Received my copy of James’ Serenades yesterday, which is lined, friends, with velvet. I’m right back to all those arguments about the method of poetry’s publication/presentation and how perfect binding should / shouldn’t / does affect the way poetry is read. All I can say is that, lined in velvet, it is as if I am reading these for the first time.
One thing I hadn’t noticed before is the incremental riffing on Peter Gizzi’s poem Beginning With a Phrase from Simone Weil. The curious thing about the Gizzi references, and I can tell you b.c. I asked him about it today, is that James wasn’t entirely aware of making them…what is the “this” I refer to, you may ask? Here are some quotes to demonstrate. I’ll start somewhere in the middle of the section, although this work is long, untitled, seamless, so ’section’ is really a misnomer:
“I am beginning to breathe effortlessly.
There is only the bay to cross.
So, don’t be afraid of the dark when
the possibility of light exists–
if only to enable the foresight of a future
anxiously awaited–though
the present hasn’t been overlooked
and we’ve lost nothing but physical nearness.
No more prescience in the new model
of everything loved.
The peculiar disparity in time, in each location,
where everything is present–your voice
in time, laughter, a vendor in the periphery.
What better way, loving you from afar,
where every small detail is beautiful in its station.”
The first ‘direct’ allusion comes with “No more prescience in the new model / of everything loved,” echoing and expanding on Gizzi’s line “No more presence in everything loved.” I first thought James was starting something like an argument w. Gizzi’s line, which comes in the stanza most directly engaged with dismay, loss, death: “And chaos is no better model / when we come adrift” and ”I heard a fly buzz.” But no. I’m not sure if I thought there was an argument because I believe, deep down, that every riff must expand upon its source, or if I’ve stuck to a mistaken reading of Serenades as that coat of many rosebuds, gather them while ye may. Either way I was wrong. Like Gizzi’s poem, there’s an insistence in Serenades on loss as integral to experience, doesn’t that sound hokey? Which is why it’s a poem and not a blog post. The coyness I read in Serenades is that the absence of the beloved is declared on the first page to be temporary. Hardly devastating, it’s this absence that provides a space for the lover to make his endless, refracted declaratives.
Of course the allusion here is also to Gizzi’s style, where the rephrasing acts as a kind of exoskeleton on the poem. We watch the permutation and torquing of a phrase from Weil as it sifts down through the stanzas, managing somehow to ACCELERATE. James does something similar, even taking off where others have taken off, that is, I too wrote a poem riffing on Gizzi’s which gets referenced here as well: “What better way, loving you from afar.”
I’m getting to my point which is that James typeset the Gizzi poem for Fin Amour and the fact that he didn’t realize he was making these incremental references to the poem suggest something about its having taken him over via his hands. Isn’t that wonderful!
I haven’t finished my new, lined in velvet reading, I’m halfway through says the black elastic which serves as a binding, so expect musings part two next week.
Sometimes the cub reporter voice still takes over.
January 29, 2004 * 2:34 pm