;.cPoems, Recollected & Selected, 1962-1973, from typescript
;.l1,6,60,66,1,0,10,75,192,2,15,20,25,127,10,0,
;.l2,15,75,192,2,20,25,127,15,0,
;.l3,20,75,192,2,25,127,20,0,
;.l4,25,75,192,2,127,25,0,
;.l5,30,75,192,2,127,30,0,
;.l6,12,90,192,2,18,24,127,12,1,
;.l7,17,125,192,2,26,35,127,17,2,
=po6273

RECOLLECTED AND SELECTED POEMS , 1962-1973

Input from typescript.
Typed, Belmont, ca. 1973.

.p
NARCISSA

she knelt

        naked  

              over

                her first `friend' told her

                      "I hold a deep black pool of hate"

                another, later, laughed,

                      "I have, at least, a puddle"
           
           those waters

                                     (NYC, ca. 62)


{I've here added the semi-quotes around 'friend', as I thought ofdoing at the time; it was the contemporary term for lover.}



.p
arse poeticorum

artculate
&-lated, surely:  words
climb like mistaken snakes,
rhyme and fall:  Diddlely
shit or crap
compounded, it's the sound
counts, and when words unbound
abound who
wonders where the contents went?
               (Berkeley, 1962)

[Ref:  Jingle:  You'll wonder where the Yellow Went/ When youbrush your teeth with Pepsodent]

--------------------------

*What I learned at the Philosophrs' Convention

We seek
a bright white young man with a proper stopper
who measures fearless ideas through a bottle-dropper,
not like these, please, who rant, pant, rave and wav-
er, tipsy-topsy, the raggedy Andy and Mopsy's 
of acadanemia; we
deem decorum seemlier
and procreate a proper pecking order
of minds intense and dry as typewriters.
                                            
                       (APA Convention, Washington D.C., 1963)

------------------------------                     

Whwere shall I ma Muse display?
Her little ass must itch and shake
if he high on the grass we take,
and Placitas' stones won't fint poems    w e l l,
I will not carp at where her lay is told
buit with her cold goldfish
in others' streams to dwell
and come, with thanks, to bunks of monks, wot drilled in blissfilled solitude
'midst juicy fruits, wriggly figs
all gentle folk, ewes

---------------

Mona Mustache (after Stevens)

"The lion sleeps in the sun
His head is on his paw
He can kill a man"
Fer hot dogs!  (Roar)
 
[Note to Mona Mustache:  I took what I took to be a somewhatpretentious few lines by Stevens, and tacked on a bad pun, basedon a Dada send-up of the Mona Lisa -- by Max Ernst, if I recall.]
			
---------------------------------------

Looking for bugs
the duck bobs
bottoms
up
like a
well-known poet with
hic-
ups

---------------------------
.p
**On Seeing a Pornographic Movie

Gives the Devil his due:
the set of sex sans residue
of love, and freed from complication
of art, angst, or even procreation.
                     (Boston, 1972)                                     
-----------

On Getting slugged on the jaw near Celso's

Only this, that
bodies break so easily
mend so slow and achingly
and pain is so incompatible with coffee-cake
                              (Arroyo Hondon, 12/70)

-------------

damn yr. tranquilizer:
now, every time I try to drop a note to my soul
a little cherub floats by on a pink & white cloud
catches it, and drops it into a golden wastebasket
                                (NYC 11/63)

---------------
Fragment

 ... a shower washes the night away
 Bach puts her little-girl world back in order
                               (Santa Barbara, 1968)

------------------

To his Coy Mistress

Ah Love, you're like a pinball game
all turned on and a-light
until we'd get it on, or in
and then it's -- TILT -- Goodnight.
                             (Albuquerque, 1972)
                             (printed, Snowmen & Scarecrows)

---------------------
From 33 variations on the devlish tricky theme:  #24

OH, rue the day of the ex-rouee
card scare inserted, he's deserted
barely pressed, heis suit's re-dressed, with
"Beat it, Mister, she's mysiter"
So sometimes lords of ladies intellectual
bow out, unmanned by bawds' love; gay boys, ineffectual.
---------------------
.p
The Peacnik and his New Yorim imp's Reply to the Nymph*

Hey now now why so gsrave
as we lie here gaze to gaze
	(Because we put the arse before the discourse?)
{One impulse from a vernal wood} and your face on my arm
is worth bingos of "do you know" and "did you too"

The Peacenik:  three Weeks Later

	The day love you
	left I
	raided your pad for food; found
	a stewing chicken your name.
	So Sue, though split, chick, you're
	keeping your cool.

