Notebook
"The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed." (Walter Benjamin)
Dec 29, 2003
Ybor CityA glow of sounds is the city. Gregory Corso can sometimes have an elegance maintained by alacrity and elegiac tones, a certain Splendour in his work that most poets lack.
Drove through Ybor this morning, past the house on 1920 Fifth Avenue, it's now unoccupied and the entire lot is up for sale. On the next block they're building a huge complex of lofts. In all the streets saw treasure after architectural treasure, a sprawling mini-utopia I hear there. The Jose Marti park is locked, though well-kept. The bar we used to frequent across the street has disappeared. The former warehouse we converted on 19th Street seems unoccupied. The silos by the port that used to read: TAMPA TERMINAL are still there, without words, beside two giant freight ships.
Sitting to read in the library cafe now,
Los detectives salvajes as our generation's
Rayuela. The great novel of the (Latin) American 1990s. Maybe comparisons to Leslie Marmon Silko's
The Almanac of the Dead should also be noted.
#
the house is small enough for disagreements
the house protected by trees
the streets around the house a silence
over the hours taste dawn
souvenirs in the leaves of the oaks
almond these quality tree types
that was afterwards a frontera
dispersed for guidance
"you're much too young
to get a hold on me"
the 1989 transparency
current format
electronic digress
each sign of earth, in the pause
"but most of all, youve got love technique"
the lamb bleating at the end of the song
an (ironic) urban comment on the pastoral
which the psychedelic/house brings toward
music's trance phraseology, not poetry
LibrariesAs the city can become a library, driving through Ybor, imagining it as the basis for
Anna in the Tropics, which aside from the dismissive reviews from the "literary" press is an important American play. And much of this importance comes from its evocation and analysis of place. The cigar factories and the Cuban culture in Tampa in the early decades of the 20th century. Jose Marti himself had lived there, working as a lector in various factories.
Tampa is long-neglected in History. Writing this from the USF library, that savannah campus between North Tampa's "suitcase city" and the wilderness of woods and swamps along the rural edges of the Hillsborough river.
To what extent do Cuba, Puerto Rico and Venezuela exist directly in the landscape of Tampa?
Cuatro conciencias
The poem "Cuatro conciencias" by Cesar Vallejo from his
Poemas humanos, those crucial texts he wrote in Paris in 1937 and 1938. What has the poem meant, in terms of form teaching us that a minimalist approach is best, particularly for the approach to poverty. Walcott's playwriting slogan: "Think poor."
These would be then the four repetitions that I think. New Order's sublime music, that trilogy of 1980s albums.
Vallejo and Benjamin coinciding in their city's lament, in the mid to late 1930s, looking at the smallest moments. The slightest repetition, slow vision.
Dec 28, 2003
New OrderBeing in Florida is concretized for me in New Order's 1980s albums:
Power, Corruption & Lies (1983),
Low-Life (1985), and
Technique (1989). That exhilirating mixture of loud rock guitar and drums, with the electronica beats fuelled for seasons. The latter of these was recorded in Ibiza, Spain and evokes that early 1990s "era" I'm concerned with narrating. As a preface.
The songs on that album pile up and make sides A and B indistinguishable on the cassette deck. Driving through Clearwater, Tampa, St. Petersburg after twenty years, this music seems its most sustained symbol. That possibility implicit in their music, maybe cosmopolitan utopia.
Dream
functioned as the realest position
before the drive up the coast, Dunedin
dirt road is along the shore, after
restaurant, same repetition of faces
seemed familiar, twelve years ago
Realer than the transit effort from this
point of Clearwater toward the Tampa
neighborhoods of the "era" accorded
an historical mesh, pre-fascist tome
financed by university and early 20s
rather, function replenished itself
for the "love" was at one's display
solved for ever retargeted, the optimal
far librarian, who was the ghost? and
what for, it's a repeated ghost decision
*
"I hold the city here, complete:
And every shape defined by light
Is mine, or corresponds to mine,
Some flickering or some steady shine.
This map is ground of my delight.
Between the limits, night by night,
I watch a malady's advance,
I recognize my love of chance."
(Thom Gunn, "A Map of the City," 1954)
A Hotel LifeBegan in La Guaira of the mid 1970s, etablished while entering the 33rd year in Honolulu for a week. On the 16th floor, the mountains carving fog.
The flowers found me blocks away, the tropics
They sound like bedside table drawers opening
The papers feel and smell like Bible pages.
