Tracking the Beast; The Flatlands, Dilation of Exhaustipated vs. Extensive Meanings and Metaforming

Links to: 1) Yeat's 2nd Coming 2) Longfellows translation of Dante 3) Byron's Letters 4) Ezra Pounds ABC of Reading 5) Roman de la Rose.

Table of Contents

July 11

• Jonny Cash Shows Up

• The Flatlands + The Flats

• Yeats Poem: Second Coming

• Longfellow translation Dante

• T.S. Eliot and the Wasteland

• Empsons’ Soil of Corpses

• My Perfusion of Urn

July 10

• Tracking the Beast

• Link to Ezra Pounds ABC of READING

• Link to Byron’s Letters

• How to Get to Cassa Pessoa in Lisbon

July 9

• More on Emile Cioran + his Journal

• Link to Roman de la Rose

• Substack + The Chron: Design Notes

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Walk the Line: Food for Thought

July 11

Bonny Johnny

Johnny Cash Shows up. While I am reworking poem called Rides the Tender Herd. And I stick with him on it for nearly three hours —

Suddenly I am back reworking poems… Because of something somebody harangued here on Notes about nature of Poems on the Substack which at first amused, and then found myself pushing back against.

Stingers

People in Notes pursue aphorisms, for the hard boiled, in order to bag a stinger. Sometimes to be humorous, like Pop Shit, for instance. Other times to address their incredulity.

Note this morning:

Well, for me, this forcefully addressed an issue — gun in hand — about certain type of poetry on Substack, And the tedium and plundering nature of the sublime, surface flat up against time.

As serves to capture moment as it exists and dies. A dilation of the deciduous, exhaustipated.

A confined enragement, hostile with reality, I used to refer to when a teenager, as my entrapment in flatland.

Day in day out, occurred to me, as existing in a flatland, there was no distance in it, with which to unearth beyond my seething conniptions. Hate permeated every nostril — Language spoke to being its prisoner. Still does, at times.

The Flats

Only to find later, that Empson refers to that which reveals itself in poetry — plain clothed, unladen with (dead) metaphoricals — as “the flats.”

English poetry, had full allowance for lacing poetry in an extensive if not voluptuous usage of metaphor, right up through Yeats —

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Yeats SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

From Yeats' The Second Coming

Italian too, translations of Dante, are of course full of it.

DANTE, a part of entry into hell:

At first in motion set those beauteous things; 
So were to me occasion of good hope, 
The variegated skin of that wild beast, 
The hour of time, and the delicious season; 

But not so much, that did not give me fear 
Alion’s aspect which appeared to me. 
He seemed as if against me he were coming 
With head uplifted, and with ravenous hunger, 

So that it seemed the air was afraid of him; 
And a she-wolf, that with all hungerings 


translation from 
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

ENGLISH TRANSLATION AND NOTES 

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Yeats, according to Paul de Man, starts wondering — if utility of the metaphorical, to decipher his reality, was in fact quickly slipping away — tho, without his ever losing touch with it.

T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, seems to address that same issue directly, also without ever losing touch with it:

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What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

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Some American poets sought to break through all that — Eg: Leading man Bukowski.

Others, like Burroughs, addressing his own naked lunch, mortal error and terror, takes it and remakes it, in a forensic like eruption.

Not Dead - Sleeping

Empson said, that with English, all dead metaphor are a “soil of corpses.” Are only sleeping, as if waiting for its implications to return as color, interminable with comparison.

For myself, despite trying to scale it down, in verse in particular, as if to simplify, it always pushes through, rears up from within.

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From Perfusion of Urn —

Raise the high finger 
wave, make waves 

let my pie fly
consecrate the sky.

Where plusses 
rift deuces, 

battle mortal cruces
crave for truces.

Buffer and squeeze 
the holy breeze

beating at bounds.
Arises and flies 

troubled tangled
undisguised, 

speaking of
pathways to love. 

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Hems and Hoes

I struggled with trying to defeat it. Because its a throwback to usages that appear mostly abandoned.

Only to find myself getting sucked back in, again and again. More and more fascinated by what extensive uses occur there, the leaps and bounds and interplay of language and symmetries.

But also, for a place beyond reality suitable to catch what languishes in my nostrils, full of hate, but from a metaphorical distance.

I began to think, that the occurrence of such language, helped, with respect to my burying “the madness,” to reveal its inventions, as part of an eternal now, as an “eternity” that lives cooped up within it —

Ultimately, seemed better let them come out come out wherever you are — As its perfusion (of urn) remains as ever prone to flood the zone, irascible and composited.

Empsons’ Soil of Corpses -

All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison. — EMPSON

I Walk the Line

The drum that beats and repeats for me along an underbelly of metaphor in language, is of an immense stickiness, right out of the ear.

And sniffing rhymers — walking the liners -

Fell me back through Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s usage of meta, compresses meaning, so that it bridges with conceptual immediacy straight into poetry.

Meta lets/gets in so much at once! Which is what Empson gets on about, applies himself specifically to addressing and defining, how, where and what.

Meta is not just a flowery relish in search of langauage, but as applied, provides phenomenal access to a multiplex of compressibility and intensity of forms, that remain unphased, from what time debounds with, root and branch, in the rhetoric.

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Tracking the Beast

July 10

I like to play out ideas here — I dont see why not.

But this really is a Personal Substack — of a Poet.

I like to keep track of my thinking through literary doings, do research, and egg out commentary, and also revisit the metagaming, and subsequent methodlogy: plan and fidget —

I didnt think of as a game. And still dont. its a reckoning with oblivion….