The Night Wet
On iron age gruel, Pierre Reverdy, Musique Concrète, some bees.
Seed
barley / linseed / ‘gold-of-pleasure’ / knotweed / blue and green bristle-grass / dock / black bindweed / camomile / gold-of-pleasure / clover / spelt rye / Yorkshire fog / rye-grass / goosefoot / buttercup / lady’s mantle / black nightshade / yarrow / wild camomile / smooth hawksbeard
These are the species in a seed-based gruel preserved in the digestive tract of the Graubelle man, a bog body discovered in 1952, as described by P.V. Glob in The Bog People.
One thing
a person in Northeast Portland can do is ride a bike out to the Dharma Rain Center and say hello to their beehives. One—one hive—has a gap along the top of the super, poorly patched with duct tape. The bees use the gap.
Here’s a poem to scroll past
Wind's Source in the Bend of the Road
by Pierre Reverdy, tr. Guy Davenport
a grey dust
in the air
a south wind
on stout wings
dull river sounds
the evening upsidedown
the night wet
as it comes
around the bend
of rough roads
tasting of cinders
and along paths
where you hear
the church organ
its old recessional
making the heart
a pitching ship
and speaking of
failures and hopelessness
when the fires
in the fields
go out one
by one when
eyes are wet
like the grass
when roses shed
we go barefoot
over the leaves
dawn scarcely light
someone is looking
for an address
in an alley
stars have brightened
late flowers topple
across fallen limbs
the dark brook
licks its lips
without opening them
like the circumspect
when the sundial's
sure steep edges
another notch along
toward the horizon
the shouting's over
the weather's changed
and I walk
with the sun
in my eyes
all was for
nothing some names
and some faces
I have remembered
everything that happened
in the world
was a holiday
on which I
wasted my time
This translation appears in Davenport’s Thasos and Ohio. Picked that one up in a surprisingly good used bookshop in Northport, Michigan. Like all good used bookstores I’ve never seen it open since. I’m also very partial to his translation of a Harold Schimmel poem in this collection. But it’s out of print so you may as well grab the collection of Reverdy poems NYRB put out a few years back.
I could spend a week reading this poem and nothing else.
Papaya
In the close of his “A Step Away from Them”, one of the Lunch Poems, Frank O’hara mentions Reverdy.
A glass of papaya juice and back to work. My heart is in my pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.
This is also the poem from which Hermione Hoby took the title of her novel Neon in Daylight, which is great. Looks like Catapult is between printings there maybe. Grab it when you can.
Padgett thinks O’Hara may have been reading Reverdy in the original French here, or in Ashbery’s translations, published in Evergreen Review in early 1960, rather than referencing a specific English edition.
I spent a while the other night trying to figure out which Papaya King knockoff O’Hara may have visited in the poem—Gray’s didn’t come onto the scene for another few years—not because I care about the history of fruit and hot dog joints1, but because the use of ‘glass’ is so striking to me. I assume these places were selling it in glasses, but I need visual evidence. If you’re an O’Hara-cum-glassware enthusiast, please give me the answer.2
Another Pierre
Here’s an early Pina Bausch solo piece—I don’t care for it. The track she’s dancing to, ‘Spirale’ by Pierre Henry, is excellent. Helpful to remember Henry made this by manipulating reels of tape.
Meaghan calls this sort of mounting drone work ‘panic attack inducing.’
More importantly you should listen to this track Henry did with the Violent Femmes in 1999. Derrick compared it to They Might Be Giants and sure, why not.
I can’t listen to They Might Be Giants because:
[A] I think it’s boring to dislike them but suspect I would and
[B] Once in college I got recruited to work security for a They Might Be Giants show on campus and it made me feel drunk with authority and it embarrasses me to remember. This is true.
And
New writing from Jamieson Webster for e-flux on diagnosis, finance, collapse.
Lloyd Center closes in August. Buy comics from Floating World in the meantime and I guess after. Here’s one you should buy.
New Kassel Jaeger album. First track here. Some bells in it. A few.
— Dustin
I care about the history of fruit and hot dog joints.
Also who is this.
2) Barbara Guest