Poet's Studio, The

APz In the Studio

I WRITE IN THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF OUR MASter bedroom. It is, as the vacuum cleaner salesmen say, a heavy traffic lane. My dear singles come and go en course to the bath, my son and his friends and the pup careen on by, banging the terrace door as they move in and out of the yard in fogs of brown Mojave dust. It is a busy, lay open place of blessed interruptions, of that kind a site as I have feeling poems to be. For me a metrical composition is made of thresholds and transgressions, and nothing poetic is at any time still enough to be interior or apart. In writing, I aspire to pass over, via the poem, into the day. If all goe well, the arrivals and soft interruptions profuse, and the day approachs also over to me. Interruption and distraction are the authors of real time. I think of Charles Olson:

This morning of the small snow

I enumerate the blessings, the leak in the faucet

which makes of the sink time.

("The ballads of Maximus")

I think of Robert Creeley:

Make time

of irritations,

looking for the

recurrence

("Mazatlan: Sea")

The lines of a metrical composition are instances of timing, by dint of which I mean to say a verb-"to time." The permissions I give and am given by dint of the interruptions of my musing in the corner of my swing contrive my cadences, showing the line breaks to the onrush of my words.

I write in the lyre-backed made of wood chair I've had since I was nine. It is the chair in which I squirmed and somehow or other managed to learn the art of drawn out division. The seat is terrifically frayed, almost threadbare now, and the lyre is cracked and free from moisture and coming away from the frame. I like to think of it as the objective correlative of my argument with Orpheus, that manipulative prude If sole Orpheus had had the useful sense to let Eurydice take the lead! Think of single springtime followed immediately by another flat more wild and free! Dr Williams did, as in Spring and all where he, at least, give permission to a real Eurydice lead the metrical composition throughout its greeny good transgressions:

The imagination, fre from the handcuffs of "art," takes the lead! Her feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who draw near behind her have much to think of Hm

Also, my chair always reminds me that I've a lengthy way still to go. The stain of Orphism is still on my words. Hm.

My piece of poetrys are written first (I will not say "composed" as I've adored Robert Duncan's notion of a "disturbance of words within words" too lengthy to accept so poor a settlement) on my manual typewriter, a portable Olympia (oh stain of Orphism!) I've carried around since corporation days. Many's the time it serv a double aim i.e. both as writing implement and luggage. Into its case I could easily pack a hardly any days' change of underwear and sock as well as a toothbrush. I gues I could say my "studio" is mobile. level now, in clement weather, I can take the heart of it outside, and I do, right to the lower extremity of the flowers. I can bring the writing across my doorsill into the open air. This pleases me a allotment as I am very empty of urging students and myself to come by by any good means, piece of poetrys into the world, and not to mind about getting worlds into numbers Leave such distillations and entombments to the Platonists, Heaven help them. And it pleases me too that, because I write upon a manual typewriter, I am in physical contact with the page. I'm at any time reminded that a poem is first a piece of white paper and solitary later (to paraphrase Robert Rauschenberg) a piece of paper more or les overlayed with words. In the interval, alphabetic characters and words have taken the places into which I've set them, and those places are not mine. It's my metrical composition all right, made by my crushings placed by my hands and organ of sights but it doesn't look like me Putting piece of poetrys on pages, I put the words exactly where they are. I cannot disavow them, on the other hand they are always already gone from me As Creeley avers, "Position is where you / set it" (and notice the heavy emphasis the line break lays on you, i.e. just gaze at what you've done). Everything is upon not in, the line. Poetry's all an envoi; I can have feeling it getting out of hand, and I like that.

Back indoors now, back to the southwest corner of our scope for one last noticing. Writing there,! write below sum of two units portraits: a daguerreotype and a photo. The former is of Thoreau, the image of him we all know best: soft-shouldered and disheveled, transparent-eyed and turned to one side His portrait is there because I regard with affection him, because I read him almost each morning of my life, and because, for me numbers is morning work. The point of time I open my eyes on waking, eyesight begins its wonder-working power. Thoreau's great theme was triumph of vision, literal human vision, above adversity. he had the courage of his faculty of perceptions and, writing, I consult the courage of those transparent organ of visions every time.

The photo is of Ezra strike near the end of his life, walking away from the camera down a side public way in Venice in company with a white glossy cat. (I am hearing Vivaldi as I write this; Ezra would have liked that.) The photo is there because Ezra beat wrote the most beautiful poesy I know and paid replete price for the privilege. without of wreckage and wrong-headedness he managed to find, in Pisa and after, a completed music of nearness, of fondnes and of humility which, unlike unobtrusiveness consists wonderfully with visionary pride. each day of my life, writing or not, I examine to come to terms with my wreckage and with the considerable proportions of my possess wrong-headedness. Ezra and the durable, habitable ruins of The Cantos give me daily, confidence that, by coming to bourns I also will come home