*'s complaynt:  "you'd better go before somebody comes home andintroduces us.

------------------

in one throb of the moon, Jane
you filled my heart and fled

{naked, you knelt  ...
by moonlight in Placitas, juniper tree }


	thinking of rowboats in Central Park, I said
	Don't worry , we'll bump into each other a dozen times a day
	Rio Grande breaking past rocks.

-------------------
l7
*To one who accused him of staring

As Pythagoras, some say, knew each thing by its true tone, unique as numbers
and lived among unheard harmonies, as if from seven concentric spheres
So, apart from you, I know
no clearer sound, or simpler beauty

                            (Placitas, ca. 1971
                             to Susan Harrison, z'l)

---------------------

Two poems under the influence of Carl Shragear's Panama Red

Miraculously, the waters parted
They passed through to Mt. Zion
To on he to whom the God once spoke in the silence in the heart of the fire in the veins of a bush)
The God spoke again
and the WORD            
             of infinite delicate complexity
                                             was revealed as LAW
Blinded, he returned
to seal his mountain-top tomb with the shattered calf.
The WORD was hewn on stone tablets.

[Notes:  there should be an ontic hierarchy here:  LAW is one level above everyday, WORD an ontic level abovethat -- so it calls for a larger font
This is as I wrote it then, mistaking Mt. Zion for Mt. Sinai

------------
(fragment, after Auden)

[This fails both as poem and philosophy, but it does raise some interesting ideas.]


"We are not risen," Jesus said       [1]
and scared St. Paul clear out of bed
 -- childless Piscean philosophers

	"mankind must choose between the rack and the crucifixtion
	 therefore take of my body and eat"
	 flayed alive, Christ the Dancer

in pictures of the Crucifixtion       [2]
the loincloth hides it --
the nail through his balls            [3]
but clearly each leering spectator sees
in this man gentle as water, mankind's first-born son
the most obscene, convulsive sin
of his own desperate imagination

-- later, the incredible radiance

[Comment:  This is a very problematic heresy.  The notion of what it might be to take on the sins of mankind.
Notes:
[1]:  D.H. Lawrence, The Man who Died
[2]   Auden, "About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters}
[3]   Cheap shock value, of course.
      Shrager said, I assume of middle-period Beethoven sonatas, that the composer tries to get the listenerto hold still until he can deliver a kick
                                         
-----------------
l1
.p
33 Variations on a Devlish Theme

Theme:  Be kind to your web-footed friends
        for the duck may be somebody's mohter:
        she lives all alone in the sawmp:
        in the cold and the wet and the damp.

[These are trivia, I'll input them later for buswory.]
[The sendoff is, of course, of Bethoven's Diabelli Variations,itself a sendoff, starting from the theme.]        


1.  h.  Ho!  What's that?
    C,   milord, 'tis a duck.
    H.  It fits well this dismal place.

        Poor breedy, reedy, quaklikng that
        alone doest live orr girgive in drear miasmal swap 
        cold, wet, damp, fforsaken
        by outhgt save motherhood's drab recreation --
        CHURL, as thou love'st me, rembereth
        Thine own sweet heart, dame, firlight and
        be kind to't.  This pleedy, broody sedgling too
        may be a mother.                   

2.  Kindly mind th'ununluck ducky
    Someone's mother she be, maybe
    Lives she all alone in swampy
    Cold y wet y dampy ook.



