Aljibar by Pierre Joris

If poets send me c.d.'s I usually add them to my Media Player.

So I am fairly accustomed now to the voice of Pierre Joris (and John Most and many of the San Diego poets of the early nineties who were involved with WE magazine and many others.) I especially love to hear Harold Moe and Katie Yates perform, whether singly or in groups.

My Media Player seems to like Pierre because it serves him up muchly, and that's fine by me. He's a strong reader and some of the pieces are supported by strong musicians, rappers, aleatoric shortwave radio, you name it...good stuff. You can buy the disc at his site.

Last night I was enjoying his recent book Aljibar (graphiti 65), which is a strong collection but also a paragon of book design.

The black and white illustrations throughout are sometimes reminiscent of those Joe Brainard did for An Anthology of New York Poets, and complement the poetry well.

It's a bilingual edition, with the French translations (by Eric Sarner) en face.

There is a beautiful invocation by Anselm Hollo at the beginning of the book in French I have to type here: "Une diaspora permanente - l'etat ideal."

And sly Pierre noted the strange resonance of something obviously coming through his headphones on a plane he was flying on...dig this...the politesse of software...

"Patientez s'il vous plait. La langue que vous avez demandee est en cours d'elaboration."

("Please be patient. The language you have requested is now being prepared."

Tres Vanilla Sky.

That's exactly how I feel about contemporary poetry too, Pierre lol.

I wanted to share three poems from the middle of the book.

I'll give you both versions.

    Novalis, Revisited

Who does
not love
the light?
Rhetorical first
line of
the first
hymn to
its opposite,
night, a
vague face
lifting, now
lifted into
gray dullness
of cloudy
day over
Albany, NY
here we
live inside
weather, day
or night,
shutter clicks
still images
into place
that are
never still
only stilled
by our
will to
do just
that, it
is never
it is
always day
or night
we live
inside the
weather of
the wolves
between chien
et loup
between the
dogs & the
wolves
our condition
though we
admire the
eyes of
our cats,
their ability
to see
the whole
spectrum
of light,
of night,
the ana-
logical the
-logon the
digits stay
where they
belong pawing
earth scratching
bark or
back incremental
security, careful
one-twos
against the
lithe slide
the un-
stoppable glide
into day
into night
---no time
only distance.


If I'm not mistaken, en francais the time "entre chien et loup" is the dusk hour, a European metaphor of old, for the fall of night and the ascendancy of the more primitive, feral form of the same creature. And of course this would apply to us as well as that's how it's being thematically torqued in the context of Joris's poem. Don't we often quicken at night, feel the prowling and other ancient instincts return then? Okay, so you're married. Use your imagination.

Of course, that twilight state is about more than sex. It's our hopeless plight, "our condition" to be creatures of violence, angels with dirty faces. Isn't that what God called Lucifer? But he was beautiful an hour before he fell. As it's used by the poet here, the drift is also Promethean, the idea of man as a creature somehow stealing light, the fire of consciousness from the more general darkness that abides.

The opening lines of the poem definitely seem to invoke Lucifer without speaking his name. And later Lucifer morphs into Prometheus.

Isn't that how myths speak to each other--their strange subterranean connectedness we sense even though we are up here on the surface. Culture dials a wrong number but starts talking anyway. So myth engenders myth. Life is a strange concatenation. At the root. Literally (D.N.A.) and figuratively (the molecular sentences of the object).

I'm fairly certain that metaphor (chien et loup) is used by Follain in his Transparence du Monde. I always liked that collection, the impossible to imitate spareness of those small poems. Merwin did a good job translating that. I saw it went back into print a few years ago. It should.

I like the way the poet captures the history of writing, the phenomenology of writing with his strange pun on "digits (numbers in a computer versus fingers). The bestiality of a spirit is captured here:

"-logon the
digits stay
where they
belong pawing
earth scratching
bark or
back incremental
security, careful
one-twos
against the
lithe slide
the un-
stoppable glide..."

That's strangely sexy imagery, where writing is anachronistically traced to its physical roots. The poet foregrounds the animality inherent in text.

