Syllabi for Spring, 2015

English 410: Form & Theory of Poetry

English 313: Introduction to Creative Writing: Forms of Attention

John Muir on the wood rat & his flat

from First Summer in the Sierra, "North Fork of the Merced," Library of America, William Cronon, editor, 193-194.


The chaparral-covered hill-slope to the south of the camp, besides furnishing nesting-places for countless merry birds, is the home and hiding-place of the curious wood rat (Neotoma), a handsome, interesting animal, always attracting attention wherever seen. It is more like a squirrel than a rat, is much larger, has delicate, thick, soft fur of a bluish slate color, white on the belly; ears large, thin, and translucent; eyes soft, full, and liquid; claws slender, sharp as needles; and as his limbs are strong, he can climb about as well as a squirrel. No rat or squirrel has so innocent a look, is so easily approached, or expresses such confidence in one's good intentions. He seems too fine for the thorny thickets he inhabits, and his hut also is as unlike himself as may be, though softly furnished inside. No other animal inhabitant of these mountains builds houses so large and striking in appearance. The traveler coming suddenly upon a group of them for the first time will not be likely to forget them. They are built of all kinds of sticks, old rotten pieces picked up anywhere, and green prickly twigs bitten from the nearest bushes, the whole mixed with miscellaneous odds and ends of everything moveable, such as bits of cloddy earth, stones, bones, deerhorn, etc., piled up in a conical mass as if it were got ready for burning. Some of these curious cabins are six feet high and as wide at the base, and a dozen or more of them are occasionally grouped together, less perhaps for the sake of society than for advantages of food and shelter. Coming through the dense shaggy thickets of some lonely hillside, the solitary explorer happening into one of these strange villages is startled at the sight, and may fancy himself in an Indian settlement, and begin to wonder what kind of reception he is likely to get. But no savage face will he see, perhaps not a single inhabitant, or at most two or three seated on top of their wigwams, looking at the stranger with the mildest of wild eyes, and allowing a near approach. In the center of the rough spiky hut a soft nest is made of the inner fibers of bark chewed to tow, and lined with feathers and the down of various seeds, such as willow and milkweed. The delicate creature int its prickly, thick-walled home suggests a tender flower in a thorny involucre. Some of the nests are built in trees thirty or forty feet from the ground, and even in garrets, as if seeking the company and protection of man, like swallows and linnets, though accustomed to the wildest solitude. Among house-keepers Neotoma has the reputation of a thief, because he carries away everything transportable to his queer hut,--knives, forks, combs, nails, tin cups, spectacles, etc.,--merely, however, to strengthen his fortifications, I guess. His food at home, as far as I have learned, is nearly the same as that of the squirrels--nuts, berries, seeds, and sometimes the bark and tender shoots of the various species of ceanothus.

(1869, published 1911)


See Albert Saijo's WOODRAT FLAT, here.

20

You are magnified among Angels and men: you are street view on google earth, swiveling up and down a street whose origin is a stop sign. The symbol for magnifying glass isn't one, though it serves the same purpose. My youth a field of dead metaphors on which I click my mouse, or touch the screen as if it were skin, tattooed. Pencils are old technology, but good symbolism. They travel better than hostages in a freezer locker, or a policewoman on her beat. The old Paris priest held a sign that named the dead, all of them. We know the killers by their videos. One brother picked up a sneaker from the street. It was an act of volition so small it fascinates. Another man sat beside a book case in which four books lean. I cannot read their spines, see only white paint, an otherwise bare room, a man in a black jacket beside a Kalishnikov. Testimony before the fact that cancels it.

--11 January 2015

Albert Saijo's Poems of the Climate

When I think of weather in poetry, I think of Wallace Stevens's poems on clouds, snow, winter. The best weather was simple, cold. But, because cold is not enough, the poet desires "so much more than that." Here is the first stanza of "Poems of Our Climate": "nothing more than carnations" is all that a human being needs, and not enough.

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

Lisa Robertson has more recently made the weather into the subject of an epic. In an essay quoted by Sina Queyres, she frames weather as a sincere rhetoric: "But I’m interested in weather also because cultural displacement has shown me that weather is a rhetoric. Furthermore, it is the rhetoric of sincerity, falling in a soothing, familial vernacular. It’s expressed between friendly strangers. I speak it to you. A beautiful morning. You speak it back. The fog has lifted."