5.  duck
      mother
       maybe
        baby

   kindly wipe yoru wewbbed feet

6.  in the mist, a sound             or    duck / water / alone
    water shaken on the lake
    from a duck's wet back.

7.  We're in the primordial soup:
    cold as a tramp's damp, but it's home --
    Duck, baby; here comes mankind                             

8.  blst the
    damp cold
    here comes a man kind
    be kind

9.  Let me ex-
    palin : Copld have you -- damp too -
    al-
    ways PLEASE even unto thse
    least of me creatures afeared
    like geese freezing in winter rain
l7
  I'd like to say it beautuflly but I'm tired, my feet are cold, my boots leak
l1

10.
There was once a female of pluck
Who brooded alone in the muck
On what from her bun
come forth rightly defined 
to become, in her likeness, a duck

11.
who vowed ne're to be taken a'back
but recapture her critical lack
Her doct'ral oration was this professtation:
l7
-rhy and thy- -maticic demands bedam't, even a lit'ry creation ME hereby thinks
 therefore ex- and con- -sist in unique expression of'ts freedom
                                              viz., a quack

12.  Home to mother a-smother in love
and discourse on what that's really of:
"I'm beset by a drake, he
won't slaken his makin' unbearable!
id est, a pest

[leftover:  of all possible puddles, the best]
l1

13.

Looking for bugs
the duck bobs
bottoms up
like a
well-kown poet
with hic-
          -cups.

 ....

19.
The duck does not know
How beautiful she is; 
So are you; let's fuck.

20.
behind it all
only the sadness
of flowers too long unbloomed
rain on a summer pond

	[A good example of a phony haiku -- too long unbloomed??]

 ...

23.
(Peep-show, 109 E. 43 St. (2nd floor)
   "It's the most degen3erate we've ever seen"
     Inspector Bossis, Dep't of Consumer Affairs, cited by Sheehy
	
legs spread, the living model, always changing
revolves through generations of constellations of generation
two bits make the whole

[Comments:
of course the names Bossis and Sheehy are nice found objects: Sheehy was Gail Sheehy, probably writing in New York Magazine.
These lines were written some years earlier, and tacked in her.
The Diabelli variations do, as I recall, get increasingly complex. I know the Goldberg's do; though those are serious music, notparodies.]

32.
Somewhere, overall, Shiva and Shakti dance
"Woman is half the universe, said Susan and split
Me, since, just too much 2nd-derivative sex ...
                            (Playboy Club, 12/72)

33.
Swimming in the swamp
The duck, followed by ducklings
Hunters, go get warm!

                          
.p
Campaign 72

Skipped lunch, midst drizzle
waiting to see John Lindsay
sleek and tan, shake hands.   

              (Boston, 1/13/72)  

----------------
Welfare clerk

Tasteless to complain
She may be watching TV
and plan to serve tea

_______________

SHORTER POEMS:

Ce que nous dit notre bon chef

    Defesne de cracher
    dans le diner*

                           *Don't spit
                            in this shit

---------------

Thoughts on a pad at 6 A.M.

       this pad
       is a mess

-------
l7
COLLECTED SHORTER POEMS:

What the Master said to the stranger who enquried as to his name

Lao-tzu;
who're you

-------

What the master said to the pedant who persisted in enquiring as to his health

                                                                                 Lao-tze;
how're ye?

A Leading Theologic Doctrine Rebutted:

                                          Just war?
                                          Just gore.

A Critique of Poetry:

poetry's
unjustifiable

What to do while visitng persons whose feline has fallen       into nitroglycerine

Don't pat
the cat.

-------

Untitled:

Wordsworth?
Inflation.
       
--------
A longer poem, in Commiseration with one whose concubine has forsaken him to become a camp-follwer of theSocialist Workers' Party

She's got the hots
for the Trots.
	
---------
.p
Sketches:  UCSB Philsophy Department, '67-'68

Wienpahl:

	Honest Ulysses, washed ashore
	wonders:  what are all the plastic people laughing for?

