february notes

hello… here again with the sweet sights & sounds of the shortest month ~

the sub-title is from james schuyler’s poem “february,” which is basically a poem about looking around at things at sunset. i always teach this one in my “attention” class at this time of year, after hearing this poemtalk episode about it with bernadette mayer in which she gets excited by how schuyler just says the names of colors. she’s right, it’s cool to know you can just say the names of colors in a poem. here’s a colorful february sunrise of my own:

i’ve heard people say that 4am is the time when the veil between worlds is thinnest… i have always felt this about february. this month i felt the strong absence of the lupercalian festival, a rite that purified the city of ancient rome in the middle of february. the lack of snow this winter made it worse, more unwashed. i would like to suggest that we get lupercalia started again and run through the financial district with wolf-fur belts, as the romans did. we could all use some ritual purification this time of year.

below, another list of things i encountered and liked while looking around lately. not much else to report! hope you had a decent, tho unpurified, month.

Pier Paolo Pasolini – Trilogy of Life (1971-74)

Alive in every way you can imagine — and great to watch as the winter trudges along. My fave was the Canterbury Tales in which Pasolini casts himself as a lazy Chaucer who rips off Boccaccio. In the final scene in Hell, there is an endless volley of priests out of Satan’s asshole.

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Ming-Liang Tsai – Rebels of the Neon God (1992)

A solid early work, whose symbolic world turns around a flooded apartment… a lot of haunting scenes of flip flops squishing through the puddle-hallway… maddie and I decided that this movie is about video game addiction

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Maria Negroni — Mouth of Hell, trans. Michelle Gil-Montero (Action Books, 2013)

prose poems responding to a novelistic response to the allegorical sculptures of a 16th century italian duke. in the 1962 novel, by the argentine novelist manuel mujica lainez, “duke orsini, the morose hunchback who mirrors his life in the sacred forest of monsters, ventures into the grotto one moonlit night with a potion promising immortality. he hopes to discover the true nature of his existence.” sadly, the potion turns out to be poisoned. negroni’s version centers around this final empotion’d night of deathward self-discovery, making this scene into a figure for an infernal poetics: disfigured, lost, at the echoic entrance to hell.

Edouard Leve – Autoportrait (Dalkey, 2012)

It’s great. A more melancholy Perec/Brainard brainchild, a paratactic Proust. I love the quality of Leve’s attention – the archeology of minor sentiment, the entfremdung of the piecemeal self, the commitment to truth-telling, the desire “not to change anything” which is what lends such beauty to what is.

There are so many negations in Leve’s list – all the things he doesn’t do, that don’t feel necessarily like regrets but rather a way of carving out the shape of a self through negation of what is not-self. It reminds me of a profile I once read of Gerald Murnane which mentions a list he keeps of all the things he’s never done: worn sunglasses, flown in a plane. This practice feels true and important to me: a rebuttal perhaps of the sense that any choice can be made, any action can be taken – we have a finite amount of time, we must choose. Leve was 38 when he wrote this, realizing that we’re defined just as much by what we neglect and what we opt out of. Of course this book can’t not be retroactively marked by Leve’s more existential opting out (I haven’t read his more famous book on the subject) but his sense of negation in Autoportrait seems perhaps connected to this…

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Lee Young-Ju - Cold Candies, trans. Jae Kim (Black Ocean, 2021)

In the translator Jae Kim’s intro, he mentions Lee Young-Ju had an accident as a child which left her partially blind in one eye, which led to her slantwise approach both visually and poetically to the world. He’s right that there’s a sideways optics to the poems’ slow pan over secret terrors – nothing ever gets taken in all together, but in shifting bits that grow like molds, come apart, crawl, burn, fall, eat each other, pool, clot, jump off cliffs, fall apart or are chopped off or appear in the wrong places. “If only I could embrace them all and get thrown out of this world. I want to become glass. Opaque window glass.”

But there are figures, like the Sister, for an intimacy that is there still, but hard to bear: “I don’t like you people. I don’t like myself, who can’t cast you aside. Nor do I like the sadness of not being able to dislike the entirety of what I dislike.”

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Duo Duo (多多)– Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems, trans. Lucas Klein (2021)

The poems Duo Duo has written after his return to China in 2004 really reward extended meditation. I got it from the library but quickly realized that wasn’t enough time to spend with this one... not easy to categorize; it’s really “poetic thought” as J.H. Prynne once called it in a speech in 2008 in Guangzhou – a kind of thinking by & through language at a level beneath the “outer shells” of the personal & political, which it employs to get to something deeper, the “extreme density of the unresolved.” Fitting that Duo Duo is considered one of the Misty poets, a name which I love… kind of wish US poetry ‘schools’ had such sick designations.

Régis Bonvicino – Sky-Eclipse: Selected Poems (Green Integer, 2000)

A lot of great poems translated by Michael Palmer, Robert Creeley, Douglas Messerli, and a lot of others (including one silly homophonic translation by his buddy Charles Bernstein) … Bonvicino is really neat — syntactic disjunction mirroring urban decay (or overwork?), a minimalism that keeps its cool while strumming loose prepositions into something close to the Romantic, but echoey and feedbacky… also, you can learn a lot about brazilian poetry on his blog.

finally, here’s a playlist i made this month. good for walking around and looking at stuff. inspired by an imaginary walking tour of meadowlands american dream…

onward to march~