Out of Thomas Gardner’s _A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson_ (OUP, 2006), Charles Wright, talking about how the “engines“ of poetry work: “No one wants to say any of this, because we all want to be so meaningful, but in fact, the music drives an awful lot of these engines.” And:

Like a gin-soaked spit- baller, a dumpy little rain is coming down & barely delivering. Fed up with poetry.

Two trees. One out of an interview with Ronald Johnson, suggesting the structure of ARK might be like that of a tree: “I think time makes things a tree.” The other: a line out of Grace Slick and Paul Kantner’s “Eskimo Blue Day”: “You call it rain, but the human name / Doesn’t mean shit to a tree.”

A nod and corona today to William Carlos Williams (b. 17 September 1883). Out of _Collected Poems 1921-1931_ (The Objectivist Press, 1934). With a Preface by Wallace Stevens: “His passion for the anti-poetic is a blood passion and not a passion of the inkpot. The anti-poetic is his spirit’s cure.”

A page out of Kelvin Corcoran & Alan Halsey’s _A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens_ (Constitutional Information, 2015), a kind of balladic romp starring W. S., Plato (“Before Plato was a man there had to be an idea of Plato”), a horse named Snowbird, and several literary cameos.

Out of William Carlos Williams’s “Prologue to Kora in Hell” (1920): “A poem is tough by no quality it borrows from a logical recital of events nor from the events themselves but solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.”

At Four Mile Lake, an osprey keeps hittting the water, raking up nothing, flying off. After a loud splash, I look up (I’m scoping distant shorebirds) to see the osprey in the water, floundering, large bent wings straining. Pulled under, it loses or relinquishes its (sizeable) fish.

“A cultural history omitting the machinations of Eros lacks a natural strategy.” Being a swell aphoristic remark made by Guy Davenport in the afterword to Elizabeth Hutton Turner’s _Americans in Paris (1921-1931): Man Ray, Gerald Murphy, Stuart Davis, Alexander Calder_ (Counterpoint, 1996).

Found accidentally, receiving books at work: “Wall III” (1983), by Anni Albers (1899-1994).

Clark Coolidge, out of a barrage “From Notebooks (1976-1982),” printed in the Michael Palmer-edited _Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics_ (1983), sounding a little Williams-esque. (He says, too: “Williams is our Cézanne. With him the way of working begins to open.”) Apt reminder in a crowd.

The process of art must always go where the most uncertainty lies. So that beauty when its found, as it rarely is, has a touch of the marvelous about it, the unknown. Masterpieces are only beautiful in a tragic sense, like a starfish lying stretched dead on a beach in the sun - Wm Carlos Williams

Learned, in Ellen Levy’s A Book About Ray (MIT, 2024) that Ray Johnson designed New Directions covers for both Williams’s In the American Grain (“the poet’s hand, palm out, back pressed into masses of foliage”) and Rimbaud’s Illuminations (“with the grainy Ben-Day dot rendering of the poet’s face”).

An entry out of Ian Penman’s lively, notational _Erik Satie Three Piece Suite_ (Semiotext(e), 2025). Reminding me somewhat of Enrique Vila-Matas’s _Bartleby & Co._ (New Directions, 2004). Lightness and its mock other. Think of, say, Joe Brainard vs. Charles Bernstein. Ron Padgett vs. Ron Silliman.

“The fate of insects is not less important than the revolution.” —Rosa Luxemburg Quoted sourcelessly in Ian Penman’s _Fassbinder: Thousands of Mirrors_ (Semiotext(e), 2023). Prescient and unexpected, if a little blandly put. Perhaps it’s a reworking of:

Mid-morning walk along Short Beach (Nahant), tide way out, sky hazy. Unexpected: a single pale piping plover exhibiting “foot-trembling” behavior, repeatedly tapping the sand with one foot in order to bring prey (worms, tiny invertebrates) to the surface.

Short Beach, Nahant, a little north of Boston, 6:30 a.m.: wrack and sand, impeccable blue sky. A few black-bellied plovers, semipalmated plovers and sandpipers, a couple of great black-blacked gulls among the usual congregation of herring and ring-billed gulls. A single killdeer calling somewhere.

