Larry Ochs

 

Mark Tursi just keeps firing questions:

 

Is the inertia you speak of related in anyway to Olson’s notion of “projective verse”? i.e. one perception leading immediately and directly to a further perception . . . energy transferred from where the poet gets it to the reader. I really like this idea of a poetics of intertia that you seem to suggest. It’s like taking Olson but expanding the “percussive” and the “projectile” aspect and letting the “prospective” just happen. This would seem to gel with your surfing/snowboarding analogy and this idea of shaping motion while in motion. And, hearing the sound and signification in your head first certainly must be a kind of roller coaster of rhythm. And, I’m trying to connect this to something else that has really intrigued me: that is, the way in which you really situate the writing of a poem in a very specific moment in time and place. As in your previous answer, even, and the description of your office – very specific, very detailed. You also do this on your blog quite often; i.e. where you talk about exactly where and when a poem was written, who was there smoking a cigarette or drinking coffee, what the weather was like, what OBJECTS were in your vision. This is really fascinating, I think, when connected to the way a poem happens—musically—in your head. So, I’m wondering about two things: 1) how do you begin a poem? from an image, a sound, the context or the image into sound? or something entirely different? and 2) how does the particular context (place, people, time, objects, etc.) actually become processed into this inertia or motion or “unfolding of meaning in time”? from visual to sound, image to sound, or a different route?

 

Last week I read at Moe’s in Berkeley from the opening of Zyxt, the final section of The Alphabet, which includes, among many other things, the following line:

 

I step into Pangaea, a dark little Cortland Street club down the block from Have-a-Lick’s, stepping up the small bleacher seating to the upper rear left corner, pulling out a notebook from my black Danish book bag, letting the competing, compelling saxophones (Ochs, Ackley, Gruntfest) lead the rhythm of the writing

 

In the audience happened to be Larry Ochs, the great saxophone player from the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, so I was pleased indeed that he was here to hear his name (it occurs in one or two other locations within The Alphabet as well) & recall that particular context. What had not occurred to me, however, was that Ralph Gutlohn, the one-time owner of Have-a-Lick’s, a great little ice cream parlor that is (or was) a Bernal Heights institution, would also be there. But he was, so I felt doubly fortunate indeed. After the reading, Larry asked me if I had had that sentence written down somewhere for 30 years (a slight exaggeration on his part, but only by about five years) & I had to tell him, no, only the image/sense impression floating around in the back of my mind all that time, just waiting to get written down.

 

Part of being a writer, at least for me, is constantly having all this material inside one’s head, so to speak, ready to pop up when the best possible moment arrives. I think that one reason many writers – myself definitely included – tend to be, if not loners exactly, people who appreciate solitude is not only because writing goes better in peace & quiet, but rather because we’re always processing all of this material from our lives – it’s a constant, never-ending churn of data.

 

When I’m thinking about starting on a new project, whether it’s a new section of The Alphabet or an entire new project to come along after The Alphabet, I tend to proceed in very much the same way I do with a single line or phrase or combination of sounds. I sort of worry it to death, then begin to make notes, write it down. If I’m lucky, or at least if I’ve gone about it the right way, one thing does indeed lead directly to others in something of an Olsonian fashion – I love those early theoretical statements of his not so much for their prescriptive tone (Olson so literally loves to throw his weight around, rhetorically speaking, that one can only imagine what it must have been like to have had him as a teacher, with that 6’9” presence right in front of you – I can imagine being terrified if I had been a teen at Black Mountain circa 1953 or ’54) as for their intuitive grasp of the feel of the writing process.

 

Zyxt is a case in point. The title is the second person singular indicative of the verb to see in an obsolete Kentish form of English: literally, you see. It is, more importantly, the final word in the OED &, as a conjugation of the verb sight, an important echo with my favorite of all recent literary collaborations, Sight, jointly written by Leslie Scalapino & Lyn Hejinian. Now The Alphabet already has its own collaboration – Engines, which I wrote with Rae Armantrout – but what I was interested in with Lyn & Leslie’s book was its use of what I would call integral elements, or distinct passages. Lyn & Leslie went so far as not only spatially separate out their contributions, but to initial them as well. I was intrigued with the idea of that kind of autonomy of the element & the possibility of establishing something more akin to an internal dialog. The result is that many of the surface elements of Zyxt might look familiar to a fan of Sight. For example, there are not only a fair amount of passages floating in white space, I use a heavily indented line that runs rather as if it were a paragraph instead of the traditional hanging indent of the poetic line – the only place in all of The Alphabet that does this without being, in a strict or usual sense, prose as such.

