·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Objects hold residual.
Objects hold what is residual.
What is residual?
This envelope will be gone.
Limited postage gets one only so far.
Death the elimination of oasis.
A flexible straw the terminal feeding tube.
“His vital signs are all present.”
The see-saw between present and oblivion.
To watch closely. Breath by breath.
Father and son. Blind, Homer caught it so well.
The weave. The unweave. Penelope in tatters.
What knows does not know.
The extended shadow.
White, blazing, the gift of Rhododendrons.
Salute.

Walking to the top of “my” hill at 21st & Sanchez, I stopped to talk to the woman who lives with her husband in the once infamous house of the mistress of San Francisco Mayor (and subsequent California Governor) James ‘Sunny Jim’ Rolph Jr. The Mayor’s mistress would apparently raise a flag above the house - which could be seen from City Hall - when the coast was clear to have him come make a visit.
Behind the iron gated fence is a lovely patio and garden now blooming with well tended rose and other flower bushes. It’s most distinguished element, however, is a baroque, bronze sculpture that features Leda reaching up to embrace the descending Swan. (The sculpture makes a cameo appearance in one of my Walking Theory poems).
“Where is it from?,” I ask the woman.
“It’s from Italy. A previous owner of the house was Mussolini’s eye doctor. Mussolini’s uncle sent it over here as a gift.”
I am never sure what to make with information like this piece! The sculpture in and of itself is an interesting - even if indecipherable - crown to this high hill over looks the City in so many directions. I just want to suspend the story - the whole idea of its fascist family donor - in a separate space. I don’t want the story to infect the way in which I have previously enjoyed the space. But there it is. Out there now with the one about the mistress. No pure history no where!

*

With parents flirting variously with the other end of life, I find myself cutting wild blooming flowers from my mother’s gardens (roses, azealeas, etc. with huge, radiant red, pink and white petals) and giving them out to my friends everywhere.

Well, it’s not quiet at all. Sunrises from the City (SF) are remarkable. Flowers blooming and flush gardens, trees, et al. So Landscape - walking up and down my local high hill - is a fresh hit, a regality that transcends the violation of the News, deadlines, obligations, etc.

So much for morning graces, tho this afternoon is also lovely - the trees have new leaves and the shadows are cast everywhere - streets and walls, the new murals of the season.

Unfortunately I have not been able to tend the blog much. On top of some wonderful projects with deadlines, I have got two parents demanding attention and care, making their way with us (my other brothers, et al) through their final phases. It’s a zone, a fertile one, a ritual bearing of which I have only rarely known. Naturally I keep notes. Whether these become of public value to share, I am yet to say, or want “to blog.”

For awhile - at least - I am quiet, drawn inward.

Will return when things move outward, again, assume as inevitable.

The Apr/May issue of BookForum I found kind of a surprise (in that it’s practically impossible to find something readable among the proliferation of gallery ads in its mother publication: ArtForum!)

Eric Banks, the editor, seems to have a real brain and a publisher to support a vision of multiple kinds of literary materials - frequently international - that are different from the New York Review of Books, ThreePennyR 50’s seeming nostalgia for that kind of criticism, tone, etc. variety .
In terms of Americana - and in light of the recent passing of Robert Creeley and and the perhaps narrow and continuous focus on defining and redefining postwar ‘new American poetry’ - it’s fun to read Robert Lowell’s letters (a new book is out) and who he was hearing and how he positioned himself in letters to Pound, Berryman, Ginsberg, WCW and others. In the letter to Ginsberg in 1958 he is already very aware of Creeley and Levertov - and though he is excited by Kaddish - without irony he writes,

“…I guess poetry as a technique means much less to me than to you. I can hear Creeley’s polite, dim halting voice behind the barrage of Williams…”

This is four or five years before the publicaton of Creeley’s “For Love.” (In response to some of those poems, I suspect the first wife did not think Creeley’s voice was “dim” by then!)

Indeed Lowell’s letters import the pathos of somebody getting spun open, challenged and attracted to the new poetry - not without being critical, or entirely jumping ranks. The weather had clearly begun to change the landscape of American poetry.

