Hard to fathom how James Schuyler (d. 12 April 1991) could be gone now 35 years. Here’s a piece I wrote—out, in a rather more mannerist version—of the final issue of John Tranter’s Jacket. I never met the man. Bless the big, breezy, long-lined marvels, bless the perfect skinny specifics, bless him.

Painter Francis Bacon talking to David Sylvester in 1962, with a “Self Portrait” dated 1971. (Somewhere Marianne Moore repeats the philosopher _Sir_ Francis Bacon’s line: “There is no excellent beauty, that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”)

At the Botanical Gardens, the GoatHead people snubbed the Great Wildebeest. The GoatHead people are worthless.

Read Nancy Lemann’s _Malaise_ (2002). I like how she drops unattributed quoted material into the doings. Here’s Walker Percy—mentor of sorts to Lemann; if her books remind me of any, it’s Percy’s _The Moviegoer_ (1961)—in a squib for a 1985 New York Times Book Review piece on “famous first lines”:

A. R. Ammons’s “Hymn”—found in _Expressions of Sea Level_ (1964). The usual Ammonsesque bout of easygoing pantheism seeming terribly precious today when so much else seems “chasmal to my ant-soul”:

Revisiting lines out of Melville’s famed 1850 quasi-manifesto “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” ascribed in its original as being “by a Virginian Spending July in Vermont.” To note: how William Carlos Williams, some 100 years later, saw the need to continue to call for the rejection of “a foreign model.”

Sad to hear of Glen Baxter's passing. A remarkable genius of the non sequitur. This is the pencil drawing he did for the cover of my 1977 poetry selection Fast Asleep from Z Press. I wanted a cross between a cheap detective novel and a tawdry sex paperback. Glen's illustration did not disappoint.

Out of the Portuguese fictioneer Gonçalo M. Tavares’s _The Neighborhood_ (2012), translated by Roopanjali Roy, a piece called “The Window.” Tiny vignettes of a comic “philosophical” bent concerning some of “the Misters”—Valéry, Calvino, Juarroz, Henri (Michaux), Kraus, and Walser.

Klara Maria Fehrle-Menrad (1885 - 1955) 'Obstbaumpflege' ca. 1925

Simon Palmer, Modest Margaret, watercolor, with ink and gouache.

Passing the shore of Minumé where they gather The beautiful seaweed, My boat has approached Cape Nujima of drooping summer grass. . The sea must be calm on Kehi Bay For I see fishermen’s boats Crowding out Like so many cut reeds. -Hitomaro, Manyōshū, (Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkōkai)

Photographer Sally Mann, in the “Prologue” to _Art Work_ (2025):

Some birds, including Great Crested Flycatchers and Northern House Wrens, have been known to drape snakeskins over their nests. Why? Evolving research suggests that, at least for cavity-nesting birds, the snakeskins act like a scarecrow against predators! Discover the details in this article:

To overcome this shabbily gathered existence and rediscover the gaze that, at its very beginning, loved it enough to lay out the foundations. Whatever I have left to live will be in this onslaught. This shiver. -René Char (tr. Gustaf Sobin)

A paragraph out of Nancy Lemann’s 1998 novel _The Fiery Pantheon_. I liked the quote (“. . . far from Rome, I would pitch my tent, and my tent was Rome to me”) well enough to look for its author. Slippery, complicated, lacking all authority (as authoring ought to be), it turns out.

Bill Traylor / Untitled (Mule, Dog, and Scene with Chicken), July 1939

Out of Edward Foster’s 1994 _Postmodern Poetry: The Talisman Interviews_, Susan Howe talking about “abolishing categories” and poetry as “a different way of knowing things.” I admire her upfront curiosity and pragmatic clarity (see the prose introductions—“to anchor the poem”—to some of her books).

Heartbreaking, uplifting. The late genius Gil Scott-Heron.

Eyes and skates have a thing in common: in the french language they are the most likely words to be followed by the qualifier "au beurre noir". The "raie au beurre noir" is a traditional dish. An "œil au beurre noir" is a black eye. Anyway, happy april fish's day, here are a few "faces de raies".

Out of Emerson’s Journals, c. 1847: “Literature should be the counterpart of nature & equally rich. I find her not in our books. I know nature, & figure her to myself as exuberant, tranquil, magnificent in her fertility—coherent, so that every thing is an omen of every other.“

Literally cannot stop listening to Billy Stewart’s 1966 version of the George Gershwin / DuBose Heyward standard “Summertime.” Billy Stewart, dead in a car accident at thirty-two. A song like a drug—makes me feel a terrible need to get up and go walk it off.

Cy Twombly, Polaroid from the series 'Le Temps Retrouve', ca. 2005

glen baxter, rip

Melville, getting—early, in “Notes for January”—into my year-long sequence titled “Notes for General Circulation”: ‘God keep me from every completing anything.’