 

Now the very opening passages of Zyxt are:

 

Thus an abrupt

 

 

 

Faces phase into vases, an illusion of space fills in at the margin, merges an urge to turn (the line loops in on itself

The French aversion

The merchant of images forgets

 

That first passage – a single phrase truncated so that an adjective carries much of the weight & function of a noun – borrows very directly from a radically different source than, say, Lyn or Leslie. It’s an aspect of what I would characterize as the eruptive writing style I’ve long associated with Faulkner – if there is a secret novelist in my stylistic sauce, it’s almost always him – and this is a phrase that, in various forms, I’ve been thinking about literally since my days in college. There are poems in Crow that are contemporaneous with when I first began contemplating this line. But I never could quite see or hear how to use it, even as it nagged & gnawed at me, until I read several books by one of my other favorite Southern voices, Forrest Gander. Forrest’s use of vocabulary & ability to position individual words is a revelation. He made me realize that I really needed to confront this line in a way that I had never conceived of before.

 

The second stanza, to my mind – and I’m open to the idea that all this is just my hallucination – takes as its first line a series of moves I’ve made so often before that they’re almost a tone-setting gesture, not unlike the way an orchestra “coughs” its notes warming up just prior to the work getting under way – only here I’ve brought it inside. And already the lines here are beginning to address the formal questions implicit in the poem – it’s going to be over 120 pages long when I finish typing it – and opening up to let in some half-glimpsed referential material.

 

To all of this, I should add that Zyxt is rare for me in that it has an epigram¹ —

 

Fra il dire et fare

che il mezzo delle Mare

 

— which is something an old friend, Mario Savio, used to say: between speech & action lies half the sea. When I was working in the U.S. Post Office in 1967 & ’68, Mario was laboring as a longshoreman across the street at Pier One (not the retail store, the real thing) along the Embarcadero in San Francisco. Since our wives knew each other, we became friendly & would have a cup of coffee together in the morning before starting our jobs. At the time, Mario struck me as something of a tragic figure. Just two years before, he had become world famous, the personification of student activism in the United States due to his work as the spokesperson for the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. But he had found the glare of celebrity – very much the same thing I discussed a couple of weeks ago with reference to Bob Dylan – to be horrific, the U.S. government was breathing down his neck, he’d already had a baby & had I believe finished his undergraduate degree in philosophy. 1967 was still a time when he would have been arrested if he had even jay-walked, so to say that he felt claustrophobic in those days would be a great understatement. By comparison, I felt quite free even tho I was working in this dank three-storey warehouse² only because of utter necessity – Shelley had been “in hospital” as the Brits would put it & we needed every cent to get by, so just floating along on student loans wasn’t going to do it. Mario & I were both working alongside the water of the bay, but neither of our jobs promised to a setting out on any great journey, so Mario’s slogan – I guess it’s an old Italian folk-saying – had an especial ironic aspect to it. Now several decades later, as I was beginning to work on this poem, Mario – by now a philosophy professor at Sonoma State – passed away from a heart attack while moving furniture in his house. So that saying just popped back into my head & fit here perfectly. There is a lot of stuff going on during the opening of this poem.

 

I should note one other thing. I knew I was working on all these things during the weeks & months before I actually started writing Zyxt. At one point, I went out to the King of Prussia mall & purchased a large journal-sized notebook in which to write the poem. It’s still the only time I’ve spent over $100 on a notebook, but since this was the end of The Alphabet, I let myself run a little wild. So that volume, which has a tan leather binding & a gilded trim to the paper, was sitting there, getting larger & emptier up until the time I actually started writing, on December 29, 1998. The notebook has, in fact, a title page in which I’ve written title, dedication & epigram, so they were all finally in place in my head before I started writing.

 

Now this may all seem to be quite a long walk around the block, but if you ask me what it is I do & think when I start a poem, this is pretty typically the kind of stuff that enters in & how.

 

 

 

¹ Tho The Alphabet has both an epigram at its beginning & what I think of as an “echo-gram” at its conclusion, about which I shall not say more here

 

² The building has been razed to make way for some tennis courts.