Dec 27, 2003
lines for imrovement of waking
lines for improvement of waking
a financier's daughter, the island
on a map we have Chapoquoit
revealed as being small and obscure
in the Massachusetts coastline
hit, at times, by hurricanes or storms
there was one last August
whose skies lit up repeatedly for hours
lightning storm larger than any
I've seen before there were books
to read and time to follow despues
"Mont Blanc
Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni
1
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark--now glittering--now reflecting gloom--
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters, --with a sound but half its own.
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap forever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves."
[...]
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817)
Ritual de lo Habitual
Centered during the years 1990-1995 in Tampa, Florida and environs, as now, our primary residence. As in Residencia en la tierra, some epic connotations but to the "slacker" sides. But, again, Neruda is always superceded by Vallejo. All the Boom rituals apply, la lectura reveladora de
Cien años de soledad en México en 1990. H. and I met at the restaurant where I washed dishes and she waited tables. A macrobiotic and organic kitchen where I also prepped. We would later live and travel together for most of those years in Tampa.
One vortex was the sprawling campus of USF in North Tampa, on the edge of the city. The school owned countless acres of swamp and forest. Living in and around that campus one survived by identifying a school to follow, etc. So, the library was undertaken, friendships with librarians assured access to limitless books, began reading contemporary Venezuelan poetry alongside the excellent Latin American literature stacks on the fourth floor. Avoiding secondary homework for research indoors.
But on occasion we ventured into the forests, day or night. All pastoral landscapes for hiking, mountain bikes, on foot and by car, into Lutz drives to see friends or parties at hippie farms. H. and I drove from Florida to Massachusetts in the summer of 1991, in a week with stops at her grandparents' in North Carolina and family in New Jersey. Sleeping in a tent outside Asheville and Greensboro, white corn grits with a slice of American cheese, coffee with cream in AM neon strip mall homes. Visiting J. in Manhattan on our way back south. Nuestras voces trepando como animales encerrados, the productive insomnias of Nueva York.
There, as in the woods or mountains, one had the feeling of unrealness, an artificial air that we willingly built and refurbished daily. Coincidental meetings of specific people which M. later on, in Ybor City, would refer to as manifestations of cosmic consciousness. Noticing the tradition and its influence on one's words. Again, Ernesto Cardenal's
Cantico cosmico was a misread teacher in those years, only in short fragments, anthologized. But this is blending into another drive with the same route south, in 1993, returning with H. to Florida.
"Had I not
once a lovely youth, heroic, fabulous, to be written on sheets of gold, good luck and to spare! Through what crime, through what fault have I deserved my weakness now?"
(Arthur Rimbaud,
Une Saison en Enfer, tr. Louise Varese)
ExpenditureHow does one spend lines?
It is about using the citations
for your sentence's purpose.
If you lack one, then at least
recognizing valuable information
what you're gathering, editing
a notebook, meant to be
brief, accurate, succinct and
collectivelly grown, dissociation
spending time with leisure, study
Dec 26, 2003
A History
One should have been reading more Vallejo instead of Rimbaud. Less self-aggrandizement, a healthier dose of humility and common sense. For the sake of anonymity's self-awareness, this was a five-year plan of psychedelic proportions we were vowing to complete. It ended up straggling below the five-year mark, but seemed somehow to encompass the entire decade of the 1990s. It was unoriginal and served very few poetic purposes. Or, maybe despite its derivative nature, words flourished inside our bodies and have left some faint trace. Since words were always the focus of that obsession.
Marked by war (Gulf War I), campus "protests" (however many hundreds of us stood at the gates of USF-Tampa and USF-Sarasota, and at the Wednesday flea markets on campus for sit-ins), sex, drugs, violence (the L.A. uprisings, Cypress Hill's self-titled masterpiece first LP and Ice Cube's
Death Certificate, EPMD's "Hardcore": "yo, yo, yo, my afro's in the house / as long as I live large, life will be luxuries," getting robbed at gunpoint on Halloween night while working as a pizza cook, the thief wore a skeleton mask and put the glock straight to my face, his other hand gripped me by the shirt collar), study, the discovery of books and individual poems, death (Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix), and love (back to sex).
