Page 38 - Studio International - September 1972

these impeccably designed pages, you can hear myriad of other kinds of expressions ranging directed finds is full of laundry-list
and see, and what you can't smell Williams from pure mimesis (chick-will-widow cryptography, Poe-like diddles, copy-book
describes. In this book especially Williams chuck-will-widow/ whip poor weel whip poor riddles and grocery store nomenclature. He
limits himself to his initial mission (which he weel) to pure showoff international patter (`No likes unfinished questions and multiple choice.
shared with others such as William Carlos Schwarzwald stuff/keine Waldeinsamkeit'), the He likes to extract the essence of advertising
Williams) to 'raise the common to grace.' His point being there is just no place you cannot go copy (`Concentration is the very essence of
folk poetry rings true even when his arch titles in a Book. poetry' E. Pound) and he likes pseudo-charts,
don't, for instance: In his newest book, the title of which is pseudo-graphs and pseudo-mathematics. His
`Mrs Sadie Grindstaff Weaver and Factotum, printed only on the back cover, 'The Loco low chuckles are dispersed irregularly through
Explains the Work Principle to the Modern Logodaedalist In Situ', with embellishments by the Book and sometimes are extended so that
World': Joe Tilson, Williams takes us where he's been you have to double back for the double take.
I figured since 1968 with a diarist's enthusiasm for Somewhere toward the middle of the
anything anybody cryptic detail and an iconoclast's self-irony. A unnumbered pages in large type appears
could do a lot of I major section of the six-part book is taken up
could do a little of with Williams's presumably artless extractions
(he calls them 'excavations') from case
mebby
He doesn't stop with folk but gives, in whatever histories in Havelock Ellis. He explains in his
form he can, the sounds of his South, sometimes informal notes that he used a method consisting
typographically aided. Here is a rough non- of laying over a rectangular cutout on the prose
typographical translation of '3 Ripples in the text 'positioned, variously rotated etc. over
various sections until material began to
Tuckasegee River' : re-shape itself... What I was looking for were and there is certainly something damnyankee
tsi KSI tsi the fire-points, the garnet crystals free of their about his terse choices, and his curt parodies,
KSI tsi KSI matrix.' These excisions for all their cold sparingly dispersed in the book, such as :
tsi KSI tsi method come out a lot more like warm nesting goodk kkkk unjam ingwe nches lass ? start again
But he can be Dickensonian too in his birds than garnet crystals. He's far from goodk lasses enche sking start again kings tart !
descriptive inspiration: Pound's objectness here, method or no. The again sorry goodk ing we ncesl ooked outas thef ?
aflame azalea, mayapple, maple, thornapple Havelock Ellis adventure reminds me a little of unmix asloo kedou. . . .
plantation Mostly Porter can hold because he has so much
Octavio Paz's venture into concrete poetry- space to disport himself in. It may be, as
a white cloud in the eye cum-object in 'Discos Visuales' in which the Higgins says, that for him the process is the
of a white horse poems are presented through windows on thing, but all this process is then processed into
rotating discs so that they can be read in a
a field of bluets moving non-linear fashion. Paz said he wanted to something of a sequence that falls, like Arp's
below the black suit papers fluttering to their artful rest, into a
present 'a handful of signs like an ideogram that
of William Bartram significance. Found objects ? More like Pound's
is a purveyor of signification,' but the poems idea of the poem that is more objects than
bluets or "Quaker Ladies" or some say refuse to dissolve themselves into signs, statements. The statement in Porter is
"Innocence" windows or not. In Williams, even the found negligible but the stating is most vigorous. If
signs—real signs on lavatories or in provincial
bluets and the blue of gentians and Bern Porter's finds were strung up on the wall
Philadelphia blue laws ! towns —compose themselves into his Gesamt they would lose, for they need to unfold in the
poem, and sometimes into sharp political mind's eye in the kind of time the mindless eye
high hills, statements as well. The book includes an cannot provide in assaying objects. q
authentic exchange between Williams and
stone cold
sober Governor Wallace himself, along with other
illuminating commentary by the folk. 1 'Blues & Roots Rue & Bluets, A Garland for the
as October. Bern Porter's signs are, in 'Found Poems', Appalachians', by Jonathan Williams, Grossman,
N.Y. Grossman, 1971
Yup, when he damn well pleases Williams can mostly signs, but they are signs that have a `The Loco Logodaedalist In Situ' by Jonathan
make those long inventories of numbered notes cumulative and startling effect of revealing a Williams, Cape Goliard in association with Grossman,
and quotations like all the rest, but in this book poet's soul in spite of themselves and their N.Y. 1972
`Found Poems' by Bern Porter, Something Else
such lists only occur sparingly amongst a manipulator. Porter's fat book of visually Press, 1972
88