The week is cresting, and I feel good. I woke up apprehensively on Monday. Tuesday, I woke again with problems that needed resolving. Yesterday, things were worked out somewhat. Today, the pile of papers on my desk has not diminished, but there is the sense, as Frank O’Hara writes at the end of "Joe’s Jacket" of being ready (of course he was speaking of a Monday, well, it’s something to strive for).
I am back in Black Mountain: lectures coming up on the artists (SVA) and the poets (The New School). Reading John Wieners, amazed by the way his lines seem so courtly and classical, while at the same time being smeared with the bodily fluids of outlaw life and love.
Again to smell what this calm
ocean cannot tell us. The seasons.
Only the heart remembers
and records in the words
of works
we lay down for those men
who can come to them.
I love the way he bends the meanings, so that "we lay down for those men" stands on it its own, while simultaneously being part of the phrase "works we lay down for those man who can…" Works suggests poems, and men who can come to them (If Olson or Williams were writing this) would men mean who can understand. Here "come to them" has an undeniably sexual overtone. I also like the way, if you take the last sentence as a whole, the heart remembers and records, but the poem does not tell us what it records. It is a sentence without an object, leaving it open for each reader to make his or her own recording of the moment, while reading or remembering this poem. There is something formally beautiful and stylistically modern about the encasing of the rhymes words/works and calm/come.
More later, it’s time for breakfast.