Thinking about a remark by John Marin, objecting to precisionist Charles Demuth’s paintings. Reported by William Carlos Williams in a 1938 letter to Constance Rourke: “He said, How can a painter follow a _line_, or allow his paint to be controlled by it. The painter should follow his _paint_.”

“I disdain nothing. I expect to reach heaven over a bridge of cobble stones. My whole life is a cleaving to the very nearest thing I can lay hand to . . .” (The defiantly local William Carlos Williams, out of a letter to Viola Baxter, 24 June 1914. For a poetics of the “to hand,“ the “at home.“)

Coleridge—who planned, with Robert Southey, a Pantisocracy “at a convenient distance, from Cooper’s Town on the banks of the Susquehanna”—out of the Notebooks: “A great Man’s Book in this Country like a Candle in Lapland, extinguished the moment after it was lit by Insects, Gnats, & Buzzflies—”

"The authentic fragment, dismounted from its former place in the fabric and replaced according to new exigencies, constituted an American method." —Mike Weaver, in William Carlos Williams: The American Background. He notes how Paterson begins with a ‘quotation’ out of WCW’s own preliminary drafts.

Poking around again in Mike Weaver’s William Carlos Williams: The American Background (1971), a book I read twenty or so years ago. I like how he swears fealty to “the unregarded carriers of art and literature, who with few exceptions will not survive in the public memory . . .”

“One thinks of Shakespeare as sitting quietly in a corner and then, when he’d had quite a bit to drink, becoming screamingly funny.” (Fits my experience with writers perfectly.) Out of The Table Talk of W. H. Auden, Alan Ansen’s amusing “nor is it a verbatim record” gathering of remarks.

Out of Ronald Johnson’s The Shrubberies (Flood Editions, 2001):

Christopher Middleton, out of Palavers & A Nocturnal Journal (Shearsman, 2004). I can never think of “Paradise” without recalling Pound’s “I have tried to write Paradise // Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise” (out of “Notes for Canto CXX”).

An excellent new poetry press. Publishers of Jordan Dunn’s Notation, Patty Nash’s Walden Pond, Gion Davis’s Designated Stranger and, recently, Alicia Wright’s You’re Called by the Same Sound.

Another couple of entries out of Michael O’Brien’s _A Pillow Book: Notes from a Reading Life_ (Cairn, 2018). The Lautréamont / O’Hara pairing of similars (pointing to a possible source, or a fortuity). And the irrepressible Scot MacDiarmid spouting off (one notes that he seemingly kept his word).

Another tiny sample out of Thomas Meyer’s _Fisher King_ (Verge Books, 2025). Two stanzas of a thirty-forty stanza’d poem called “Do the Locomotion.” Short sentence-ry, lovely pacing, adages as quotidian matter and must, occasionally a glimpse of some grander scheme . . .

Out of Thomas Meyer’s _Fisher King_ (Verge Books, 2025), found in a longish section called “Adages Agenda.” Probably wrong of me to ascertain a slightly wry, sidelong grin to the note. (Probably wrong, too, to think of _dukha_ as somehow ancestor to “dooky.”)

Reread James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere (1958). Still love the random line: “Maybe I’ll take Vera Vera for my stage name.” Though late (and unremembered) mention of a dish called “salmon wiggle” (“On to the salmon wiggle when suddenly the fire truck went clanging . . .“) did “elicit a chortle.”

Two entries (stray, related) out of Michael O’Brien’s _A Pillow Book: Notes from a Reading Life_ (Cairn, 2018). That persistent Modernist rejection of “mere” likeness (see Williams), that leaning toward assemblagist means, that stirring materiality, that defiant market refusal.

Out of Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler: Schuyler writing to Ron Padgett (21 July 1968), anticipating the arrival of Kenneth Koch for a visit to Fairfield Porter’s place on Great Spruce Head Island. Dishwise, indeed. He does, also, admit: “it would be fun to see him.”

Two out of Tom Pickard’s splendid new chapbook, A Walk in Winter (Foolscap Poetry, 2025). Impeccably presented, sound-tensile pieces (see, say: “pecked in limestone / swathed in lichen”). Includes, too, a selection out of an expanded version of Fiends Fell, forthcoming from Flood Editions.