Now the French words griffes and chiffres are hybridizing in my mind.

Here's the French version Sarner gives us (apologies that I am not going to keyboard the accents):

    Novalis, Revisite

Qui
n'aime pas
cette lumiere?
Premiere ligne
rhetorique du
premier
chant a
son contraire,
la nuit,
vague visage
sou-leve
face lifting,
maintenant
leve en
grise grisaille
d'un jour
couvert sur
Albany, NY
ici nous
vivons a l'interieur
du temps, jour
ou nuit,
volet clique
et fixe les images
en place
qui ne sont
jamais fixes
seulement fixees
par notre
volonte de
faire juste
cela, ce
n'est jamais
c'est
toujours jour
ou nuit
nous vivons
a l'interieur du
temps des
loups
entre chien
et loup
notre condition
meme si nous
admirons les
yeux de
nos chats,
leur capacite
a voir
le spectre
entier de lumiere,
de nuit,
l'ana
logique le
-logon les
doigts-pattes restent
la ou ils
doivent gratter
la terre
grattent le dos
securite
mesuree,
aller-retours
attentifs
douce glissade
la coulee in-
arretable
dans le jour
dans la nuit
--pas de temps
la distance seule.


And I found myself drawn to this poem...


    HOMAGE/COLLAGE FOR ERIC MOTTRAM @ 70

1....I am searching unceasingly for my own discovery"
2. it takes leisure to be a man is revolution
3. granddad, why are they all whispering?
4. this is now what I want to do, I want to know
5. an image      an open hand with things in it
6. the result of composed ascent
7. concepts as modes of ordering
8. performance as what is revealed, moving outwards
9. the embryonic form of organisation
10. laughter of naked bathers
11. of transformed beings returned to the steep sea
12. break the mesh that grips us
13. an errand in wilderness
14. consult a goodbookseller as to whether a book is
15. the fields of exchange
16. back there at origins a traveling forward soul springs up
17. the waterfall     the illuminating gas
18. I hope this list will be regarded as an open
19. do you enter space from edges    by intersecting lines
20. you eat light your eyes carry
21. a parenthesis of what is to be known
22. but a gun to show that he was a faithful private
23. in liberty    a space   of flame between us
24. Social roles, rituals, taboos, manners and conventions are boundaries of
25. their bark and moan   songs of the story tellers
26. believe that in offering a candid account of himself he creates
27. to choose insecurity
28. gather surprise among limestone turf plants
29. The clearest example of work which actually leap out of the area of
30. knows that the naturally depraved yearns to be a policeman
31. trample workers
32. Intelligent ones should generate the excellent Bodhi-mind
33. when creatures learn     brain nucleic acids change
34. our nostril move    we stride on a hill curve   air moves
35. from then on my road meets everyman's road from the south of solitude
36. shieldless venture in adventure / we dare in the undaring sea
37. tracks laid down underwater
38. from separate existence/this bites in my mouth your kiss
39. "Collage-design method is, as he puts it, 'transformation.' It is similar"
40. neck erect for songs at a high level space/
41. on each cusp spandrel corbel lovers beside angels
42. have you woken up mad with information
43. against fluted pillars the grainy dark of news
44. "the subversions of his own power and confidence"
45. tokens of myself brought here up through clay and soil
46. so a tongue breaks words it assumed memorized
47. the balance acts refuse sacrifice the waste loneliness
48. from a man half through our wall strides towards us
    parts us / and
49.     few leaves touch to live a difference of breath
50. satori
51. determined not to disappear
52. living in a world more or less homicidal and desperately mercantile
53. "gut passion, crystal clarity of intellect: two energies, two modes"
54. the work: encounter between    and consolidation
55. he returns me to his head
56. here rewrite the message that is you
57. shaken by the fire and darkness of his time    I lived
   the lives of others
58. friends we need to believe
59. whereby I lived, and moved, and had my being aboard the
60. media prisons through terrors of recognition
61. three kinds of silence and movement in the long
    wind-strung day
62. "Mottram demonstrates how poetry can be political without"
63. a liberation into power
64. of leisure without guilt
65. shards in winter    Night in Tunisia
66. fertile to recognize resemblance
67. a man goes forth stops in the sun
68. beneath light surface   fold on fold
69. we to whom the world is our native country
70. "figures always foreboded, awaited, and loved rise
    into view"


This poem uses collage to create a portrait of a man who lived his life in literature, theory, flesh, words, spirit. I didn't know much about who Eric Mottram was, but I found this online...

from Wiki...


