Cathy Eisenhower writes about my note

 

ron:

 

thanks for your blog.

 

i just wanted to mention that your google results could very well be

determined by your search behavior recorded under your IP address. i

don't disagree with your argument, but i do think it's important to

remember that google uses cookies and stores user information for a

long time to customize results and whatever else they do. at least

that's what some say.

 

http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html

 

http://google.indicateur.com/index.php3 (good site about google by

google)

 

cathy

 

 

"The world is burning, and you are combing your pubic hair!"

(Greek saying)

 

I’ve been aware of the Big Brother aspects of Google for some time, including its penchant for employing former government intelligence types. And, of course, Google owns Blogger now as well. But working as a market analyst in the computer industry, one runs into enough former spooks to know that they need jobs just like everyone else. A couple of these people I would have no hesitation calling friends. The pharmaceutical industry, very visible in the Philadelphia-Delaware-NJ region, especially likes to hire ex-spies for competitive intelligence. Mostly what I’ve noticed is that these guys (they do seem to be all males) go through culture shock trading old fashioned offices in Langley or the Pentagon for cubicles . . . although – as this article from the current issue of Studies in Intelligence notes – your standard Kinko’s has better technology than a lot of them are comfortable using. & poets in the La Jolla area will know already that one of the very few off-campus sites available for readings around there is a bookstore that is owned & operated by an old CIA operative – he has lots of “good luck” wishes from his old crowd mounted around the bookcases, which gives the shop a rather uniquely eccentric feel.

 

But the deeper implication of Cathy’s note is that Google will understand, because of the prior searches I’ve done on its software, that I would want to read about Ian Hamilton Finlay first. And that a new formalist doing precisely the same search as I performed, with the exact same search terms, might well come up with a radically different order, if not results altogether. Still, if Finlay showed up first, Stephen Ratcliffe turned up 34^th on my search and I know I’ve googled his name before – he’s one of the people whose poetry I try to keep up with whenever it turns up in an e-zine somewhere. Number four in my search was entitled “Poet, 92, releases collection,” while number 6 was “Elderly residents share in the joy of poetry.” Google may be attempting to create a “smarter” search engine, but that puppy still has a ways to go.

 

Chris Lott writes to inform me that his own weblog offers its own compilation of poetry news:

 

In your weblog on June 4 you note the lack of diversity in the Poetry Daily news headlines. Although not a massive enterprise in news-gathering, I have taken to trying to expand a bit on these offerings (in my own little way) by doing some news scouring of my own, results reported in my weblog Ruminate (http://www.chrislott.org/).

 

My own tastes are clearly somewhat more traditional than your own, but I at least hope to highlight some other kinds of poetry and provide some pointers to articles relevant to the international scene. I imagine I will continue to do so 2-3 times per week as long as people find it useful.

 

c

 

Which in turn reminds me that Laurable – the mother of all poetry bloggers – also can be viewed in just such a light. That’s a journalistic light, with a lime green lampshade.

 

 

 

ш         ш         ш

 

 

I once again own & have in my possession a copy of Francis Ponge’s “Notebook of the Pine Woods,” in Things, a selection of Ponge’s work translated by Cid Corman, published by Mushinsha / Grossman. At 31 pages, it’s the longest single work in the book. In my first blog on Ponge, I suggested that the poem was a sonnet. It’s not. In most versions, it’s nine lines in length. Here is the first version, entitled “The pine wood,”

 

Alpine brushwork surrounded by mirrors

With purple wood handle high tufted green bristles

In your hot penumbra stained by the sun

Came dressing her hair Venus issuing from her bath

Marine or lacustrine to the side-aisle steaming . . .

Whence the elastic ruddy thickness on the ground

With odoriferous hair pins

Tossed there by so many negligent treetops

 

At which point Ponge offers three separate alternatives for a possible last line:

 

– And my pleasure also in tasting there my sleep

And this slanting sash in the sleepless tissue

. . . Floats a slanting sash in the sleepless tissue.

 

Note that the first version suggests the presence of sleep, while the other two suggest its absence.

 

Fifteen rewrites later, there is a work with a far more complex title:

 

The plaintive motes
or the sun in the pine woods

 

By this brushworks high tufted with green bristles

With purple wood handles surrounded by mirrors

Let a radiant body penetrate straight from the bath

Marine or lacustrine to the side-aisle steaming

Nothing remains of it relating to sleepless motes

On the elastic ruddy thickness on the ground

With odiferous hair pins

Tossed there by so many negligent treetops

But a peignoir of penumbra stained by the sun.

 

One third of the original lines – and not necessarily the ones a reader might expect – have remained unchanged, but others are radically different.

 

It’s also worth noting that all of these versions – and Ponge continues after the 16 versions to contemplate other changes, or ideas about revision, for another 15 pages – were all composed over a single week in August of 1940, a much more compact period of time than I’d imagined.

 

A lot of this work reminds me a great deal of Rae Armantrout’s writing process, which is similarly characterized by a thorough, probing consideration of every possible word or linebreak. My gut tells me that that unchanged fourth line “Marine or lacustrine to the side-aisle steaming” is the key to Ponge’s poem. But “peignoir of penumbra”?

 

ш         ш         ш

 

Finally, K. Silem Mohammad has a recent post characterizing Michael Cross’ new “chap envelope” – is that a category? – thus:

 

Cross's in felt treeling is an unbound stack of twelve square cards (counting title page and endpiece) and sheathed in an indigo envelope. 

 

Er, Kasey, maybe we got different envelopes, but my copy clearly isn’t indigo. It’s . . . lime.