Something to look forward to: John Berryman’s forthcoming Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs. Here’s one (out of a recent New York Review of Books). Another assemblagist of a kind of “mess and message,“ with rhymes quirky, off-tempo, insolent, rash. A drunk, a confabulator. (See, too, Spicer.)

The thing that one wants to put _as language_ out there isn’t something that you can simply put there by _thinking_ about it. You have to get yourself into a kind of unrapturous, cool, undisturbed condition in which you are receptive to that which the Muse speaks through you. Christopher Middleton

Out for a couple hours to Mary Beth Doyle Park, where Malletts Creek’s been made to sprawl through a tiny patch of marshland and mudflats. I go to look at migrating shorebirds. Today: solitary, spotted, and least sandpipers. I study the birds through my scope, “I note differences, I / fully abide.”

Rocks and words. Out of my book Breeze (2003), an overlooked poem. (Working at home, vaguely thumbing through stuff, doubts and cheer in wavelets. See O’Hara’s frank note: “up in the dead of night / wondering whether you are any good or not / and the only decision you can make is that you did it.”)

Read Virginia Woolf’s The Years (1937). Noted: a lovely moment of synesthesia, wherein an overheard sounded word metamorphoses into a distinct visual construct, order Hymenoptera, an emphatically material thing (and accurate to the word’s aural shape):

Saludos Herman Melville (b. 1 August 1819). Who called Moby Dick “the draught of a draught“—and whom I love for saying: "God keep me from ever completing anything."

Collaboratory work between John Ashbery (b. 28 July 1927) and James Schuyler, out of The World Anthology: Poems from the Saint Mark’s Poetry Project (1969), edited by Anne Waldman. Written in 1952, slightly prior to the two beginning the novel, A Nest of Ninnies.

Read: Kim Dorman’s Kerala Journal (Xylem Books/Corbel Stone Press, 2021). Marvelous small works limned with a miniaturist’s quiet assurance, mostly attending to the local, to what’s found at the interstices of the natural and the domestic. And: to the way sound is anchor, is release. A tiny batch:

Some visual off-rhyme, likely coincidental, occurring here, I think. Enough to make me go look at the Dylan album to find out why the Latronico had me humming “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.” (My pop-colonized subconscious.)

Coleridge (d. 25 July 1834), out of On Poesy or Art (1818), plugging the processual: “[T]here is a difference between form as proceeding, and shape as superinduced;—the latter is either the death or the imprisonment of the thing;—the former is its self-witnessing and self-effected sphere of agency.”

William Carlos Williams, out of a 1913 letter to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine. (Found in “On William Carlos Williams,” a short piece in Cristina Campo’s The Unforgivable and Other Writings (NYRB, 2024), translated by Alex Andriesse.)

Lazy morning: (a little) writing, and finishing off a couple books, including Gustaf Sobin’s Luminous Debris, a quiet dynamo of a thing. Loved, particularly, “Acqueductus,” wherein the “sequence of dismembered sections” of “the Roman aqueduct of Nîmes” is read as “a kind of fragmented antique text.”

For kimdorman.bsky.social Samuel Beckett (apparently in a 1969 Vogue interview): “Writing becomes not easier, but more difficult for me. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

City bird incident. Near the South Street Seaport: a common tern offering a three-four inch silvery slip of a fish to a sizable juvenile, who downed it head first, leaving a sliver of caudal fin protruding.

Ninth century Chinese Buddhist monk and poet Hanshan, pictured by Japanese poet-painter Yosa Buson (1716–1783).

“Wild Fowl” c. 1865, by The Amateur of Longjumeau. Early photography mimicking a common still life motif. (Charmed by both the “Amateur” tag—would there were more amateurs “of X”—and the gradient tonalities of the print itself.) At the Met.

Yesterday: the bandoneonist Julien Labro with the orchestral collective The Knights, at a lovely concert in Bryant Park. Philip Glass, Astor Piazzolla, Edvard Grieg, and Labro’s own work. Good to be (even slightly) untethered, what travel’s good for.

Perfect frontispiece. (“Screened Porch, Great Spruce Head Island, c. 1968” by James Schuyler)