Gossamurmur Read online

  She put her dictum on the validity of love in all directions and buried it in a corner of the tundra:

  for a joining that is not easy but is a joining work in love

  Dream of duality in the phenomenal universe

  veil of maya, a memory of rescue

  illusion’s dream

  a false dichotomy?

  MA = not

  YA = that

  I’ll tear it off, pierce it

  rend the veil from the other face

  A gossamer web but not a trampoline

  that will bounce out a Spider Woman’s prey

  Not a rubber band

  Another word for strain-energy storage

  might be resilience

  A virtue of the movers and shakers of this shimmering world

  Thinnest strains so they cannot be seen

  UV-colored to lure; great train-energy storage;

  efficient protein manufacture

  Gossamer with binds to the more rigid:

  branches, walls, twigs, grass stems,

  the edges of roofs

  all architectural structure

  Lycosid spiderlings in a velocity gradient

  of breeze and currents

  There is the lift of gossamer

  and the glide

  The scramble of spiderlings

  to the highest point

  for a better launch

  The drag-to-lift ratio

  enough drag to engage the breeze

  enough thin delicate strands to glide

  and not parachute too soon

  Gossamer mostly as seen floating in air

  PIVOTS

  Archive, Archeion, Archon

  See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (University of Chicago Press, 1996).

  I know this from Derrida, as written in the poem.

  Archive Fever is a salient text, useful in a meditation on the overreaching arkhe, naming commencement and commandment as nomological principles. The contradiction, as Derrida explicates it, is the irony of an archive that shelters itself from this memory of arkhe, and also forgets it. We grow fainter in our memory and for the purpose of memory (versus erasure) require residence and command for our archives, and for a particular kind of concealment. Archeion is the domicile, which moves from private to public. Archons are those who command, who guard the documents. Poetry is by nature self-secret, but it is also fragile as document, and when recorded falls even more victim to decay and the unknowable technology of future guardians, if there be such. And who will be present to establish “voice recognition”?

  Argana Café, Marrakech

  Parts of this poem were written while traveling in North Africa, living and working for several weeks in Marrakech on two occasions. I first arrived shortly after the bombing of the Argana café in the medina of Jamaa el Fna, a terrorist act that killed seventeen people and wounded twenty-five on April 28, 2011. I also was working with a foundation that had a library and a center for translation, Dar Al-Ma’mûm (House of Wisdom), near Marrakech, named for the son of a caliph in Abbasid-era Iraq, and the notion of preservation was keen on people’s minds, given the ransacking of museums and other sites of archive during frequent times of strife and war and inclement weather.

  Caddis fly catch-nets

  The name of the order of insects, Trichoptera, to which caddis flies belong, comes from the Greek words meaning “hair” and “wing.” They are also called rail-flies or sedge-flies and resemble moths. The combination of hair and wing and a gossamer-like membranous quality—brought to my attention by Peter Warshall—was an eidolon for the poem.

  Dark Lady of my DNA

  Rosalind Franklin was a chemist whose research was used without her permission by Francis Crick and James Watson in their scientific breakthrough around DNA and the double helix.

  demolishing stacks in a library

  A reference to the much-debated renovation plan that would demolish seven floors of “stacks” at the New York Public Library. Many of the books would be stored under Bryant Park; with a new compromise generated by great protest from artists and writers and scholars, a new facility for storage would be built under the library. Many opponents have feared that the Central Library Plan will turn the historic Forty-Second Street Library into a giant Internet café.

  Djinn: Jinn

  Jinn (Arabic: , singular variant spelling djinn), or genies, are described in the Qur’an and in Arab folklore and Islamic mythology as occupying an alternative world to that of mankind. Jinn, humans, and angels make up the three sentient creations of Allah. The Qur’an mentions that jinn are made of smokeless flame or “scorching fire.” Like human beings, the jinn may also be good, evil, or neutrally benevolent.

  Djuna Barnes

  I observed the celebrated and somewhat reclusive author of Nightwood in my Greenwich Village neighborhood as a child. Barnes stands in as a guardian here, and the site where she lived, at 5 Patchin Place, is an historic landmark. She reappears in New York City dreams. There is no visible plaque or marker at this site acknowledging her former residence there.

  Holy Grail as a blank check

  David Graeber’s provocative idea of the Holy Grail as a blank check is from his book DEBT: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011), an inspirational tome for the Occupy movement.

  “…(I swear it) from the breath”

  From Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” 1950.

