For the second Christmas in a row, David Shapiro has spent at least part of the day reading my blog & sending me a series of notes. I don’t know if he thinks of these missives as a present to me, but that certainly is how I experience the generosity of such close reading. He took, for example, Karri Kokko’s question about writing poetry backwards to think about the direction of time in the arts altogether.

Backwards, reverse, inversion, perversion, subversion: I have been intrigued with this. Jung mentioned he learned Ulysses by reading it backwards. Of course, that is., in a sense, how all generic forms are read. At the beginning of Hamlet, say, we know revenger's tragedies end with death. We know, as Gertrude Stein once joked about drama, but a serious joke, more than the characters know. That is the strangeness of Godard's remark. We have a beginning, middle and ending, but not in that order. But is it a beginning if it comes at the end? For example, how many civilizations open meals with "dessert" or wear their shoes on their head. And if shoes are worn on the head, do they become, after all, a hat? It's not just an issue of the surprising end, but the way to make an entrance an exit, a window a defenestration.

Cut-up techniques are just one more physical way to understand this. (And in painting, do we read right to left or left to right – Tuttle says he and Agnes Martin thought right-to-left was a gender-specific issue, which I doubt.) In my architecture-poetry classes, I am always aware of young spatial analysts who, when they are free to translate say the famous Wang Wei go by diagonals and inversions. Musicians do this, but can one warm up at the end of the piece? But that is why Koch used to warn us not to warm-up at the beginning, like poor jazz?

Berrigan intrigued Johns when he systematically re-arranged a sonnet, so that it becomes coherent upon reassembling. But doesn't Proust come close to this everywhere, when the past rearranges the present, as in jealousy in extremis? The sign that you have just decoded, or perhaps misread, changes the past.

Anyway, Irreversible the new movie begins with revenge and slowly turns to a tranquil beginning, which ends the film in rotating calm. The artificiality seen in poor rhymers (the sins of rhymes) or the idiot formalists who can't really do their metrics, is that they are forced to go backwards in a clumsy way? That's why Graves made his idealist remark about not writing a sonnet until you're half into it. But that's not enough. Anyway, through-analysis in music means that every great fugue is often composed backwards.

I read much literature backwards, a habit from the Hebrew misaligned with English. But also because I KNOW that Paradise Lost comes first, as in Proust. It upsets my son. It always reminds me of the canonic joke of Roussel: Begin with the first page and end with the last. That suggests the reader is free not to do that.

I used to find film coercive in my youth, because I could not stop it easily. Video has given us many directions, and I love teaching film only now when I can constantly stop, redesign the film, etc.

So one has a funny last freedom, the model of simultaneous grids in Jakobson. For Jakobson the secret of poetry is the way the two axes come together and make every line in a poem the partner as it were of every other., There is no way out – the last line of a Shakespearean couplet, say, harps and re-harps and changes the first line. That is the bizarre super-reader super-patterning problem that Riffaterre and others picked up as a putatively bad or good infinite in poetry. Just as you say the readers of your work often remember things you don't, and presumably any great critic will find patterns that are "there" but not necessarily designedly dropped.

And in such a way, the writer's death poem or death, for example, influences our reading of the life or myth. This has been said over and over about the death of O’Hara, which transfigures poems. Koch’s Cloud poem, at the end or near the end of his life, thus gets re-read from the perspective of the end-as-present. That is the banality of much of the readings of Plath, where the suicide is seen "everywhere." It's the reason I rejected a Kimball question about whether I always wrote the same poem. There are ways in which any critic can reduce a poet from development to stasis. Borges loved to accept this as a fiction of time never changing.

Koch's best assignment was to write a story that could be read 4 ways. Keith Cohen delighted in this assignment. I found it merely ingenious. But it is a good way to remember how difficult it is to judge or read a novel, a poem, music., A bright student once told me that music was never really heard once. One can't judge a piece of music, until the end and the beginning are learnt at once., Thus, writing backwards or in reverse is perhaps too mechanical an operation about the operations of time.

Mozart in his rondos builds into the music the repetition that makes ecstatic the lack of difference between beginning and end, like the great paintings of Johns in 'cross-hatchings that always suggest a coming together in folds. Jasper has been one of the most ingenious painters of the problem of time, voice, and folds. That's why he titles one folded work: Corpse and Mirror.

A lot of my assignments in classes since l970 have been about folding a poem forwards and backwards.

I also believe that the charm of most haiku is reduced when translators are not very careful about how often the sudden image comes first or last but possibly reversed from the fate of attention?

What is the beginning of a painting?

How does a poem end with the proper sense of beginning?

All these have been exactly problems in Stein. And my sequences were one way, I hoped, to escape a single tempo. I would write for a year and then carefully derange structures until they represented the doubt I felt about objects and time.

The time in architecture, the time of circulation and vision often trumped in photography, but also illuminated by great architectural photographs, is the space of the sequence in Corbusier, always revising his photographs and painting his buildings.

In sculpture, what is the time of a sculpture? I asked Fairfield Porter: can you paint in the past tense?

Bye, just a hello -

David Shapiro