Baffling Combustions

In this second LAFAYETTE session we continue our riff on the Marquise and the Square that bears his name with more context, Lafayettean lore and grace notes around his words resonant with the BLACK LIVES MATTER protests: "When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties."

In this first of two sessions, Sam Truitt, Andrew McCarron and Sparrow X. Carter talk about “Lafayette,” both the historical figure (French Marquise and a US founder) and the square in Washington, DC that bears his name. The latter particularly has featured in the news recently: both as the site of the teargas-stun-grenade attack on BLACK LIVES MATTER protestors (that cleared it for Agent Orange’s bizarre march across it to bible thump at a nearby church); and as a sudden “no man’s land,” with its six-block entirety barricaded with eight-foot, chain-link fencing. The latter has been taken down, though not the questions its erection calls up. We touch on those, while filling out the Marquise’s patently heroic life and touching on what words he left us.

In this first of two sessions we talk humbly about, around, and through Robert Creeley by way of examining two poems: "The Immoral Proposition" and "Kore" (with more to come in our next session). This talk is characterized in part by our coming to terms of our inability to come to terms with what Creeley left us past deep appreciations and some loose holds on his poetics, intermixed with wonder at how much he was able to enjamb into the finitudes of his practice: "O love,/where are you/leading/me now?"

Feeling we may benefit from a work both far away and near, about isolation and home building and care (even in words), Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England” came to mind. Below is a link to the poem (with a recording of Bishop reading the poem), and otherwise listen here to us mull what Bishop made of Daniel Defoe’s most famous, seventeenth-century castaway’s experience and reflections—a timeless poem. She writes: “The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun/rose from the sea,/and there was one of it and one of me” – as Ted would say, “just like all of us!”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48287/crusoe-in-england

Here we steer into Bernadette Mayer's "Eve of Easter," leaving what wakes - the "shocking resurrection idea" included and all that that might freight. The poem was first published in Mayer's GOLDEN BOOK OF WORDS (Angel Hair, 1978) and republished in EATING THE COLORS OF A LINEUP OF WORDS: THE EARLY BOOKS OF BERNADETTE MAYER (Station Hill Press, 2015). This podcast also includes a Public Access Poetry recording of Mayer reading the poem on April 26, 1978. (There's a lot of ambient sound in that recording, sorry). One program note: We fail to mention that the poet John Milton's first wife was named Mary (Powell), as was one of their daughters (born October 25, 1648).

Here we speak of Alice Notley’s “Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice,” published in Selected Poems of Alice Notley (Talisman House, Publishers, 1993). Abetted in part by Sparrow having been Notley’s student in the mid-1980s, we turn up what insights we may glean about this work of dictation, actual or implied, from the departed Kerouac, touching on his life story and late challenges with the Beat movement he in part set in motion. This brings us to some discussion of the exigencies of the Lower East Side of New York’s '80s poetry forty years back, the New York School poetry “kit” and Notley’s seeming inveighing against scholasticism. We look into the virtues of the “knotty” poem, gender identifications (and ambiguities), the practice of channeling/clairvoyance, Mark Tansey’s “Triumph of the New York School,” Samuel Beckett’s poem “What is the Word?,” Dave Smith’s THE ONE PURE WORD, his critical essays on the poetry of James Wright, and speculations on the emergence of the universe (again). This podcast includes the sound of an undated video on YouTube of Notley reading the poem.

