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Among the books I picked up at the now-defunct Ardea Books & Art last April was Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon by Ray Hsu (Nightwood, 2010), a book of poems divided into two sections ("Plural" and "Singular"), whose titles ("CHORUS," "CITIZEN," "NARRATOR," [OFFSTAGE], "[ONSTAGE]," etc.) suggest a theatrical play.

I have been poking at this book on and off for the past week and am enjoying the passage from scrap to archive; the book's argument over an ordered self versus one resistant to it.

In advance of the book's division, a numbered piece (1-13) called "Ninety-Six Scraps, or,"

Here are numbers "3" and "9":

3. Problem is all this feels outdated. One great big relic. Some we we can't do without. All I see in these material surfaces are anonymous friends. Don't we have data bases for this now? Grids?

9. [Holds poem to the light.] I wrote this one years ago. Literary form. But it got tired. Whatever tied us to the world was the point. Whatever outlined that was a poem.

A poem by Hollywood, California-born poet Jack Spicer (1925-1965).

THING LANGUAGE

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

A couple days ago I received my contributor’s copies of the Capilano Review’s “George Stanley Issue.” Although I missed the launch, I heard that the length of the evening was in direct proportion to the turn out. Seems George has a lot of fans.

After reading my contribution, I began flipping through the issue to see what others had to say on George. The words “Jack Spicer” showed up a lot, as did “Robin Blaser” and “Robert Duncan,” which should come as no surprise, given that these poets are the Holy Trinity of the late-1950s non-Beat San Francisco poetry scene, of which George was an end-stage member.

A piece that stood out was entitled “’What Marks the Changes?’”: George Stanley at The End/The Beginning” by Reg Johanson, a poet/professor who read a gripping suite of poems at the Heavy Industries launch at Spartacus Books a couple weeks back.

Reg’s essay talks about George’s last three books as a chronicle of a world – and the world within us -- increasingly determined by market forces, aided and abetted by neoliberalism. With this (proposition) in mind, I came upon a curious citation of George’s poetry that included a number of Reg’s square parentheses (I assume they are Reg’s), devices we use to make grammatical sense of what we are citing.

The citation looked like this:

“[The newspapers tell us] / how stupid [we] are not to understand / [our] true nature. ‘Born to compete, boys.’ /(‘Born to lose’ [we say]), ‘It’s not just / the bondholders have you by the shorthairs, / it’s your attitude’” (“Abner” At Andy’s 9).

If proper grammar is in the service of the same ideological forces that are reshaping us, has Reg not done to George’s poem what he praises George for revealing, despite the inclusive “we”?

A small room above a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

Someone is moving in next door. Up and down, up and down. A man's grunts.

I am keeping a tally beside me. Sixteen trips so far.

All is quiet. I imagine him sitting on a box, not talking on his phone.