Because she doubts sincerity, she concludes her book with this: “Sincerity says that identity is moral. I need it to be a tent, not a cave, a rhetoric, not a value. There’s also the fact that my sex is a problem with sincerity. I want to move on. I want a viable climate. I’ll make it in description." But Robertson, like Stevens, uses the weather to mean something other than the weather. Perhaps she's only commenting on the fact that this has happened, but she pursues the weather's rhetoric with her own inside-out metaphoricity.

Doubtless there are books on this subject, but weather as human desire or rhetoric is not my theme. Rather, I want to think about some of Albert Saijo's very last notebooks, written when he was clearly quite weak. In the early 2000s, he'd still been writing at length on his obsessions: against CIV, for animal nature, in praise of weed and the simple life. By 2010 (approximately), he devoted himself to a single subject, the weather. He produced pages full of reports on the weather in Volcano, on the Big Island in Hawai`i. Here are some of his pages.

Day after day, he notes whether is it day or night, windy or not, rainy or not, whether the sky is clear and has stars in it. There's the water guy, who needs to be called, but again there is the out of doors, the moon. One note of commentary/critique is a sentence or two about white people: "THE ONLY HUMANS ARE WHITE," he notes acerbically. And then the weather starts up again.

At first, these notebooks read as diminishment. The poet, who once had so many thoughts, is now reduced to local weatherman. But what a faithfulness to the world these pages represent! Day by day, sometimes hour by hour, he notes a state of being that will inevitably change. Saijo's weather notebooks refuse even the haiku's oblique lessons, except for "quite beautiful," "still beautiful." He writes what he sees, and leaves it at that. No punch lines or comic strips, no rants or aphorisms.

This poetry of witness, if I may call it that, is pure meditation on that most basic of the world's conditions, the weather. It is one man, outside himself, taking notes. This is not a poetry of desire that comes out of poverty, nor is it a poetry that considers weather to be a form of rhetoric. There is only the wish to record--not in conversation, but in solitude. These notebooks are not conversation, but homage to the world outside the window, and the self.

Notes:

Sina Queyres on Lisa Robertson, here.

Blog post #3 on the notebooks can be found here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2015/01/aphorism-adage-epigram-maxim-one-liner.html

Blog post #2 on Saijo's notebooks can be found here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2015/01/i-think-i-could-turn-and-live-with.html 

Blog post #1 on the notebooks here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2015/01/on-finding-typo-is-it-in-woodrat-flat.html

Albert Saijo's new Tinfish Press book, WOODRAT FLAT.

19

It is a long time before you come unto it, you pass it in an instant, and leave it for ever. That's too easy, Tom, and you know it. You've erased the scab you knew was there but stings all the more for getting yanked off. I'm in bed listening to doves and thrushes and the murmur of Battlestar Galactica. The actor looks famous, but I can't find his name. Is that the instant you mean, so ordinary? I remember walking across the campus of New South Wales with Hazel Smith. I have no memory of what we said.

--10 January 2015

18

The WORLD is not this little Cottage of Heaven and Earth. Hansel and Gretel trapped in a freezer at a kosher market in Paris. The wicked witch dressed in black, her face masked. She has taken hostages, considers that the word resembles host. Body and blood, what thins as you age, teeth leaning like trees in a hard wind. There is this to confront, time's ordeal. And when the “forces of order” broke open the door and shot the witch dead? Did they in the freezer know to come out? Scapegoats, with their funny meats, huddling in the cold. They were led there by a Muslim clerk, later handcuffed by police. He looked like the witch, you see. They all spoke such good French.

--10 January 2015

17

He is not an Object of Terror, but Delight. Terror is our subject, not our text. If history cedes to entertainment, terror is delight. Bad translation within the same lexicon. Hand to type. Monk to press (he plays soccer in an adjacent poem). Her Alzheimer's mother calls her Angie. Another mother called for Jenny: she was mother's lover, a missing piece. The dead were objects of convenience. Sublimity is passé , except as random violence. No more crossing the Alps, even boulevards. There is no time to think after. How we get PTSD matters less than that we have it. To have is to own; to own is to grasp. I want to see this world from the scenic look-out of a spiritual text. I cannot find my way back. I am leaving the city and entering the suburbs, away from my heart. Arteries flow backwards. If delight is a small store in the banlieu, I will go there to ask for samples.

--9 January 2015