I was just visiting Volcano, staying quite close to Albert's old cottage, which looks quite different now--it's painted and has an overhang to protect the wood--and thought a lot about him and his influence on me and others. So, in the interest of keeping an archive, I'm going to paste in the talk I delivered on his notebooks last year in March in Hilo.
If you're interested in Saijo, simply type his name into the blog's search engine. You'll find another essay, or two, as well as considerations of the notebooks that include photographs I took of some of them.
LOOK
LIKE WHAT IT MEANS
A
Few Propositions On Albert Saijo's Notebooks
I WILL NEVER USE A MACHINE TO WRITE – IT ELIMINATES THE EYE HAND
MIND ART OF CALLIGRAPHY THAT WILL EVER BE A PART OF COMPOSITION FOR
ME
--Albert Saijo, WOODRAT
FLAT
Writing
is such a “reportless” place—the word is Dickinson’s, and it
comes from a poem—indeed, a manuscript—that I love and that
begins: “In many and reportless places – one feels a joy….”
While writing or thought is
reportless, the manuscript is the material trace of that process and,
I believe, of the joy that attends it.
--Marta Werner, co-editor of Dickinson's envelope poems
1.
Albert
Saijo did not write poems, he wrote words, sentences, blocks of
hand-written printing. His notebooks, some as small as a memo pad,
others as large as a “utility notebook,” were full of pencilled
words and sketches. Hardly anywhere was there an indication that what
he was writing was “poem.” The poems came after, when Saijo or
his wife or editor marked sections of writing that became poems.
These were typed in manuscripts of capital letters, followed by the
books and journal pages in all caps. His cottage industry of writing
was transmuted (and diminished) into the mass production of type.
2.
To
write by hand or to speak out loud is to court the muse of
dissolution. Saijo wrote in pencil, which can easily be erased. His
notebooks reside in two or three plastic tubs, piled up in no
particular order. Many of the pages are smudged (the page about
having a shit is oddly besmirched by a brown stain: SLIDE). Not one
of his pages looks like any other of the pages; each was composed as
a separate field. In his essay, “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson
writes in all caps: “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND
DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.” Citing his friend, Robert
Creeley, Olson insists that “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION
OF CONTENT.” If content is meaning, then Saijo's form was page and
pencilled capital letters (at least after the 1970s, when he still
wrote in cursive). Or do they work the other way around?
3.
Olson and his friends loved the typewriter, because its mechanism
could stitch words across the field of composition; the white space
was more a canvas on which to draw than a parking lot where words get
parked, left to right and then back again. My students tell me that a
typewritten page feels more “personal” to them, and I suggest
that's because it's an old technology more than that it's in any way
“personal.” But if typing the score to a word-composition
attaches the poet to the instrument of his or her voice, the
typewriter is personal. Olson wanted writing to follow the breath,
the poet to be attached to his voice. He was already one step further
in technological time than Saijo was in later decades.
4.
Saijo—always after and before his time—used the typewriter to
institutionalize his poems. The typed page was a to-be-published
poem. But the writing, that was done by hand. It is on his notebook
pages, not on the typed page, that he most identifies with Olson's
field of composition, often completely covered in black letters. The
printed book is an after-image of his text, a translation more than a
conveyance of his thoughts. How can anyone think that this poem is
the same as this poem? [“Why not take the fun view?” in
handwriting, and then in the book: SLIDES]
5.
But
what is different
about the two versions of this poem? Is it simply that one is grandly
messy, while the other is entirely too neat? Not so much. What's lost
is process and, even more radically than that, the movement of time.
There's a kind of sound in time's movement that is smudge,
crossing-out, over-writing. The typed version of “having fun” is
relatively no fun at all: its static and all its neatness suggests an
antiseptic notion of nature and a perhaps appropriately clean view of
what nuclear winter will bring. But the hand-written version, the
original and authentic (though I dislike that word) one, that's
kinetic. Charles Olson again: “A poem is energy transferred
from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by
way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay.
Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct
and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to
accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a
poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the
energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is
peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different
from the energy which the reader, because he is the third term, will
take away?” Well that's more abstract than a Saijo poem would have
it. The kinesis is in Saijo's writing. The typo for “extremity”
as “extemity” is not a typo at all, because it's handwritten. It
marks the speed of his writing, perhaps, more than that of his
fingering on a keyboard.
6.
In her book of passionate criticism, My Emily Dickinson, Susan
Howe argues that editors ruined Dickinson's handwritten poetry by
regularizing it in type, changing her idiosyncratic symbols and
punctuation, putting all the words in lines from left to right. In
their original, they looked like blocks, not the neat hymn-like poems
we see in printed versions, even those more faithful to the original
than the early versions. Howe's argument was and is feminist; male
editors, she claimed, had “tamed” Dickinson's wildness and had
organized them in a different order from that of the fascicles that
Dickinson had sewn together like chapbooks. Dickinson had tried to
get her poems published, but then turned away from the public form,
holding them close to hand in her room. Because they are in her
handwriting, Dickinson's poems are difficult to decipher. Albert
Saijo's volumes of Dickinson's facsimile poems, which I recommended
to him, contain a dog-ear. At that turned down page is this poem, in
Dickinson's handwriting, decipher—or better stated, re-ciphered—in
Saijo's handwriting. [Slide]
7.