Alexander Sesonske (Chairman)

	It is an error to ignore the terrier
	Whose silent eyes but make his bite the scarier.

to Jean Cox:

	Between our worlds you walk, Euridyce
	and men fear to touch you.
          
.p
Beat Sheaf

everybody got depressed that montyh
the dishes saat dank in the sink for days
while slugs crawled across the stone floor of No-Doz nights
several girls found out who they really were
`	cut their heair
and stopped sleeping around
	or, if they had been vigins
starting sleeping around ... 
          
------------

in the beginning the the WORD
the Logos, the key-word that unlocks everyting
now just a little Word will do to
	clear me a yard to play in
                                      ?'`61?
-----------                                 
*
Ed in Rochester
Ricky in Columbus
Half-=filled saki bottle in the closet, underwear on the floor
Poems strewn on the sesk, on the floor; Eric's essay on Whitman, and a sticky-bottomed sherry glass
Past the dirty windows
Cold white snow and snow-trees
outside
               Oberlin, Obio,  Xmas, 1960

------------------
l1

so grey a day
the puppies sound like seagulls
                     (Taos Reservation, 11/72)

-------------------
the petals of the night are like cloth
(black of the night flying like sky
   sun white light)

-------------------
.p
walking the blue stsreet
	low Lord
storefronts me staring
	walked blah, Lord
dust gutter scuffs heat
	knees flick pavement street
stopped hot blue.

---------

Walkin' donw the L.A. freeway
Gonna make the scene somehow
Bluebook in my briefcase
The mark of Cain upon my brow

---------

Met me a real fine baby on the Apian Way
I didn't sleep all night & couldn't study next day
Well I love you you pretty baby, yes you're really fine
But I'm FLUNKING ALL MY FINALS so I hope you won't be mine
Baby won't you please please say good-bye

--------------

April 17, 1961

Cryin' across the sea, Charlene
Cryin' across the sea
Just thought I'd tell you, little buddy
Cryin' across the sea

Cryin' for the moon, Charlene
Cryin' for the moon
'Fraid if I fall asleep, little buddy
We're gonna loose the moon

[Comment:  As I recall, that was the day JFK blockaded Cuba;which, it was generally believed, would either be a feather in hiscap, or World War III.  I bet on the former and skipped the picketline.] 

-----------------

[Comment:  I soon gave up this emotional free-form.  For whateverreason, it now appeals to me again.]

--------------
l7
Oscar
will eat only graham crackers, peanut butter, and Oreo cookies
his wife & shrink say, what the hell
as long as he's got to have a neurois, it might as well be a harmless one
l1
                      
[Comment:  Marilyn Strauss [Lidov], z'l, told me that story.
Some time later, she told me something apalling:  Oscar and hiswife had used some sort of spray, he contracted cancer, and wasdead in about a day.
Marilyn could marvel at the sublime improbability of lateBeethoven, and I suppose at the bizarre improbability of the USAworld she shared. 

-----------------

Pensees d'Ann

	il y etait
reine comme les fluerus
	et doceur de l'eau
Pluis se tombent
	et mon coeur s'en va

Le ciel voulait dire
Naturellment ne pouvait pas
parce-ce qu'il etait ciel
Si il eait coline, peut-etre
Ciel dans le nusages ne peut pas parler.


-------------

Damn it to hell, Jack Krouac
I've paid my dues:  eulogized you in a valedictory & ...
                        (New Can Co., Holbook, )

[Comment:  That was written on one of the few temp jobs in which Irealize I really had risked my life:  I was running a fork-lift,for the first time in my life, putting spools of wire, that mayhave weighed a ton or more each, on shelves high above my head,with only the frame and a bump-hat for protection.  
And the bump-hat kept slipping off.  Yellow plastic, I think. 
Fortunately, I woke up the next morning and told my mother I wasnot going back.]
-------------
.p
l7             
*The day after our 14-year-old acid-ace flipped out

Admittamce desk checks his identity;
he's here merely patient
whose presumed pain precipice constrains our most carefully contained inanity
complacent as his tranquilizers.
Meanwhile his baby lady waits his space
while joy & despair race through her face like a Late Quartet
and friends grieve in patterned evasions.

