Song of a Reformed Headhunter

TLS March 11 2016 from Thomas Heaney's review of Vanessa Ogle's The Global Transformation of Time : In the early 1960s, E. P. Thompson started scouring anthropological reports and journals for examples of peoples around the world with a less calculating sense of the passage of time. He was looking for temporal measures that were still deeply embedded in human action. In Madagascar, there was a word that designated "the time it takes to cook rice" and another for the moment it took to "roast a locust". In Burma, there were monks who started the day "when there is light enough to see the veins in the hand". In the English language, Thompson found linguistic markers closer to home: there were once such things as "a pater noster wyle", "a misere whyle", and there there had survived a rarefied measurement known as "a pissing while". Summer breeze— a pint of blueberries from the store

I am grateful to translators Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani for introducing me to the short fiction of Antonio Tabucchi. Time Ages in a Hurry collects nine stories: "The Circle," "Drip, Drop, Drippity-Drop," "Clouds," "The Dead at the Table," "Between Generals," "Yo me enamore del aire," "Festival," "Bucharest Hasn't Changed a Bit" and "Against Time." The stories are closely observed, often revolving around two people in conversation. The late Italian writer is profoundly concerned with the passing of time and its effects on memory, desire and fantasy. In the very poignant "Drip, Drop," a man waits beside his dying aunt, who has taken custody of not only him as a young boy, but also the childhood memories that he was too young to remember. The stories do not stay in Italy but range across Europe and beyond. "The Circle" is narrated from the perspective of a woman from t...

Life and Time life is one thing/and time something else             Hasina Gul, “Life and Time,” translated from Pashto by Sher Zaman Taizi A dog bounding through the swirling smoke of sand stirred by its own running.

We stayed with D & T near Woodstock from Wednesday to Saturday. For Thanksgiving, T cooked and fed a company of nine people. I met Jan Harrison , a painter and sculptor, and her architect husband Allan. Carol-Ann, a feminist performance artist, came with her new boyfriend, an Australian documentary filmmaker called George, who covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and is now covering Occupy Wall Street. Burroughs also made documentaries, but of jazz musicians. GH was the other architect, and I was the representative poet. As for our hosts, D worked with videos and T had worked for MoMA. So much art present at the table, but reality, in the form of George's wars, dominated the talk. The day after, we drove two hours to the town of North Adams to visit MASS MoCA . The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art is housed in former factory buildings with beautiful hand-cut stone, covered bridges and exposed brick walls. The buildings were put up in the late 1800's, by Arnol...

What Are Years Indeed      in its surrendering      finds its continuing —Marianne Moore, “What Are Years”      Seventeen cherry trees on fire, a man’s red hair,      but they are not men and these are springtime leaves and flowers, not flames, indifferent to guilt, insensible to innocence, going softly when their time is up.      What is mortality?      What is eternity?      More representative the cherry branches in      a glass vase, cut but alive, their slashed stems sipping water, their tight royal velvet buds— so many—unfolded in a pink faint, clawing the air for air, more      rage-rousing, by far      more courageous, are,      as is their true support, not roots, but a table      made from cherry wood and fought for, with blind patience and wordless skill, a pedestal tr...

Seven/Seven is here again, a new year, the last year of a first decade. For all my Seven/Seven poems this year, I have started a PFFA thread titled "Infinite Variety." From Anthony and Cleopatra , of course. "Age cannot wither her/ Nor custom stale her infinite variety." This month, for a week at least, let Miss Bishop be my muse, please. The Bowl I made a trip to each clock in the apartment —Elizabeth Bishop, “Paris, 7 A.M.” One clock is short. Another clock is dog that bounds round every twelve years and barks at dogs not yet born and dogs gone before. The good clock in the kitchen is a bowl. The one I check to go in step with New York City rests in my pocket, next to my penis, and that clock rings with a ringtone called Melody. So many clocks! How does one keep track of time? I have lived here long enough to have had three loves, one of whom is sleeping in my bed, visiting from the west coast. He is soft, this clock, but nuanced. The second ...