There’s also a wonderful piece by Bruce Bawer on the person and work of Guy Davenport - which ought to drive people back to the work.

But the Americana aspect is only a fraction of the Review’s scope - which also work based Japan, Iran, Cambodia; the vision is global and certainly a refreshing (if not often tragic) space encounter with folks who have opened their eyes beyond ‘our’ borders, as well as redefining what’s been previously assumed as “our” frontier.

And so refreshing given the entirely - it seems - ethnocetric mode of this sadly Bush shaped era. Who ever thought we would be living again in a time in which religious arguments - particularly these of a nineteenth century cast - would be re-empowered to define the times?

“Mark and emotion, matched one to one. A unique emotional handwriting. Technical skill as pathos. Aversion as a way to point to the horror. Materiality at the extreme.”

A sketchbook composite from remarks by T. J. Clark about Jackson Pollack to introduce a two day symposium on “Modernism and Why It Won’t Go Away.” UC Berkeley, today:

Take a stick. Take a can. A can with white paint. Opaque white paint. Put the stick in the paint. Figure the initial gesture: a circle, a ladder, a lightning stroke. Make a white circle on a black rock. Erase the first mark. No. Do not erase. Paint another circle around the first circle. One. Two. Three. Four times eight. Open five cans: pink, brown, silver, blue, lavender. Put a stick in each. On each fourth, shift the color. Migrate quickly. Stop. Go. Witness. Slash. Go. Slash. Witness.

Make one ladder. Two ladders. Make the circles circle the ladder. Make a second ladder. Make the circles circle both ladders. One, two, three, four. Shift each ring into a different color. Throw down a lightening stroke. Make it zig, zag through each circle, across each ring. Erase each slash. Witness. Erase. Witness. Surround the entire rock. Color. Slash. Circle. Ladder. Lightening. Say it’s finished when it’s finished. Black, color, rock . No. Do not say it’s finished. One, two, pink, blue; three, four, lavender, silver, brown. Stick. Stick. Slash, erase, witness, stick:

Imagine a page. Imagine a white page. Imagine dark. Imagine the dark stroke. Imagine the dark stroke emergent. Imagine a ladder. Imagine a ladder broken. Imagine foul. Imagine the territory destroyed. Imagine the territory destroyed to save some other. Imagine the other destroyed. Imagine destruction. Imagine the art of destruction. Imagine waste. Imagine the end. Imagine sirens. Imagine the tongue burnt. Imagine ashes. Imagine war. Imagine:

April 10, 1999

An international dinner at A’s. Around the kitchen table:
N., a Russian poet and journalist. Silver hair and brooding, an exile in San Francisco.
J., Russian Jewish, beautiful and smart.
T., a gay Iranian, born and raised there. His father a Persian engineer; his mother, Allentown, Pennsylvania, Irish-Catholic.
A., English, half-Jewish, in Bay Area since 1967.
F., Kentucky born, raises apples on the family farm, lives in New York, writes books on gay sexuality and, currently, finishing an apple cookbook.
We talk a great deal about the war in Serbia. J. speaks against it, as does N. J. paints a picture in which the Serbians are not intolerant. In fact it was the Serbs who protected the Jews during the War. N. asks where was the United States when 600,000 Serbs were forced to leave Croatia.
“And think,” says J., “Only a while ago hundreds of thousands of Serbs were in the streets protesting against Milesovic, and now he has them all back in his support.”
You do not think,” A. asks quite bluntly, “they are not doing the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo?”
J. and N. retreat to the argument that Milosevic is only interested in the defeat of the KLA nationalists. “It is a Civil War. The same as if Texas tried to leave the United States. He did not want to
cleanse.’ He wants to make sure Kosavo remains in Serbia.”
“This is so much like Russia,” J. says, “where everyone sits around the kitchen table and discusses politics.”
I say nothing. I remain disturbed, very, by this war. It’s as if what was not ever full taken to battle in the Cold War - at least in relationship to Russia - has now found a full and tragic vent in the Balkans. The cold war vocabulary that was established by the USA and the Allies - particularly the militarists - has now risen into a pre-millennium fury.
Regional and local points of view mean nothing.