Eric Mottram (1924 – January 16, 1995) was a teacher, critic, editor and poet who was one of the central figures in the British Poetry Revival.


Early life and education

Mottram was born in London and educated at Purley Grammar School, Croydon, and Blackpool Grammar School, Lancashire. In 1943, he was awarded a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge but opted to serve in the Royal Navy instead, only taking up the scholarship in 1947. He graduated with honours in 1950. Over the following decade, Mottram travelled extensively and worked as a teacher in Switzerland, Singapore and the Netherlands.


King's College London

In 1960, Mottram returned to London and took a post as Lecturer in English and American Literature at King's College London. At the time, King's was one of very few British universities to offer American studies, and Mottram was to prove a pioneer in the field. He co-founded the Institute of United States Studies in 1963, the same year in which his tenure as a lecturer at King's was confirmed. In 1973, became Reader in English and American Literature and was appointed professor in 1982. In September 1990 he retired with the title Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature.


Mottram and the Beat Generation

In the early sixties, Mottram travelled to the United States and met a number of writers, including William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg and others. He became friendly with William Burroughs during his time in London. These contacts resulted in three of Mottram's best-known critical books; William Burroughs: the algebra of need (1971, British edition 1977), Allen Ginsberg in the Sixties (1972) and Paul Bowles: staticity & terror (1976). These studies did much to help introduce the Beat writers to a wider British audience.


Mottram as poet

Mottram's first book of poetry, Inside the whale was published by Bob Cobbing's Writers Forum in 1970. He went on to publish at least another 34 collections, including A Book of Herne: 1975-1981, Elegies (both (1981)) and Selected poems (1989).

His work clearly shows the influence of the American avant-garde poets he admired, particularly in his use of techniques such as found poetry, cut-up technique and collage, but it also has a distinctly British quality in the tradition of Basil Bunting.

An interview with Mottram appeared in the London based magazine Angel Exhaust, along with his poetry.


Mottram as editor

In 1971, Mottram was made editor of the Poetry Society's magazine Poetry Review. Over the next six years, he edited twenty issues that featured most, if not all, of the key poets associated with the British Poetry Revival and carried reviews of books and magazines from the wide range of small presses that had sprung up to publish them. Mottram also included work by a number of American poets, a fact that ultimately led to his removal from the post.

During this period, Mottram was twice a guest lecturer at Kent State University, where, along with Black Mountain poet Ed Dorn, he was an early supporter of the musical group Devo, and its founders Gerald Casale and Bob Lewis, whose poetry Mottram published when he was editor of the Poetry Review. He also edited The Rexroth Reader (1972) and the section of the 1988 anthology New British Poetry that was given over to the poets associated with the Revival.

So I have another poet to investigate. If Bob Cobbing published him, I be there was some strong poetry in the man. And if he got along famously with Burroughs, he must have been a great guy. It doesn't get much better than Burroughs for this reader.
The digital vatic works for me.

And this poem is rather a display of digital vaticination.

Interesting that the Algebra of Need book on Burroughs is mentioned above. While I haven't read that and don't know what the title references, I think instantly of a Burroughsian metaphor for addiction. What is addiction but a shift-place substitution practiced within the human body?

And the etymology? Again from Wiki...

"While the word "algebra" comes from Arabic word (al-jabr , الجبر), its origins can be traced to the ancient Babylonians,[1] who developed an advanced arithmetical system with which they were able to do calculations in an algebraic fashion. With the use of this system they were able to apply formulas and calculate solutions for unknown values for a class of problems typically solved today by using linear equations, quadratic equations, and indeterminate linear equations.

