After six years on a shelf, my old Olivetti has a room of its own.

Sleet, grey squirrels, geese.

“We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right — not an obligation — to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called “inner exile” in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations … resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

“So much for difficulty. Now let’s take the other aspect — overintellectuality. I have said, almost to the point of boring myself and others, that I am as a poet simple, sensuous, and passionate. I’m quoting words of Milton, which were rediscovered and developed by Coleridge. Now, of course, in naming Milton and Coleridge, we were naming two interested parties, poets, thinkers, polemicists who are equally strong on sense and intellect. I would say confidently of Milton, slightly less confidently of Coleridge, that they recreate the sensuous intellect. The idea that the intellect is somehow alien to sensuousness, or vice versa, is one that I have never been able to connect with. I can accept that it is a prevalent belief, but it seems to me, nonetheless, a false notion. Ezra Pound defines logopaeia as “the dance of the intellect among words.” But elsewhere he changes intellect to intelligence. Logopaeia is the dance of the intelligence among words. I prefer intelligence to intellect here. I think we’re dealing with a phantom, or as Blake would say, a specter. The intellect — as the word is used generally — is a kind of specter, a false imagination, and it binds the majority with exactly the kind of mind-forged manacles that Blake so eloquently described. The intelligence is, I think, much more true, a true relation, a true accounting of what this elusive quality is. I think intelligence has a kind of range of sense and allows us to contemplate the coexistence of the conceptual aspect of thought and the emotional aspect of thought as ideally wedded, troth-plight, and the circumstances in which this troth-plight can be effected are to be found in the medium of language itself.”

—Geoffrey Hill, Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 80

Birch, crow, maple.

Coyote, woodpeckers, bald eagles.

Learning the Right Thing from the Wrong Person

Margaret Renkl, NY Times:

…we profoundly misunderstand the very nature of art when we think we know in advance what readers — or audience members or gallery visitors — will derive from it. Or, worse, when we presume to tell them what they should derive from it.

Robins, cardinals, red-winged blackbirds.

We just moved into our house.

Last, next.

85: Mile Marker (Arrow)
86: Signs of Spring (Contra Costa Goldfields)

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

We just bought a house.

• Russell Hoban, The Mouse and His Child (Scholastic 1967, 2001)
• Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (Bloomsbury 1973, 2000) (reread)
• Russell Hoban, Kleinzeit (Summit Books 1974) (reread)

Last, next.

84: United States of Letterpress (Full Circle Press)
85: Mile Marker (Arrow)

• Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Yale 2009, 2019)
• AR Ammons, Sumerian Vistas (Norton 1987)
• Ellen Bass, Indigo (Copper Canyon 2020)
• Carolyn Forché, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin 2020)
• Rob Shouten (ed), Rinkeldekinkel (Milkweed 2021)
• Mark Scroggins, Elegaic Verses (above/ground 2020)
• JJ Rowan, a simple verb (Bloof 2019)
• Kristina Lugn (trns Elizabeth Clark Wessel), I Want You to Come Now! (Bloof 2021)

A poem of mine, Walls, has just appeared at Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

A poem of mine, Demiurge, is available now in Issue 6 of Wine Cellar Press.

It’s a hay(na)ku, a poetic form I’ve been playing with since 2004 or so. (Learn more about hay(na)kus from its inventor, here.)

Last, next.

83: Snowy Evening (15,901)
84: United States of Letterpress (Full Circle Press)

Jim Dodge, from the Foreword, The Gary Snyder Reader:

The last question came from a young man who wanted to know what Gary meant by the paradoxical statement that ends the seminal Four Changes: “Knowing that nothing need be done is the place from which we begin to move.”

Gary replied — and here I’m working from memory — that Nature bats last, is eminently capable of caring for herself against human foolishness, and no doubt will remain long after our demise. Nature doesn’t need us to save her.

I could feel the audience sag, then bristle. Someone called out, “Then why work to stop the destruction?”

Gary grinned hugely, leaned slightly forward, and replied without a quiver of hesitation, “Because it is a matter of character.” Then, with an absolutely wild glitter of delight in his eyes, added, “And it’s a matter of style.”

Henry Adams, The Education:

All New York was demanding new men, and all the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man,—a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type,—for whom they were ready to pay millions at sight. As one jolted over the pavements or read the last week’s newspapers, the new man seemed close at hand, for the old one had plainly reached the end of his strength, and his failure had become catastrophic. Every one saw it, and every municipal election shrieked chaos. A traveller in the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue, and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come or how it was to act. The two-thousand-years failure of Christianity roared upward from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.

Finished in December

• Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (Harper & Row 1977) (reread)
• Robert Karen, Becoming Attached (Oxford 1994)
• Walter J Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (University of Chicago 1958, 2004)

Last, next.

82: Pitch Black (lined)
83: Snowy Evening (15,901)

• Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Return of the King (Mariner Books 2012) (reread)

• Nikki Wallschlaeger, Crawlspace (Bloof Books 2017)
• Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books 2012)

Last, next.

81: Autumn Trilogy (Maple)
82: Pitch Black (lined)

The orange was just too jarring for me. Moving on after only a week. I’ll put it to some other use that doesn’t involve me carrying it with me everywhere.