Based on the BBC television series of the same name, The Ascent of Man charts the development of human civilization through the lens of scientific progress. Though clearly intended to be only an introduction to its subjects, the book is tremendously wide in scope, taking in paleontology, architecture, alchemy, industrialization, quantum physics and genetics; noticeably, it has little to say about psychology. It is organised in powerful thematic chapters that are also more or less chronological. So it begins by looking at human fossils in Chapter 1 Lower than the Angels, and ends by discussing John von Neumann and game theory in Chapter 13 The Long Childhood. Since the book was published in 1973, I expect its discussion of contemporary science (and perhaps historical events and figures) needs updating. But, as the chapter titles suggest, the book is not so much concerned with presenting up-to-date facts as with creating "a philosophy for the twentieth century which shall be all of...

union / union To dream of union is to dream the world in words, the multifarious world conferring with two words. Pick up a fragment of the world, let’s say, a stone, and feel the heart— hard and soft —in the palm of words. Lean on a week as you would on a walking stick and learn the long and short of time-travel in words. When a backdoor is pried open and shows a cave, do you go in or stay out of the house of words? You know the ups and downs of falling deep in love. You know the stairs, that train station, are made of words. The knife is for the wound. The road is for the shoes. Honey and vinegar don’t lose the taste of words. Thank god Paul is not Jee and neither is Jee Paul but between Paul and Jee a world, a dream, all words.

retentissement / reverberation The Christmas crowd is roaring round the circus ring. The bear is tearing up the master of the ring. A stone dropped in the water does not see the ripple. A tower struck by lightning does not hear bells ring. On an abbey’s lawn I learned to make a daisy chain from serious young men stretched out in a scattered ring. I often think I moved my life to the wrong country. The call is not for me whenever the phones ring. Tempted to switch these verses round like playing cards, I do, sometimes, to hear the cash register ring. One thing leads to another, as one day the next, but there are nights that huddle in a silver ring. You have big ears, Jee, which are losing their hearing to the bloodthirsty circus cheering for the ring.

I miss my train and end my travels in a station. I cannot ride the whistle of wind out of the station. He had a feeling for vast things that come and go. He came from a small country with one train station. Today, like yesterday, work will be taking a train. The other constant change is passing Bliss Street station. The 7 train rattles my window at all hours. A window is not a station. A window is a station. My poems, I realize, have a weakness for definitions. Definitions are a quick stop at a small station. I could compare my love to many awful things. How else to wait out the long wait at the last station? Wait, Jee, though the winds blow hard at this elevation, wait till iron time pulls in and stops at your station.

TLS May 1 2009 from Paul Binding's review of Arnold Weinstein's Northern Arts: The breakthrough of Scandinavian literature and art, from Ibsen to Bergman : When, in his sixties, Ibsen returned to Christiana (Oslo) after years of voluntary exile from Norway, he worked with a portrait of the Swede [August Strindberg] in his study, to remind himself of the threatening power of a writer twenty-one years his junior. * [In Fear and Trembling (1843)] Kierkegaard insists on the sheer terribilita of the Abraham and Isaac story, so central to the biblical idea of our relationship to God. We fail, he says, if we do not recognize the enormity of this episode, its repudiation of conventional bonds in its dramatization of what God expects of his human creations. . . . Looked at with his independent eyes, not only Abraham's behavior but that of God himself casts moral doubt on the whole concept of patriarchy, on which traditional society was founded. This doubt [Weinstein] sees as at the...

drame / drama No tropical undergrowth has stepped into a grove but I think our second date is a kind of grove. After the hours made love, they put on their shoes. They are forbidden from re-entering the grove. The animals of thought are sacrificed to it. My hands empty bowls of semen round the grove. Repeat a word of power, like a ritual bird, until the non-repeatable comes from the grove. When my body forces in between the trees, it finds another place—a beach—and not the grove. Before they piss, they ask forgiveness of the trees. The soldiers know the nameless thing done in the grove. Love is the name we give to what cannot be named, past is the time, and where we worship springs a grove.

angoisse / anxiety He has not called or written for more than a week. Henry James died, Master and Virgin, this week. How does this book, a biography, persist in being when the biographer gives up his ghost some week? Why did you hide your profile on—at—Match.com? I text you only once, to ask, how was your week? I should have written, stupid fuck, how was your day? and now it is far too late to revise that week . Henry James wrote Hendrik Andersen many letters, his hands all over the young sculptor week after week. I masturbated every night before I slept. Meaning: I have been a virgin this whole week. Last time he wrote on Facebook, Happy Birthday, Jee, I could give up poetry. If he writes this week . . .

I'm flying to San Francisco today, on United Airlines Flight 15. The plane will take off from JFK at 3:00 PM EST, and land at San Francisco International at 6:37 PM PST. I will retrieve my red rucksack from the overhead compartment, shuffle behind a college student returning home for Christmas, thank the smiling flight attendant, stroll down the box corridors with their commanding signs, and, exiting that strange suspended world, walk into time and James.  What will we find in that little fold of time, when time slows down for itself, and stands in its own feet? How will time sleep during the week?

from Henry James's The Ambassadors : And when after this little Bilham, submissive and responsive, but with an eye to the consolation nearest, easily threw off some 'Better late than never!' all he got in return for it was a sharp 'Better early than late!' This note indeed the next thing overflowed for Strether into a quiet stream of demonstration that as soon as he had let himself go he felt as the real relief. It had consciously gathered to a head, but the reservoir had filled sooner than he knew, and his companion's touch was to make the waters spread. There were some things that had to come in time if they were to come at all. if they didn't come in time they were lost for ever. It was the general sense of them that had overwhelmed him with its long slow rush. 'It's not too late for you, on any side, and you don't strike me as in danger of missing the train; besides which people can be in general pretty well trusted, of course--with the clock...