Four weeks into our collective Great Pause, the Bafflers examine “Red Shift,” Ted Berrigan’s iconic New York School poem. This close reading – distinguished in part by our own Sparrow having been Berrigan’s student - proceeds from the astrophysical definition of “redshift” to speculations into what attributive meanings to which Berrigan might allude. This includes a broad look into the nature of time as surfaced in the poem and in part depth charged in Berrigan situating the poem “at 8:08 p.m.” (the Eight-Fold Path, I-Ching and Hubble’s insights into an exploding universe). We touch on his forebearers – Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery - as well as Berrigan’s friends and allies, including Joe Brainard, Dick Gallup and Ron Padgett (including a nod to the latter’s memoir TED). We look to his nineteenth-century antecedents in the Transcendentalists and Whitman as well as how Berrigan self-identified as a late Beatnik. We touch on the role the song “California Dreaming” plays in the work and Berrigan’s working-class poetics, among other ruminative forays, including the Esopus River, the poets Jorie Graham, Bernadette Mayer, Lewis Warsh and Robinson Jeffers, as well as what existential insight might be disguised in a Harris Tweed jacket. SPECIAL FEATURE: We embed a recording of Berrigan reading the work at Naropa University, 1982, from EXACT CHANGE Yearbook 1995 no. 1 (Ed. Peter Gizzi).

ADDENDUM:

1. The chronological early publishing history of THE SONNETS is correctly listed below:

C Press — c1963. Mimeograph edition

Grove Press — c1967

United Artists — 1982 (With seven additional sonnets not in original)

2. This podcast includes speculation around Berrigan's financial straits and schemes as well as the circumstances around his death. We regret and ask forgiveness for any inaccuracies, and please listen with an open heart.

In our on-going inquiry into the nature of the Great Pause, this third QUARANTINE session trains itself on John Ashbery’s much ballyhooed poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” an ekphrasis composition taking its frame and flame from the painting of the same name by Italian Renaissance artist Francesco Parmigianino (1503-1540). Without wandering too far from the work, we cite and sometimes linger on Raymond Roussel, Lisa Jarnot, Charles North, Kenneth Koch, the soul and its shapes, the appearance of “sequestered,” Walt Whitman, Jonathan Swift, W.B. Yeats, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” the word “speculum,” Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham and, once more with feeling, The Tetragammaton.

In this second QUARANTINE session we range over where we are and where we’re not, looking back to glimpse the way ahead and what the unknown feels like, through ruminations on THE CAVE IN THE SNOW, the memoir of a 12-year spiritual retreat by Tenzin Palmo (English born Diane Perry), Dag Hammarskjold’s MARKINGS, the web and the Zoom, hand wringing over hand washing, Sparrow’s dictum that “staying home is the new activism, and Jack Spicer’s poem “It is Forbidden to Look”—-where our discussion in and on the Great Pause took a pause. Following the form of the Spicer poem, which in part occurs within the myth of Orpheus and his descent to the underworld—-in Spicer case, following the screenplay of Cocteau’s “Orfe,” via a wall mirror-—to Eurydice back to life, after a few days we reflect on what we had said as well as keep going, touching on Ginsberg’s first reading of HOWL in 1955 and its 1980, 25th-anniversary performance, Greg Masters’ collaborative poem with Steve Levine “Well Hello” (for Arthur Rimbaud), the play “He Who Gets Slapped” by Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev, the nature of masks and marks, and a homage to women, who it turns out outstrip men as our current essential workforce.

We owe the word “quarantine” to the Venetians who in 1377 instituted a policy of keeping ships from plague-stricken countries waiting off its port for 40 days. While hard athwart those among us with COVID19, the quarantine sense is felt by all of us as an echo as we pass through this time of more or less world-wide social isolations, distancings and lock downs. Here we touch on and grapple with some of its immediate practical realties, associations from the past, and speculations on the shape of things to come as we discuss the Dead Sea Scrolls, John Donne, the parable of the “appointment at Samara” (as well as the John O’Hara novel by that name), Buckminster Fuller, Aristotle’s POLITICS (Book Two), the “Wild Child of Avignon,” Jung, Robert Duncan”s “Childhood’s Retreat,” a passage from THE BOOK OF DANIEL, John Prine, Hal Willner, Sonny Rollins, Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed. We’re going to do a series of sessions within the quarantine universe, broadly speaking—so settle in. Also, this podcast includes numerous, aspirational refrains to Sparrow’s fabulous 101-year-old father sequestered in Brooklyn.