  Juan Goytisolo

  Born January 6, 1936, in Barcelona, Juan Goytisolo is a Spanish poet, essayist, and novelist who has been living in voluntary self-exile in Marrakech. He has been largely responsible for the saving and preservation of the Jamaa el Fna square and market in Marrakech’s medina, one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

  [L]ike a spider, like an octopus, like a centipede slithering away, wriggling and writhing, escaping one’s embrace, forbidding possession, there is no way of getting a firm grasp on it.…

  The spectacle of Jamaa el Fna is repeated daily and each day it is different. Everything changes—voices, sounds, gestures, the public which sees, listens, smells, tastes, touches. The oral tradition is framed by one much vaster—that we can call intangible. The Square, as a physical space, shelters a rich oral and intangible tradition.

  —Juan Goytisolo, on the active culture of Jamaa el Fna, Opening Meetings, May 15, 2001

  one of two

  Ida used to sit and as she sat she said am I one or am I two. Little by little she was one of two, that is to say sometimes she went out as one and sometimes she went out as the other.

  —Gertrude Stein, Ida (Yale University Press, 2012)

  moisopholon domos

  House where one cultivates the muses. The myth survives that Sappho (approx. 630–570 BCE) was the headmistress of an academy or school of girls, akin to the Spartan agelai or thiasos, a sacred band.

  the movies I appear in

  The Edge, by Robert Kramer, 1968.

  Brand X, by Wynn Chamberlain, 1970.

  Renaldo and Clara, by Bob Dylan, 1978.

  This section of the poem plays with the author’s presumed resemblance to the actor Charlotte Rampling.

  Narada and myths of doubles

  See Wendy Doniger, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities (University of Chicago Press, 1984). Her study includes variants on the story of the Hindu sage Narada, who was transformed into a woman:

  The outer dream is a myth, which nourishes our hope that it is possible to break out of this prison of our secret loneliness to dream one another’s dream.

  seed vault

  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault resides on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, a remote archipelago only eight hundred miles from the North Pole, a sanctuary providing refuge for seeds in case of a large-scale global crisis. They are held in trust for future survival.

  Spider Woman

  Creator deity for several indigenous U.S. tribes, including the Navajo, Keresan, and Hopi. Extraor
dinary weaver of life and the subject of many myths.

  Spiderlings

  Young spiders whose silk is sometimes referred to as gossamer.

  storage units of rogue plutonium

  A reference to Rocky Flats (1952–1992), a former nuclear weapons plant near Denver and Boulder, Colorado, that created plutonium-laced “triggers” for warheads. Although the structure has completely vanished, the soil continues to be toxic and hazardous, containing leaked amounts of plutonium, the half-life of which is close to a quarter of a million years. Many local citizens, including poets from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics community at Naropa University, as well as high-profile antinuclear activist Daniel Ellsberg, protested the site for two decades, facing harassment and arrest.

  Temporary Autonomous Zone

  See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, published by Autonomedia in New York City in l991 with an anticopyright notice. The thinking in this book, essentially a manifesto, has influenced many cultural interventions and projects I’ve been personally involved with over the last decades. T.A.Z. investigates space that eludes formal structures of control.

  Tirta Gangga

  A water palace built by the Raga of Karangasem in eastern Bali, Indonesia. It has a spiritual connection to the river Ganges in India, and I cast a few of Allen Ginsberg’s ashes into its pools, as a tribute to Allen’s spiritual connection to India and to that river where he once bathed.

  Tundra

  From the Finnish word tunturi, meaning “treeless.” Frost-molded landscapes, extremely low temperatures, low precipitation, poor nutrients, and a short growing season. A metaphor in this allegory for refuge.

  Peter Warshall, ecobiologist

  Where the conversation that became this book began, with “gossamer,” “doppelgänger,” and “archive” in the symbiosis of the “braided river.”

  The fungal mat actually connects those trees, and what you have is not the image of all the Abrahamic religions, that things come out as the tree of life, with branches that go further and further apart with humans over here and elephants and frogs over there, but you actually have the image that symbiosis teaches, that life is a braided river. That things come apart, like an algae and a fungus, and then come back together again. And then they spread out and come back together again. So the whole imagery of symbiosis is contrary to the prevailing religions all over the world in not thinking of life as a tree but more or less as a braided river.

  —Peter Warshall, “Symbiosis,” from Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action (Anne Waldman and Lisa Birman, eds.; Coffee House Press, 2004)

  women in robes of sleep and utopic dream

  Joanna Macy, an ecophilosopher and activist, has advocated the concept of “nuclear guardianship,” where citizens would train for this role and guard contaminated sites well into the future. She at one point imagined a ritual period of service here, a way “archons” might help preserve and honor a more sacred site, dressed in ceremonial uniforms or monks’ robes. Some of these ideas become conflated in the poem, moving between thoughts of preservation, what’s hidden or concealed, and what needs guardianship, as with both poetry and deadly nuclear waste.

