I wanted to say something about Melissa Buzzeo’s writing but somehow I had to hear Jesse Seldess read on October 29, 2011 in Chicago in order to do so.
Then, looking for a way to write about these two books—Face by Buzzeo and Left Having by Seldess—I searched for another book to find a tether or to find a third thing so as not to compare. Or to access a reading moment when I felt particularly receptive, felt as if I was learning. Buzzeo and Seldess are asking this of me.
So I went to my shelves and found what I found in the late 90s, before I imagined any of the books I have written: a book published by Sun & Moon Press. (I used to comb the shelves at St. Mark’s Bookstore for their insignia and buy anything I found.) Where Heat Looms by Andre du Bouchet and translated by David Mus.
“We started out looking, beyond the book in our hands, for beginnings. And we arrive, astonishingly, at the book in our hands: white pages lit by sunlight spread open awaiting our gaze; prosodic feet traveling their route across it, aligned with a known road or not; receptive space going on about its business at white heat; dark print starting from the white, generated by it, curling around it letter by letter; the depth of air, light-filled, carrying the page to our eyes, into them and beyond.”
“The arts of language like the others, when practiced in probity, do not offer either a counter-world or a counterfeit image of world; but speaking directly for forces which show up elsewhere otherwise, they lead us there.”
(from the essay by David Mus)
This second quote I typed up, printed out, and hung on my office wall behind my IBM computer when I worked full time as a Higher Education Officer for the City University of New York. Back when I could say I knew nothing about experimental poetry except for a pulse in my body that resisted narrative, my office. I was dreaming of writing into an unknown space, so I turned my IBM computer monitor around so that the back with all its cables faced the doorway. I secretly filled each crack in the work day with my desire: do you remember the Dalkey Archive interviews on line? Or Duration Press and its virtual gatherings? Or the Teachers and Writers Collaborative interviews with experimental poets? There was a window that looked down to Hudson Street behind me and this screen in front of me. I mapped everything I could.
“What lapses here answering for breath I lack begins
again to fall like a fall of snow on paper. Night
seeming over deepens. I write as far as you can go
from self.”
(du Bouchet’s “In Midair”)
“Until I can describe something to you, until I can
develop some dimension to this space, what I am writing
will lack color.
I am writing this in black and
I get the feeling that
had it been colder
I would have seen the silent aspect
come across to me
the silent aspect come
across to me.”
(from Seldess’ “The Silent Aspect”)
“I unname you as, you are.
I find you in water and I feed you water. I
unanswer what is left.
Disconnected disconcerted. We are missing
direction. There is no place to go between our
letters.
There is the woman with the pomegranate, arms
outstretched, body. Still. There is a rising steam
and upswept circulation. This is my effort to talk
to you. My effort outstretched. My effort miming,
empty.
From here to there this letter.”
(from Buzzeo’s “I Unname You”)
I now write a record of a fallow state—pulled open as if content-less, I find myself in the gaps I have just transcribed. In the space of the page looming until you get to the first line of du Bouchet’s poem—he has written me into midair by not starting until you get to the bottom. I am throwing into question the sense of writing purpose I had—because what if at the moment my mother died, everything about writing changed? Can a life pivot this way?
“If you wait, a gift will come.” Who said that? I don’t know. Or this is the sentence I felt this week, listening to and then reading Seldess, re-reading Buzzeo, re-reading du Bouchet.
Memory of her face muscles going completely relaxed. There were three geese flying east after that moment. Now I am at zero and await the new. We wanted her to relax. She was always turning toward the window.
A turn toward book work—“you will tire of the press of book work”—a prophetess once wrote this but hers is no longer my religion.
Idea: make a blank book and write an essay toward its blankness. “Dear Blank Book:” Fold this essay into quarters and nestle it at the bottom. This book is covered in fur, as I picture it, and its pages would be bright green. Influence: Ann Hamilton. Currently: I am not involved in a book project. All files have been filled, forwarded, and archived.
Craving: a stack of small papers held down by one palm-sized stone. Stones: companions for the stacks. About ten stones, ten stacks. Grey stones with white veins. This summer, in Brooklyn where I used to live, a good friend gave me a stone like this.
Guidebooks: enter the works of Melissa Buzzeo and Jesse Seldess, writing companions as I go down the road. Enter the idea of a portable horizon, a gathering of slips of blue paper, in slightly different shades, kept in an envelope to be pulled out and arranged whenever needed. This portable horizon can be mailed.
A page revises a horizon, over and over, working down. First: the sentence, made of units like blue lining up against more blue, working across. Walking next to a lake that is more like an ocean. Then back in my room one kilometer from this lake, I transcribe this memory of the lake in my notebook and notice small shifts in syntax and word choice, going closer to the bottom. Meaning as accrual, as revision. An invitation if you wait.
Turning to Melissa Buzzeo’s book sitting next to my notebook, I meet the body and this body is a woman. A body as the writing: tense, then release—an idea to do something or say something or make something, then abandoned—in the months since, I map this rhythm of approach and retreat—
“Today running strong
risk the new day
now plunging into its
cold, white current
hard on
the engine wheeling
out loud
like a knife shifted by air a hair’s-breadth
mountains barely lifting clear of ground
if the road wear and break
shift your weight
the roadway is surfaced with snowfall, today.”
(du Bouchet’s “Over the Mountains”)
“If I left the ending for you
Until the others present can find it
The sun will already have gone down
At a slow pace refraining the ending
Starting off but not coming to an end
Beginning with a sound but not ending”
(from Seldess’ “Left Having”)
“In all the gathering, the collecting there is also
another kind of collapse. Even as distance is made
irrelevant.
We tried to stay where we began. We tried to point
from where we began. It was impossible.
Near a body of water quite far from the earth he
reaches out: body.
Because we cannot continue. As such. I write you
in space.
As though one could strain through cloth. To say
it evenly.
Remarks at entry: to move from sky and from
where your body is. Beneath sky. To move away
and into reentry. Towards a place that has barely
been. But that is, already. At block.”
(from Buzzeo’s “We Look at Star”)