Howe is interested in the Thomas Johnson edition of Dickinson's
poetry from the 1950s—not so long ago, in fact. The male editor has
power over the woman writer, she argues. Far be it from me to make a
similar claim about Tinfish's treatment of Albert Saijo(!) but much
of the wildness of his work is best expressed in the hand-written
versions of the poems. A lover of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau,
the American Transcendental tradition didn't work for the mid-20th
century Japanese-American writer. While Thoreau installed himself in
a cabin in the woods, Saijo and his family were shipped to Heart
Mountain as internees during the Second World War. There can be no
such thing as an interned Transcendentalist, at least not without a
lot of grief. After the war, Saijo was harassed by police over his
marijuana farming; his writing, while open to nature, is often
paranoid about human nature. And for good reason. His
hand-writing was one form of resistance to the documentation his
family and he had been subjected to. It allowed him to be an
individual in the world of type-cast others.
8.
[SLIDE
of Chuang Tzu poem] We saw a few minutes ago that Saijo had “typos”
in his hand-written work. I found a typo in WOODRAT FLAT after it was
published. As an editor, I have a good eye for typos,
especially after the book has been published. So I notice that toward
the beginning of the poem, Saijo has written, "THESE 2 TREES
SURVIVED BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO ODD TO LOG," while at the end,
the Tinfish version replaces "ODD" with "OLD":
"CHUANG TZE YOU'RE RIGHT BE TOO OLD TO LOG." The editor has
taken out some of the writing that wanders above and below the final
lines. Did he change "ODD" to "OLD"? Did our
scanner do it? Did we do it? The mysteriousness of the mistake is
appropriate to any consideration of editing, especially when the
manuscript is by someone so prone to over-writing, to self-editing,
to making the reader's life at once pleasurable and difficult. The
replacement does not ruin the poem: Chuang Tzu is, after all, quite
old. Too old to log.
9.
But why
the poem about the tree, with a punch line about Chuang Tzu, a
punch-line that seems to have turned into a title? Saijo refers to a
Buddhist parable here. The tree, like Chuang Tzu's teachings, is
"useless." Then, by way of a wildcat, a mouse, and a yak,
the writer of the parable gets to his punchline, which is also a
warning. "So for your big tree, no use?" The teacher
advises his interlocutor to plant the useless tree in a waste land,
and to walk around it, meditating. No one will ever cut the tree
down. "Useless? You should worry!" concludes the teaching.
10.
The
oddness of Saijo's two old Douglas firs saved them. Saijo was himself
an able carpenter. Many of his notebooks contain conceptual and more
detailed drawings of houses and furniture, including his own house
and chair. He knew use value. But he was also someone who knew
non-value, the art of sitting around in front of the fire, sketching
out his thoughts as they flickered by. Handwriting is nearly useless
now. My kids have learned to write on computers; they text, they use
Facetime, they write essays directly into the computer. You need a
signature for your checks, if then, which monetizes handwriting in
ways Saijo would have hated. What is original—the scratch of our
writing implement on paper—is what can be cashed in, if our balance
is good.
11.
Marta Werner notes: “And we see new things—things we didn’t see
before. Signs of speed and of slowness often appear on the manuscript
of the draft. In Dickinson’s case, accelerations in thought are
marked in the slant of the writing or the blurring of ink or
graphite. And sometimes we can also see a slowing down of
composition, as if she was making her way more uncertainly, moving
like a 'stranger through the house of language.' There’s a
beautiful draft of Dickinson’s poem 'As Summer into Autumn slips'
in which she compulsively reworks a passage, repeating and
substituting the words 'thought' and 'shaft,' and when I look at
these marks on the page, I can almost see her trying to redynamize
the trace of writing. Gabriel Josipovici said that writing is
'something that is happening … at the cross-roads of the mental and
the physical.'”
12.
In the introduction to Black Riders: The Visible Language of
Modernism, Jerome McGann
discusses the “misrepresentation” of Dickinson's poetry in the
Thomas Johnson edition. “It has approached her work,” he writes,
“as if it aspired to a typographical existence. On the contrary,
Dickinson's scripts cannot be read as if they were 'printer's copy'
manuscripts, or as if they were composed with an eye toward some
state beyond their handcrafted textual condition.” Even though
Dickinson wrote in an age of print, McGann argues, her poetry was not
written for print. A
similar case could be made for Saijo's writing, which cannot be
accurately translated into type, even if we're grateful to have the
messages he left us.