  Women’s Poetry (male fantasies about women)

  [I]t was men who determined the themes that were allowed in women’s poetry. They decided what types of poetry to preserve; what types of poetry they would write in the voices of women, thereby setting the parameters within which women could write; and what types of poetry were expected of concubines and courtesans (who were obliged to write such poetry out of economic necessity). Such poetry tends to emphasize certain male fantasies about women, centered on the woman as longing for an absent lover. It seems clear that independent-minded women must have written outside the limitations imposed by male expectations, but precious little of that work has survived.

  —David Hinton, “Women’s Poetry in Ancient China,”

  from Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology

  (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008)

  A classic case of Decider mentality.

  AUDIO LINES OF POETRY

  Lines 11–19 on page 88, lines 2, 6–7, 19 on page 89, lines 1–2 on page 90, line 9 on page 91, line 9 on page 92, from the Naropa University Audio Archive Collection. All these lines are spoken/read by the poets themselves and have been transcribed from the tapes. Discrepancies might occur in printed versions of the poems.

  “a sweeping revision” and “embers of the rain” from “Unctuous Platitudes,” by John Ashbery

  “the judge was the wind let the old things take over” from “Son of the Petrarch,” by John Ashbery

  “Truancy of will where she let it fall,” “Door unlocked after the wounding,” and “Thinking is not worrying” from “Lily,” by Barbara Guest

  “I made this book of sonnets” and “I, an island, sail” from The Sonnets, by Ted Berrigan

  “I’m so in love with art that it will get me into the next world” from “It Springs on You,” by Robin Blaser

  “First, there were the FIRST PEOPLE” and “where human feet can squish the living daylights out of cowering anemone” from “In Memoriam,” by Joanne Kyger

  “I met Death—he was a sportsman” from “Cole’s Island,” Charles Olson

  “the beauties of the Levant when we had them” and “not all the works of Mozart worth one human life” from Revolutionary Letters, by Diane di Prima

  “a place so hip even the rats doing the hustle” and “think of what needs to be what needs to be” from “Afro-American Lyric,” by Amiri Baraka

  “in this wilderness of stone” from “Blues Variations,” by Lorenzo Thomas

  For further listening, access Archive.org and scroll down to “Naropa,” or access the generous PennSound web site and portal.

  Anne Waldman is the author of more than forty books including the seminal Fast Speaking Woman, published by City Lights in 1975, and has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, and Manatee/Humanity (all three books published by Penguin Poets), as well as the antiwar feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment, published by Coffee House Press, and winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Award for Poetry. She has been associated with the innovative wings of the Beat, Black Mountain, and New York School literary movements. She brings a remarkable intensity of her own into highly original “modal structures” of language and montage both written and performed. Deemed a “countercultural giant” by Publishers Weekly, Anne Waldman is also a performer, professor, editor, librettist, and cultural activist. Her numerous anthologies include Nice To See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, The Beat Book, and the coedited collections The Angel Hair Anthology, Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, and Beats at Naropa. She has also collaborated with a number of visual artists, including Joe Brainard, Elizabeth Murray, George Schneeman, Richard Tuttle, Donna Dennis, Noah Saterstrom, and Pat Steir, as well as dancer/choreographer Douglas Dunn, musicians Steven Taylor and Ambrose Bye, writer/movie director Ed Bowes, and theater director Judith Malina. Her play Red Noir was produced by the Living Theatre in New York City in 2010. She is a cofounder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics MFA program, and the artistic director of its Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, the first Buddhist-inspired school in the West. She has traveled for the U.S. State Department lecturing at Muslim colleges in Kerala, and she worked with schoolchildren in Marrakech, Morocco, in the spring of 2011 and 2012. Waldman is a recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her extensive historical literary, art, and audio/video archive resides at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. See also fastspeakingmusic.com and the official web site www.annewaldman.org.

  Penguin Poets

  JOHN ASHBERY
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br />   Selected Poems

  Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

  TED BERRIGAN

  The Sonnets

  LAUREN BERRY

  The Lifting Dress

  JOE BONOMO

  Installations

  PHILIP BOOTH

  Selves

  JULIANNE BUCHSBAUM

  The Apothecary’s Heir

  JIM CARROLL

  Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems

  Living at the Movies

  Void of Course

  ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING

  Genius Loci

  Rope

  CARL DENNIS

  Callings

  New and Selected Poems 1974–2004

  Practical Gods

  Ranking the Wishes

  Unknown Friends

  DIANE DI PRIMA

  Loba

  STUART DISCHELL

  Backwards Days

  Dig Safe

  STEPHEN DOBYNS

  Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966–1992