                             (Yellow Springs, 1965)

[Comment:  That was Steve Keyes.  His companion was Jew-el.  Maybe she was Jewish, I never thought.
 We were all taking psychedelics then; he was one of the most adept.
 But I wonder why everyone, myself included, assumes you must baby-talk to the mentally ill
 I would now be taken for such, yet I'm aware of too much.]

-------------------------
A footnote to Aristotle's definition of man

	the dark girl, cross-legged on the grass
looked up and said
go away Sam
he leaned again a little toward her, making vague gestures
awfully seriously
Look,
Sam, she said, I've got things to discuss with my friends, please go away
he nodded and did not go
for nearly a minute     
then turned around and walked
a little ways, plopping down on the grass
took a grass-stem in his fingers

     (Manhattan Sate Mental Hospital; AFSC volunteer project, ca. '62)
l1
{Comment:  I think it may have been a few years before that; Iremember myself as quite young and innocent.  So maybe more like'60.  Really, we were too young to be plunged into that.  I knowthat at the end of each day -- our task was just to socialize withthe --- inmates -- I would let myself cry.
To see people with whom I could not but identify, confined.}

-------------

mind blown or ego gone
adrift in the close of his own seize of neurois, poor hippy
still holding his moments of lucidity like beads ...

-------------
Juggler

but
not too fast, it's
after all our
parable ----

------------       

even a dog will
roll over, play dead
try the same stale tricks day after day
	when nothing else works
----------

.p
*
"A lot of people,"
 said Ricky,
"think Henry is God
 but I don't think that's right."

----------------

"Hey -- 
 guess who I just saw --
 my ex-roommate -- you know, the redhead.
 Guess what --
 She wants to model this summer
 She'll do anything."
       
               (U.C. Berkeley, 1961)

--------------------
l1
.p
*Wittgenstein on the rails    
                             (to Maret Kahn)

	Furck you too, Sraffa
         --- Tractatus collapses like a house of cards
             simple handbook, mail out errata
             Tired of playing Pangloss to my own Candide anyhow
             Moore, be my Glaucon

Notes:  Only at G.E. Moore's insistence did W. give the titleTractatus Logico-Philosphicus to the English translation of hisLogische-Philosphische Abhandlung 
l2
( I suppose folks though the Tractatus would sail forth fromPrincipia Mathematica until it met Moore's Principia Ethica,and thus rout the Kraut or flog the Frog, more or less),  
l1
in which he takes the Platonic view that reality consists ofinterconnected Eternal Truths [I'm inserting a concept fromWhitehead's Process & Reality, itself derivative from Plato &Spinoza] (takeing 'Urbild in 3.24, 3.316, 3.333, 5.522, 5.535 asthe standard translation of Plato's 'eidos' or 'ideas') andsumperimposes upon it the Kantian therory that all we canintelligbly bespeak are our representations, which W. supposesreduce to isomprhphic logical forms of the states-of-affairswhich, in their entirety, comprise the logos.
Wittgenstein, having concluded that whwatever could be said couldbe said clerarly, ie in a form isomorphic to the reality itdesignates, felt free to take up gardening, which he did untiljolted out of his intellectual exile while riding on a train withP.R. Sraffa, who "made a characteristic Neopolitan gesture" andasked what the logical form of that was.  Whence W. commenced his"later" phiolosphy ("which could be seen in the right light onlyby contrast with and against the background of my old way ofthinking") with his 1930-1933 lectures, which survive in Moore' spainstaking but rather poor notes.