With Joris, the algebra seems to be more an image of Ultimate Translation. The fact that languages are indeed linguistic forms of algebra, with sign and signified constantly being switched. Language is really the ultimate place holder. To quote a spooky Laurie Anderson line with Wittgensteinian overtones: "Let X = X."

We can make some educated guesses about the metholodology of text generation here. Some lines seem to be statements culled from possibly correspondence or public discourse, and possibly some lines are from Mottram's poetry.

There are some typos in this poem and the French translation is missing some of the lines which are present in the English version of the poem. I don't think these are intentional lacunae, but it does create an interesting feel and Kandinsky's comment about chance being the greatest artist comes to mind, since the impossibility of perfect translation is reinforced by these erosions of seme...semen...semence...demence...humans are translated into new beings by just such textual accidents in genetic mutation....

For example, Line 2 in French reads: "devenir un homme de loisir est revolution" which is "to become a man of leisure is revolutionary." If we think of this statement not in the bourgeois manner, but in the way the young Rimbaud aspired to be "l'homme aux les semelles de vent" it makes sense. The English line would seem to be plagued by a typo, unless Joris is deliberating introducing cognitive dissonance by altering lines to untrue the translation, which seems unlikely since the strategy (if it is such) is not continued throughout the poem or repeated at all.

The poem's dislocational swerves at each end point link up well. It is the jarring and unnerving sensation we receive when we realize how much of nature (including human language as a subprogram) is automatic, pseudo-conscious, quick with a life that isn't really there....or is it? H.A.L. is just such a textual shift (one letter away in each digital "place") from I.B.M.

So the poem functions well on dual levels; it is a moving portrait of a life lived in letters, and it is a life in letters itself, the Strange Hand that manifests even when we are not willing it to do so.

"Have you woken up mad with information?

The last line, parallelling the last year of the poet's life, makes it quite clear that The Figures it is speaking of are both the language we mint, and ourselves.

It hearkens back, of course, to a celebrated Creeley poem.

But the poem's supernatural punning, its fast movement between cultures until a crystalline oscillation is set up with the vibration, is Joris's signature hability.

70. "figures always foreboded, awaited, and loved rise into view."

And this little theory poem on page eighty-two offers a succinct take on poetics a la Joris.

Here, the idea of nomadicism is embraced as an external image of what is happening internally with the linguistic/poetic process.

Joris, the peripatetic being between cultures, between places and languages, insists the homelessness of the poem is its natural state.

The poet believes in the prismatic chromaticism of a word that is held at arm's length and between languages.

Reading these lines, one is put in mind of Paul Bowles and his similar valorization of a form of spiritual nomadicism, which appeared etched into many of his characters as ineradicably as it was in the landscapes through which they passed.



    The word, the mawqif


The word is/as the mawquif, the station,
the oasis, the momentary resting place.
    The caravan of syntax discovers it, the
new word, as it, the sentence, pushes into
the not-yet-written, the word comes, or is
given -- however this happens, found,
given, stolen or made up? And I stop, and
if the word is new or re-newed, I will be
surprised & delighted & the rest of it -- for a
moment, then the push of ta'wil will get
the sentence or line or caravan on track,
no, on the trek again, into the desert
ahead, in search of another oasis-word,
resting place, station.



    Le mot, le mawqif

Le mot est/tel le mawqif, la halte, l'oasis,
le lieu de repos momentane.
    La caravane des syntaxes le decouvre,
le nouveau monde, tel quel, la phrase,
avance dans le non-encore ecrit, le mot
vient, ou est donne - d'une facon ou
d'une autre trouve, donne, vole ou inven-
te? Et j'arrete, et si le mot est neuf ou
renove, je serai surpris et ravi et me repo-
serai en lui--un instant, puis la poussee
du ta'wil placera la phrase ou le vers ou la
caravane en piste, non, la remettra en che-
min, en avancee vers le desert, en quete
d'un autre mot-oasis, refuge, halte.


What can I say to that but...

Selah.