Before going to the Kundiman poetry reading at Fordham University last night, Pauline and I had dinner at Nook in Hell's Kitchen. Dinner was very pleasant, sauced by talk about the ekphrastic stories she is writing, and about the book of poems I am publishing next April. She gave me a copy of her essay published in an anthology of women's writing, Homelands: women's journeys across race, place, and time (edited by Patricia Justine Tumang and Jenesha De Rivera, and published by Seal Press). Pauline's essay charted her own journey towards accepting her ethnic identity as a Korean adoptee, and her gender identity as a transgendered woman. The essay--and the life--is remarkable for the geography it traverses. At the age of eight months, Pauline was flown from Seoul to Tokyo, then to Anchorage, and then to Chicago, where she was picked up by her foster parents, and brought back to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That flight set the pattern for a peripatetic life afterwards. Madison f...

from Paula Marantz Cohen's review (TLS Sep 5 2008) of books on Alfred Hitchcock: [Hitchcock] was flamboyantly modest or, perhaps better, a self-deprecating exhibitionist. His understated preening is evident in his famous interview with Truffaut and in the cameo appearances he insisted on making in all his films. * He had an unerring grasp of the cinematic--on the technical level of understanding lenses and camera angles, and on the conceptual level of visual storytelling. He was able to make suspense into a metaphor for life and to use the theme of mistaken identity as a source of rich existential meaning. He understood the popular audience, was a master of studio politics and a genius at publicity, and yet he managed to hold on to his own vision. *** from Richard Marggraf Turley's Commentary piece (TLS Sep 5 2008) on "Barry Cornwall" (the pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter) and Keats: . . . we reject Cornwall for not offering the layered complexities our long admirati...

I have a deep affection for Julian Barnes, generally because I always enjoy his intellectually stimulating novels, more particularly because he taught me how to look at a painting. One chapter in The History of the World in 10½ Chapters muses on Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa.” I remember Barnes’s careful marshalling of evidence in the painting to decide whether the tiny ship in the horizon is approaching the desperate survivors of the shipwreck, or leaving them. I don’t remember the conclusion, but the approach has stuck with me: seeing is also interpreting. His new novel Arthur and George begins with the desire to take a look: A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like this then. A child wanted to see. This particular child who wanted to see is Arthur, who is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the professional ophthalmologist, the champion of the weak, and, finally, the evangelist of Spiritualism. What the child Arthur saw was...

TLS August 22 & 29 2008 from Clive James's review of Joseph Horowitz's Artists in Exile: How refugees from twentieth century war and revolution transformed the American performing ar ts : Not even the basket cases could honestly say that they had fallen among Philistines. They had fallen into a larger competitive market than the one that they had been driven out of, and even if they failed in it they would have liked to succeed. * Some of them felt limited by the indifference of the audience to anything labelled as art, but there was always a minority audience for that. There was a minority audience even for Schoenberg. On a world scale, Schoenberg's audience . . . is still a minority today, but most of the minority is in America, where minorities are larger. * European and American culture have always been a two-way interchange and to talk about either of them exclusively is like trying to cut water with a knife. Joseph Horowitz says that Stokowski's dream of a dem...

“The New Pastoral” introduces the last group of poems in the book. Whereas men discovered flint and wheel to read his world (in the form of the pastoral), the female speaker is “a “displaced person/ in a pastoral chaos.” She is “no shepherdess” and hears the “loud distress” of the herds when they are slaughtered. The lamb “unsuckled” alienates her from this male version of pastoral; it reminds her that the pastoral has a violent past in which she once participated. The pastoral poems that follow traffic with the trope of metamorphosis. In ‘Daphne with her thighs in bark,’ the speaker wishes to teach her next sister that it is better to give in to Apollo than to save herself for the trap of domestic life. Apollo’s “rough heat” will keep the sister warm, and give her good memories which will return to her when she sees the way the chestnut tree “thrusts and hardens.” In “The Woman Changes Her Skin,” the speaker, tired of hiding her aged face with cosmetics, changes herself into a snake. ...