(W.'s PI considered as theory indicates:  Putative communcation ismeaningful insofar as it is inherent in bona fide language games,which are inherent in forms of life that comprise our world, at agiven point in natural history, as it were.)
l2

{Comment:  The preceeding ain't gobbeldygook.  It may besimplistic, but it is coherent.
I've not kept up with the Wittgensteinian literature; but oneof the unaddressed problems, last I paid heed, about a decadeago, was to map the isomorphic transform of Tractatus intoPI.
Now it did occur to me this summer that in PI W. starts froma standpoint of what PVK calls 'the realm of allpossibilities' -- I think he noted that as asamprajitasamadhi; that will be clear in my transcription of his 1996Zenith seminar, esp. with my inserted titles.}                               
In the xerox copy of these poems, I'd sketched number ofapparent cartoons, that in fact neatly illustrate this.  Theworld holds a symbol,, say an right-angled pair of arrows, aseternal object, which impacts a perceiver, who symbolizes it,say as (f(x,y), and bespeaks that symbol to another person,who takes it to mind as the original right-angled pair ofarrows. 

.p
 
The following poem is the one Joyce Bashein alludes to in thepicture she gave me.  It was printed in the Thunderbird,literary magazine of the U. of New Mexico.  It's veryaffected, but has some interesting attempts at transition,almost musical.

The ellipses here were in the text, they do not indicateomissions.
l7
 ................
       (meaning, it all starts
        and ends
        with silence
or "a good bowel movement" --
                   back to earth, Lao-tzu!
                                  but     
"music is only a profanation of silnece in the interests of silence"
                                so, though beauty looks best in her bearskin
                                poems are rich old ladies; clothe with care

                     in some anthologies
                     a certain precision of style
                     perhaps; a certain patient, unimpassioned craftsmanship
                     proper to an age of reason
                     but unseasonable as pastures in Manhattan in this "saison ardente"

the past collapsed in a rubble of bric-a-brac about us, "it's in the air, everywhere"
Pound found joyciously again' the haid like neon pneumatic drills
loan-sharking myths to man "in such abudance that the giving famishes the vraving
Kafka's Beattles fare forth, quoting Gensesis
Space conflates from Sunport to "Idle-wild"
homogenized milk and Coca-Cola seep into every duchy, prefcture, sheikdom
    archeypes of all ages and cultures pulse back, to be
packaged into isolated hours, towers of green slate & fake adobe
by the ineveitable men who live each century in a dream of the last

true, rhyme's a dead bell-lettre, Bill
symmetry received its death-blow by Copernicus, still,
half-assed rhyme's fine, coming on strong, chum
    (public wan 'um bumpies squeezed, we squeeze; it pays)                                [Albee]
so go wan outa way if don' wanna unnerstan' ie be shat upon
   Thereby Abdicating the Poet's Responsibility to His Time -- not a minute too soon!

                           insight, often
                           comes only by accident
                           and weighty words fall like andirons;
                           too, the frame should suit the picutre:
                           attending a lecutre on art, plug your ears.
                           it's a dandy dandelion
                            not, necessarily, a sunflower manque

                                               ......................
                                               ......................
                                                   (meaning, it never really 
                                                    starts or)

NOtes:

1.  Cf. Cage, Tacit
6.  I think it was Luther, not Lao-Tzu.
7.  Henry Miller
8.  "When I said to her 'Mabel/ you look good in sable' / She said, 'I look best in my bearskin
9.  eg, New Poetry of England and America
13.  Mallarme, "La Jolie Russe"
 [N.B.:  I often quote from that poem -- especially "mais riez de moi, gens de partout, surtout gens d'ici/car il y a tant de choses que je n'ose vous dire / tant de choses vous ne laisserez me dire " -- but hadforgotten, and noted it as Apollinaire, not Mallarme.]
14.  Originllly a popular Albuqureque radio station
14.  reference to Pound's Cantos's and Joyce's Finnegan's Wake
16.  Hart Cranes / Eliot, Ash Wednesday
17.  Kafaka..  Cf. Ovid.  "In the beginning I misunderstood.  But now I have it, and the word is good.  Saythe word/ and you'll be free/ Say the word, and be like me ...and the only word is love.
(Beattles)
18.  McLuhan
22.  after Ptolemy vs. Copernicus, Hume vs. Kant, Moore et al. vs. Wittgenstein.



=================================================================                     
