's invisible to us. Help me to understand that.

W.S. MERWIN: That's the point. The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. But we live in it all the time.

BILL MOYERS: How so?

W.S. MERWIN: We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of-- as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that — it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery. That's always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it.

[...


...]

BILL MOYERS: When we confirmed this meeting, you suggested that I read a poem in here called "Rain Light." Why did you suggest that one?

W.S. MERWIN: I don't know, I just — that seems to be a very close poem to me.

BILL MOYERS: Here it is.

W.S. MERWIN: All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning

BILL MOYERS: "Even though the whole world is burning." It is, isn't it?

W.S. MERWIN: Yes. It is. It is burning, and we're part of the burning. We're part of the doing it. We're part of the suffering it. We're part of the watching it helplessly and ignorantly. And we know it's happening. And it is just us. It is our lives. We're burning. We're, you know, we're not the person we were yesterday. We're not the person we were 20 years ago.

A reoccurring theme in The Shadow of Sirius is the idea of ‘stillness’ and demonstrates the Buddhist influence in Merwin’s thought and writing. It is a notion that is not meant to contrast activity, but to suggest a state of existence-- a shadow if you will-- removed from the boundaries of time, as it exists just as the movement of time exists. And stillness that equates to awareness, that which provides the capability of processing rather than what is processed. Or, from a philosophical perspective, the necessary paradox of presence and absence, light and darkness, life and death..... Actually, Merwin's poetry provides the best explanation:


From Still Morning:

It appears that there is only one
age and it knows
nothing of age as the flying birds know

From Dream of Koa Returning:

and all at once you
were just behind me
as you did years ago
and not stirring at all
when I reached back slowly

From Cargo:

and the tables piled with fruit
just picked and with motionless
animals all together known
in the light as still lives
they sail on the sound of night

From Unknown Age:

For all the features it hoards and displays
age seems to be without substance at any time

whether morning or evening it is a moment of air
held between the hands like a stunned bird

From Nocturne II:

but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night…

The Shadow of Sirius may be the book that W. S. Merwin spent his whole life preparing to write. Not because of there being anything deficient about his earlier publications, but because this is Merwin perfected. When poetic language becomes this direct, even simplistic, while also holding immense depth and meaning, you know that it was written by a poet who is clearly in tune with what is wished to be conveyed through the writing, and then how to effectuate that wish. Its an accomplishment that can only be achieved when one is intimately tied to one’s craft. No surprise that Merwin’s view on poetry is that it is an art to help you decide how you want to live your life.

The first section consists of poems that largely stem from childhood memories. While personal, the poems extend themselves to the mythic and rarely feel autobiographical. Tied with this, the first poems are more about questions than epiphanies, which instills a tension to the writing that is not present in the second and third sections. And as Merwin delves into such topics of the uncertainties of language and memory, the loss of childhood innocence, the cold inevitability of death, the burden placed upon the individual for figuring out how to process and come to terms with these life difficulties, he begins to broaden the space in which loss can be understandably considered. From 'Traces':

and what do we remember
eyes but not the seeing
often we did not know
that we were happy
even when we were not
how could we have known that
at no distance

The second section is the shortest and the poems are dedicated to the three dogs Merwin has had in his life. This may at first seem humorous, but not when you consider the metaphoric title of the book (The Dog Star) and that Merwin is a Buddhist as well as a naturalist– having chosen to live in Hawaii about 30 years ago and largely outside of urban life. The dogs, among other things, are reminders to Merwin that he is, as well, an animal fiddling his snout about Earth within the cosmos, and not much more. In fact, when more, that is when the difficulties arise and which are avoided through a lifestyle facilitated by the writing of poetry (and while also enjoying man’s best friend). From 'Dream of Koa Returning':

when I reached back slowly
hoping to touch
your long amber fur
and there we stayed without moving
listening to the river
and I wondered whether
it might be a dream
whether you might be a dream
whether we both were a dream
in which neither of us moved

Sort of like me and my cat looking out into the back yard together. In the final third section, Merwin completes his poetic vision. Some of the poems are similar to those of the first section, but the tone tends to be more of a resolving acceptance rather than frictive questioning. At heart is an understanding of ultimate reality as a continual presence composed of limited moments, which begins to maybe not negate, but re-frame how one can understand the impermanent nature of life. As Merwin is in the final years of his life, the shadowy void is there in nearly every poem in the third section, but also there is an exuberant confirmation of whatever may enter Merwin’s daily awareness, including equally the flitting of the immediate physical environment and the ongoing tone of personal memory. From 'A Momentary Creed':

I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me

I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me

it extends beyond whatever I may
think I know and all that is real to me

it is the present that it bears away