Dream of a Girl with a Red Kite

A young woman, a beautiful young woman disappears. Gone for several months, there is no evidence of a crime. It’s as if a wall has gone up of which - on the other side - she conducts an entirely secret life.
I am talking to someone about her, how I miss her and want her back in my life. It is a sunny day. We are having the conversation next to the wall that suddenly opens: a V-shape opening through the white porcelain-colored, mortared bricks.
Indeed, there she is, walking along a dirt road by the edge of the sea. In a sky the color of a light green-gauze -perhaps twenty-feet over her head - she flies a red, triangular cornered kite that floats busily in the wind
I run up to her side to reclaim her, to reclaim our old friendship. Whatever stood in the way must be over. We will be able to be together again.
Instead of welcoming, however, I am repelled. “No,” she says and “No” again. Her body turns away. She pulls on the kite string and hurries down the road. Perhaps it is the slight turn in her torso, where her hips join to her legs. She moves as if possessed by an old, still active wound. The particular kind that makes it impossible for anyone to get close, not even a once intimate friend. I watch her disappear down a slope - the red kite above still busy – solitary and floating, knotted to the white string at a slope in the air.

“EURO” is the uppity new tagger’s name on the walls in this neighborhood - like, pity to all you guys who still deal in cheap dollars.

Among dealers and traders, I guess the use of such branding is called ‘global positioning.’ “EURO” is a kind of linguistic manipulation ‘power-housing.’ I think it’s kind of cool as long as the new tag is not on on the side of my building!

“The Best of Youth” - a six hour film in two parts has(some might say, finally) arrived in San Francisco at the Balboa Theater. Made in 2003 (I believe) - it’s a generational “wrencher”. A family with branches of all shades, it starts in the Sixties and concludes in 2002. When I stood up at the end of the second part and looked at the packed audience, it seemed most were over fifty, and various shadows of each other’s youth. Italian, originally commissioned for TV, the work is both elegy and restoration - if audience can be defined as harp, this one does not miss a string - mental disturbance, political extremes, single fathers, identity conflicted mothers, idealism gone diversely amok, brothers and sisters both in harmony and odds, love won, lost, screwed up - an amazing resonant range. With the exception of issues of ethnicity and race (which would be required of any film of similar magnitude in the USA) “The Best of Youth” gets to the bases.

If narrative is dead, this is a very good death. (Poetry even manages to play a small part, too.)

It’s curious, these matters of death. In one week ‘the global collective’ - if that’s what commerce and CNN have given us - we have gone from ‘counter-formality’ to ‘formality’ - or simply to High Church. The Schiavo - on some super, ever more gothic level - mimic ‘d the Jerry Springer Show. We had everything but Gov. Jeb Bush and his deputies indulge in a body tossing contest with the local, court abiding hospice police protection.
Now to Rome we have strict ritual, prayers and homage - a gathering of the extended Holy Family - to grieve, celebrate and honor the Pope’s release. Out of, I suspect, the enormous embarrassment, guilt and what have we over the Schiavo debacle, the lens of the collective goes 24/7 to Rome.

Indeed one senses an enormous, global relief from the Springer/Schiavo episode in which the recurring image of Schiavo’s face on Fox Network News was reminiscent of Madame Tussaud at her gothic best. (Remember, she worked with the death masks of guillotined French Aristocrats that she managed to purloin across the Channel to London).

Ironically, of course, one knows the Church under John Paul was not without its gothic underbelly of large and sad sexual abuse scandals among his Priests and flock - of which he ignored, and now the media and most of the gathered are choosing to ignore in the celebration of his life and example. The high formality of the Institution of the Church enables the possibility to forgo facts on the ground, while, alternatively, aesthetically - and not without genuine feeling - to appreciate so much.

Sadly as we move on, I suspect, we will have the former Exterminator, Tom Delay, doing everything he can to upstage the Pope’s Funeral in order to bring attention back to Schiavo. To live under such cycles seems our fate under a faith based Presidency. Not the Millennial gift that many of us would want, including the other current Fundamentalist style militant religious contributions.

I think I will stay busy remembering and mourning the death of Robert Creeley. An aesthetic formality to his work of which I most often felt accurate and at home.