Mystical accidentalism for sound-hemmed naught in night’s botanical glossary -Susan Howe

A walk through Media, Pa. to Glen Providence Park where every year I walk along a wee creek and look and listen for Carolina chickadees, slightly grayer and smaller and whose calls tend to be noticeably quicker than the black-capped chickadees of Michigan. Another “rarity” (for me): black vultures.

Sun-moon

Out of Susan Sontag’s journal for 3 December 1961: "The writer must be four people: 1) The nut, the obsédé 2) The moron 3) The stylist 4) The critic 1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence." Sontag died twenty-one years ago today, aged 71.

“Models of style: the swearword, the telegram, the epitaph.” -Emil Cioran (quoted from a French documentary film about him)

Cioran said, ‘We are all deep in a hell of which each moment is a miracle.’ It made me think of Issa’s haiku, ‘We stroll on the roof of hell, gawking at flowers.’

A friend writes to say Mick Abrahams died a few days back, guitarist and vocalist for Blodwyn Pig. I recall how I loved the song “Dear Jill”—off the 1969 album, “Ahead Rings Out.” Never tired of it.

Out of Ange Mlinko’s finely-printed new chapbook _Darkroom_ (Foolscap Poetry, 2025). Intricately sounded (some sidelong end-rhymes: slab / squab, Myrmid- / pyramid, unhoused / composed) and moving by means of a sort of hopscotch continuum of metaphors (the archer god’s maillot jaune seeming

A singular page out of Henri Michaux’s _Ideograms in China_, translated by Gustaf Sobin. “No longer to imitate, but signify nature. By strokes, darts, dashes.” And: “The sign in Chinese . . . no longer in any way mimetic, has [in a hauntingly canny phrase] the grace of its own impatience.”

Lyn Hejinian, the third part (of thirty-seven) of “The Distance” (in the 2008 volume, _Saga / Circus_). All clarity and grace and nuance in the sentence-ry, and impeccable pacing controlled by the line. “It is always safe / To predict variability.”

Out of _Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly¬_, edited by Yilmaz Dziewior and Achim Hochdörfer with Arthur Fink. Two photographs: Twombly by Rauschenberg, Rauschenberg by Twombly, both c. 1952.

Tethered. Out of the terrific exhibition catalogue _Five Friends: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly¬_, edited by Yilmaz Dziewior and Achim Hochdörfer with Arthur Fink, Rauschenberg’s 1953 “Untitled (Elemental Sculpture)” and Cy Twombly’s 1959 “Untitled.”

Last night: the puckish Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, all Brahms. The captivating way Nézet-Séguin works without a score and—with no obvious downbeat, no fussiness—seems to assemble and shape the various musical strands through a perspicacious corporeal charm.

My reply to “Happy Holidays from Cornell University,” an email signed by President Michael I. Kotlikoff and Provost Kavita Bala: “After Cornell University's cowardly, dishonorable, and inappropriate settlement with the Trump administration, I wish to have no further contact with it, or its minions.”

The endlessly novel Emily Dickinson (b. 10 December 1830), out of a letter (c. 1875) to Olive Stearns: “That a pansy is transitive, is its only pang.” And: “Many an angel, with its needle, toils beneath the snow.”

Out of the lively Paris Review interview with Eliot Weinberger conducted by Srikanth Reddy (in “The Art of the Essay” series):

The great pop abstractionist Stuart Davis was born on this date in 1892. Composition, oil on canvas, 1935, from the Smithsonian American Art collection:

1/ Gleanings out of Francesca Wade’s _Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife_ (2025). Stein, in the _Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas_ (1933): “If you are way ahead with your head you naturally are old fashioned and regular in your daily life.” Akin, as Wade points out, to Flaubert’s dictum in a 1876 letter

Haphazardly, out of a book received today at work, two etchings by the 24-year-old gappy-toothed moptop Rembrandt Harmenszoom van Rijn: “Self-portrait in a Cap, Laughing” and “Self-portrait in a Cap, Wide-eyed and Open-mouthed.” Both 1630.

Dipping into Francesca Wade’s _Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife_ (2025) I find a rather amply-reported metaphor I’d somehow missed. According to heiress and memoirist Mabel Dodge Luhan, Stein had “a laugh like a beefsteak.” Lovely, in a puzzling kind of way.

Still Life with Wind in the Trees

Thieving, in snatches at work, readings of Lorine Niedecker poems (out of the Jenny Penberthy-edited Collected Works (2002)). A pleasure: to shuffle variants out of Penberthy’s generous notes. Here’s an untitled 1948 piece, in the version it appeared in the New Mexico Quarterly, in 1950:

Gustaf Sobin

I keep thinking about the (bold, cocky) opening of Rousseau’s Confessions: “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator.” And how it immediately reminded me of William Carlos Williams’s first line to Kora in Hell: “The sole precedent 1/3

Ian Hamilton Finlay / Swallow, 1998

Frank O’Hara, out of an entry in an ephemeral journal (in the Donald Allen-edited Early Writing (Grey Fox, 1977)). In the previous day’s entry, O’Hara writes of “the direct apprehension of the thing itself”—a striving for presence likely to be thwarted precisely by “style.” Or by “idea.” (See WCW.)