Very sorry to learn of the death of Glen Baxter, a sure bright original. Maxine Chernoff got permission to use a wonderfully wry and (blackly) witty G.B. drawing on the cover of her _New Faces of 1952_ (Ithaca House, 1985). We had a cut made of it and printed it on our old Chandler & Price.

unruly.

A. R. Ammons (interviewed in 1973 by Jed Rasula) details a processual practice, and defends his poetry against a charge that “there is a range of thematic material that persists and never seems to begin to grow fallow.” Kudos to the obsessive hoe-row, the Johnny-one-note, the theme with variations.

Gustaf Sobin, out of “Transparent Itineraries: 1996”—one of Sobin’s scrap-filled self-collaging pieces (“Every year, at the end of the year or the beginning of the next, I go through the scraps, the fragments of the preceding year, and try to draw—from so many disparate passages—a sense. A sequence.

One more for the O’Hara centenary. “Red Rydler and Dog,” one of O’Hara’s collaborations with Joe Brainard, first published in C Comics 1 (1964). Recall reading it in London, c. 1974, in a found copy of Panjandrum 2 & 3 (1973), completely knocked out by the dog who’s “stuck his nose into something.”

For today's centenary of poet Frank O'Hara. (Frank O'Hara beside a portrait by Larry Rivers at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City, 1954)

“Hugely, spring exists again.” — John Ashbery, “Grand Galop”

Frank O’Hara (b. 27 March 1926), in conversation with Edward Lucie-Smith, in 1965. After scolding Robert Lowell for his “perfectly revolting” poem “Skunk Hour” (“What’s so wonderful about a Peeping Tom?”), O’Hara says:

Robert Smithson / Algae, algae, ca. 1961-1963

Remembering Jim Harrison (1937-2016). from the Smoking Poets series, 4x5 lino print.

Julien Gracq out of “Reading” in _Reading Writing_ (2006), translated by Jeanine Herman, a book I keep dipping into, and probably should reread.

Selecting pith versus expanding gist. Lorine Niedecker’s lines out of _New Goose_ (1946). A paring down of Asa Gray’s sentiment in a 28 June 1836 letter to Increase Lapham in Milwaukee: “Let me entreat you to pay particular attention to my _pets_, the Grasses &c, but don’t neglect the others.”

Energy and precision in the sense-making of repeated motion. A 1970 untitled painting out of Cy Twombly’s “blackboard series” (1966-1973). A photograph of “Some Grasses.”

“Melville, in a letter: ’For my part, I love sleepy fellows, and the more ignorant the better. Damn your wide-awake and knowing chaps. As for sleepiness, it is one of the noblest qualities of humanity. There is something sociable about it, too. Think of those sensible [1/2]

Yow! Reminds me of Werner Herzog interviewed in the jungle in Les Blank's Burden of Dreams (about the making of Fitzcarraldo): "The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they—they sing. They just screech in pain."

Out of William Fuller’s _Signal Flow_ (Flood Editions, 2025), here’s “Poem,” a possibly atypical piece (with its hint of allegory). The book is all prose poems, seeming to investigate syntactical overloading, and tending largely, as a result, to the somewhat dubious abstract.

“Meet me everywhere.”

Memo: need to turn the brunt of an Ashbery prepositional phrase into a flat out imperative: “no / False disarray as proof of authenticity.” (Out of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”).

The redoubtably oddball Raymond Roussel at 19, out of Mark Polizzotti’s _Jump Cuts: Essays on Surrealism, Film, Music, Culture, and Other Utopian Topics_ (The Song Cave, 2025), the essay “A Child’s Garden of Eccentricities.” His lovely uninhibited—or reckless—sense of glory at writing _La Doublure_.

Does anyone want to tell me that this is a picture of Joe Brainard looking confused by the Campbell's Tomato Juice boxes?

Out of _Houseboat Days_ (1977), random (or maybe not so) Ashbery. In every Ashbery poem isn’t there found some lingo-combo (to put it fussily) that might title another Ashbery poem? Here, possibly: “Clumsy White Paper Clouds.” It’s as if all language merely existed to end up in a(n Ashbery) poem.

Pascal Quignard in an interview (2020): “We do not know where the word ‘literature’ comes from. I love infinitely that there are two words whose etymology is entirely unknown: *eros* and *literature*. I love that words emerge from the night like comets.”

A species of disjoint aimlessness provoked by thinking of Josef Albers (b. 19 March 1888), and the purity of simply putting one thing, or one color, next to another. Paul Metcalf, out of an interview with Russell Banks (in the 1973 Metcalf issue of Lillabulero):

After four days on the plateau, I return. My satchel is filled with rocks, a puma’s skull and some mint leaves pressed in a notebook of new poems. I treat each with an equal delight. -Gustaf Sobin