Reznikoff's images

 Paul Auster pictured Charles Reznikoff as a poetic version of a street photographer. Reznikoff would wander around New York just looking. He’d sometime walk 20 miles a day, capturing images.

My understanding of the Objectivist Movement is eccentric, but I think this is the great Objectivist poem:

 

About the excavation

a flock of bright red lanterns

has settled.

 

I think of Reznikoff more as a collector of urban images, rather than natural ones. But here are three snapshots of plants that show my thinking needs some adjustments:

 

26

The twigs of our neighbor’s bush are so thin,

I can hardly see the black lines;

the green leaves seem to float in the air.

 

27

The bush with gaudy purple flowers is in the back yard —

Seen only by its mistress, cats, and the white butterflies.

 

47 

I thought for a moment, The bush in the backyard has

blossomed:

it was only the old leaves covered with snow.

 

I admire Auster’s comparison. Reznikoff’s poems are like photographs. But they are also like the images captured by Zen and Taoist poets of old. They are records of observations — records of someone paying attention.

• Sources: Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, Vol. 1, pp. 113 and 116. The first poem is No. 25 in Reznikoff’s Jerusalem the Gold, published by the Objectivist Press in 1934. The press was Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Reznikoff.

Paul Auster’s essay “The Decisive Moment” is in The Art of Hunger and Other Essays; London: Menard Press, 1982, and available at the Allen Ginsberg Project:

https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/reznikoff/decisivemoment.html

I’ve mentioned it before: “Auster on Reznikoff,” Aug. 25, 2024.

A poet speaks of refuge

 Charles Reznikoff lived in troubled times. He saw the mass movements of his day and wrote of smoke blowing through the streets, carried by strong, unpredictable winds. 

Against their hurly-burly

I shut the window of my mind,

and the world at the winds’ will,

find myself calm and still.

 

It’s a simple statement about the importance of having a place of refuge.

Reznikoff wrote poems that read like scripture to me. These lines were from Five Groups of Verse, which he published in 1927. He set the type by hand and made 375 copies.

• Sources: Poems 1918-1975, The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff, edited by Seamus Cooney; Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, Vol. 1, p. 73. There are many notes on the poet at this site, including “The case for Charles Reznikoff,” Dec. 10, 2022.

People who punish

 I’ve known people who shoot squirrels for getting into the bird feeders and who shoot crows for getting into the corn.

I try to keep squirrels out of the feeders. But I’m not vigilant about prevention and not vengeful when prevention fails.

But I have known people who are obsessed. To me, their obsession undermined their humanity. It invariably undermined my trust in them.

It’s hubris: the idea that the natural order cannot be maintained unless one person remains vigilant to correct pillaging squirrels. And now we have people who think the natural order can’t be maintained unless they correct all the people who have different views about cultural values.

It seems to me that people like that are obviously unsound. I don’t trust them.

My differences with those in power in Washington today go far beyond any political issue. Those differences are so profound I don’t think our arguments are about politics.

Different genres, different talents

 Ronald Blythe was the kind of writer who had friends who wrote letters that made him think, making him a better writer. One sent him one of the Rev. Laurence Sterne’s sermons.

Sterne is better known for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman than for his sermons. The one Blythe read was awful.

 

The great comic novelist was being dead serious, which wasn’t his style at all.

 

People do different things with words. I can’t picture Montaigne as a novelist, but the world would be a poorer place without his essays.

• Sources: Ronald Blythe, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside; London: John Murray, 2022, p. 15.

Mineral springs

 The good news is that there’s a thorough account of the mineral springs of Georgia. The bad news is that it was compiled before World War I.

I’m interested in mineral springs because evidence suggests that naturally occurring lithium in spring water protects the neural circuits of the brain. Scientists interested in Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia are investigating.

I wish an agency had timely information on all our mineral springs, which seem like an important natural resource. But the most comprehensive report I found was compiled by S.W. McCallie, the state geologist, in 1913.

It was an era when doctors and geologists were arguing about the therapeutic effects of mineral water. Physicians weren’t required to take much chemistry in those days, and so there were professional arguments. Doctors would talk about therapeutic effects of water from a particular spring, and chemists would report that the mineral content was, in fact, close to nonexistent.

In those days, arsenic, when detected, was considered a good thing in terms of public health.

Obviously, the report is dated. But it still tells us a couple of things.

First, the report shows that lithium occurs naturally in spring water across a region. It’s not limited to one spring or to one property. You don’t need to buy water from a spring owned by any one company.

Second, the report shows that our ancestors were interested in spring water, even if the science of their day was flawed. Some of the photographs in the report show large Victorian buildings at Indian Springs to accommodate the crowds. They’re no longer there. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps built smaller buildings of stone. One is a wellhouse, where the public can fill up jugs. People were in line when we visited in October.

• Sources: S.W. McCallie, A Preliminary Report on the Mineral Springs of Georgia; Atlanta: Chas. P. Byrd, state printer, 1913. This was Bulletin No. 20 in the U.S. Geological Survey. The Digital Library of Georgia has it here:

https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_ggpd_s-ga-bm500-pg4-bb1-bno-p-b20

For an earlier note on Indian Springs, see “Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge,” Oct. 5, 2024.

Wind

 March is a good time to watch the wind.

The first big blow took the blossoms off the Bradford pears. I saw the Wise Woman coming out of her greenhouse, looking at a blizzard of white petals.

The wind made all the birds who dared to fly look like crows — flying as if rowing, rather than flapping. Later, the wind piled pine pollen in small, yellow dunes and lifted the cowlick I’ve been trying to plaster down since grade school.

All that made me think about poets who have written about wind. My memory, adrift, grounded on Anne Carson’s “Hokusai.”

Hokusai was a Japanese artist who at 83 announced that it was time.

He made a lion every morning for 219 days. Winds blew lions out of the snowy pines over his cottage, the lions’ paws

 

            mauling stars

            on the way down.

 

Emotions — like the anger and frustration that can build up when you’re working, even at something you love — are like the wind, blowing one way and then another.

The poet says Hokusai continued to draw, hoping for a peaceful day.

• Anne Carson’s poem “Hokusai” can be found here:

https://elarciniegas.blogspot.com/2013/07/anne-carson-hokusai.html

Bloodroot

 One of the joys of spring is coming across bloodroot, sanguinara canadensis.

The plant, which is in the poppy family, was important in the culture of the ancient peoples. The distinctive red tones used to decorate blankets came from a dye made from bloodroot.

Each stalk has a single leaf. The leaf is wrapped around a single flower bud. As the leaf unfolds, a delicate white flower with a yellow eye is revealed. The flower opens and closes with the sun.

The flower lasts only a few days, and so I feel lucky whenever I see one. But on March 15, I saw a whole bank of them along the Yellow River.

I get overcome thinking about it, as the old Bluesmen used to say.