Gustaf Sobin, from “That the Universe is Chrysalid (Blake’s Birthday)”

A cold lazy afternoon of mostly aimless and desultory reading brings me somehow to Tom Clark’s early book Stones (1969), and a quiet poem one used to recite late in bars (along with, louder, with ready irony, John Berryman’s “Dream Song 14“ (“Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. . . .”)):

A lovely (and funny) anecdote out of Ronald Johnson’s 1976 Vort interview, conducted by Barry Alpert (reprinted in _Ronald Johnson: Life and Works_ (National Poetry Foundation, 2008)). I would love to read a collection of the letters exchanged between Ian Hamilton Finlay and Johnson.

✒️ 📔 Today's the day of our C.D. Wright cluster! Ed. @aliciawright.bsky.social ft. 11 contributors—the list is too long to fit into a single post! But you're in luck, bc the thread below tells the tale of this exceptional homage for an exceptionally talented poet! post45.org/contemporaries

Nigh-random core sample out of Eliot Weinberger’s longish poem “The Ceaseless Murmuring of Innumerable Bees” (in the Spring 2024 issue of the Paris Review). A lengthy interview with Weinberger, conducted by Srikanth Reddy (in “The Art of the Essay” series), is found in the Fall 2025 issue.

Another sharp percept of poetry’s high processual work (“words in a cranial theater”!) and slow-arriving “get”—out of Merrill Gilfillan’s _Old River New River: A Miscellany_ (Red Dragonfly Press, 2019):

A Guy Davenport letter, printed under the title ”Correction . . .”, out of The National Review (October 26, 1973): In my obituary of J. R. R. Tolkien [Sept. 28] the sentence “It was the rule of Tolkien's art that he invented nothing cynical” should have read 1/2

Derek Mahon, born on this day in 1941

“I’m not a serious thinker. I’m a writer: that’s very different. I think a writer’s intelligence has to be alive, has to be incomplete. It has to carry contradiction. It has to be sort of haphazard and amateur.” - Benjamín Labatut

Guy Davenport (b. 23 November 1927): “I can claim the effort, at least, of making prose ideograms in emulation of Pound’s poetic ones. An ideogram gathers components into a molecular structure that has charm rather than demonstrable sense.” (The claim, too, of Eliot Weinberger’s essayistic prose?)

A rare glimpse into a poet's observations, via this November edition of @thearsonista.bsky.social: Kerala Notes by American-born Kim Dorman @kimdorman.bsky.social, who lives in India and whose haunting Kerala Journal was published four years ago by @corbelstonepress.bsky.social.

Lovely. I wonder if anybody reads St.-John Perse much anymore.

Begun lately to carry around a pocket-sized notebook—for jotting down the unanticipated interior verbal onslaught, or (more rarely) overheard vocal aperçu (or sludge). The activity’s somehow got me looking again at Merrill Gilfillan’s short collection of notes “Alfresco.” 1/2

for @rloden.bsky.social Re: Stuart Peterfreund. I see now the book I should be looking for is The Hanged Knife (Ithaca House, 1970), not Harder Than Rain (1977). The latter is, sadly, rather humdrum to poor, exhibiting vestigial period-style tics—awkwardly “surreal” similes 1/3

Manuel Àlvarez Bravo / Untitled (Hair on Tile Floor), 1940s

New York again, as it slips off into its distant manic slough and revery there to the east. Or, rather, Brooklyn. Two things—contextual fillers in a show somewhat crowded with such—out of the “Monet and Venice” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.

Quick nod and amen for Roland Barthes (b. 12 November 1915), all style, no system: “the fragment breaks up what I would call the smooth finish, the composition, discourse constructed to give a final meaning to what one says, which is the general rule of all past rhetoric . . . the fragment is (1/2)

Saw Ira Sachs’s new movie _Peter Hujar’s Day_, based on the recently-found transcript of a lost tape recording made by Linda Rosenkrantz (author of _Talk_ (NYRB, 2015)). Two things: Hujar’s amusing and gently-dismissive report of photographing an Om-insistent and somewhat pedantic Allen Ginsberg.

Graciela Iturbide / Sin título, Japón, 2014

Graciela Iturbide / Antes de la matanza (Before the slaughter), La Mixteca, Oaxaca, 1992

“Stuck in Flushing.” (Annals of things I never thought I’d have the opportunity to say.)

Graciela Iturbide / Benarés, India, 1999

Two photographs by Graciela Iturbide, out of a tremendous exhibit at the International Center of Photography, in New York City. “El señor de los pájaros, Nayarit, México,” 1985 and “Ritual, Benarés, India,” 1998.