One moment was walking into the foothills of the Rocky mountains at the edge of Boulder, CO at three in the morning to wait for the sun to rise from the plains. Sitting on a cliff (no thought given to mountain lions at the time) talking to the winds and "waiting for the sun." When she arrived it was magnificent, and the flatness to the east began to burn, setting my own body back into the rocks and grass I sat on. Behind me, I saw an elk pause to look back at me across Sanitas valley on its way into the foothills. The sunrise had been a gift from the "double" I had met earlier at a cottage in town, on a lawn, arrived from India that week. And the hermano I had spoken to on that lawn, un indio who'd been adopted by "rednecks." He had spent time in Tampa and we spoke about shows at the Ritz theater, he mentioned troubles with the skinheads in Ybor City. I recognized him by the feather on his backpack. Although I would have no reason to recognize anyone that summer. I spoke with J. the next morning at the final assembly for summer classes and we agreed to meet for coffee the next day. She had finally spoken to me a week before, although she was still living with her (ex?) boyfriend.
Saturday July 27 1991banda sonora
now it's that far off
in the vibration of
minutes read Rimbaud
Now to finally sleep, as
we've been up through
all of last night, so dosed
I could hardly do anything
except watch clouds above
the beach spiralling
patterns I listened
to guitar girls swam
in the shore, full moon on,
a Gulf wind scalloping
houses, hurricane condos
returned from the beach at
dawn, H. drove us to St. Pete
to pick up S. sun rays over
the city open air, everything
shimmers still for me now
The girls swam with two
manatees that appeared
beside us floating
up the coast to Caladesi
we said nothing all night
Thursday July 1 1993Quedeme a calentar la tinta en que me ahogo
y a escuchar mi caverna alternativa,
noches de tacto, dias de abstraccion.(Cesar Vallejo)
I sit alone in my four-cornered room
staring at a candle... (Geto Boys)
con dolor, sin resfrio
copiando Vallejo
but the pain is not physical
the head aches
slow
slow pen
fragile skull
bruised eyes
the moon behind branches
with guns, quiet green leaves
aquarium room
headache theories
miles between H. in Florida
and myself in these mountains
the letters aren't enough
I cry, but only in my notebook
the editor said: here I am,
(translated) en la cumbre
con el llanto y mi libro
contra la voz de un avion
continue the draft with
broadsided sheets ripped
from the tablets, chiselled
in stone for our librarian
cards alongside tree bills,
grocery, pencils and papers
couldn't afford the dictionary
or napkins, drinks for us
#
house made of dawn
house made of morning light
house made of rain
house made of summer branches
house made of dark cloud
house made of
Ocean Rainhouse made of
Low-Lifehouse made of
Daily Operationhouse made of
Reves/Yosoyhouse made of
Murmurhouse made of
Inner Visionshouse made of
Sunburnhouse made of
The Queen is Deadhouse made of
Illmatichouse made of
Technique
"I'm not here. They've forgotten about me when the photographer walking along the beach proposes a portrait,
un recuerdo, a remembrance literally. No one notices I'm off by myself building sand houses. They won't realize I'm missing until the photographer delivers the portrait to Catita's house, and I look at it for the first time and ask,--When was this taken? Where?
Then everyone realizes the portrait is incomplete. It's as if I didn't exist. It's as if I'm the photographer walking along the beach with the tripod camera on my shoulder asking--¿
Un recuerdo? A souvenir? A memory?"
(Sandra Cisneros,
Caramelo, Knopf, 2002)
"One of those problems is bound to be the alternation we have already identified in the dialectic of the break and the period. This is, as has already been shown, a kind of Gestalt fluctuation between the perception of modernity as an event and its apprehension as the cultural logic of a whole period of history (one which is by definition-at least until the onset of theories of postmodernity-still with us.) The event thus seems to contain within itself synchronically the very logic or dynamic of some diachronic unfolding over time (perhaps, indeed, it is this for which Althusser reserved the term 'expressive causality'). In any case this is also the very logic of storytelling itself, in which the teller of the tale can expand a given datum at great length, or compress it into a narrative fact or point; and in which the axis of selection is projected onto the axis of combination (as in Jakobson's famous formula for poetry)."
(Fredric Jameson,
A Singular Modernity, Verso, 2002)
#
These were
Planet Waves we were talking about
in apartments across the city from one another
in the year's largest snowstorm, as John Wieners
recalled happening upon Charles Olson reading
during a hurricane (Hazel?) in mid 1950s Boston
Likewise, Antonia Palacios sits in a room in Altamira
for a decade without writing, only listening to the city
Taking the time for two blogs, two others inactive
as one time purveyors, a third glimpse at readings
Archives
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