EXPERIODDICIST - electronic chapbook Hank Lazer - poems and notes from Days Days names what became a year-and-a-day writing project. Initially, I thought about writing ten poems in this invented ten line (short line) format, the ten poem intent being part of a book-in-progress called Tenor, a set of ten different poems (of which this initial ten would be one "chapter"). But I found this Days mode of writing too enjoyable to abandon, and too well-suited to the limited amount of time I had to write. And since I have for quite some time been working in multiples of ten (as a basis for constructing various kinds of series of poems), I figured that instead of the initial ten poems I might write 100 day-poems. The overall project I have been pursuing for about seven years is called 10 X 10, which includes INTER(IR)RUPTIONS (a ten poem collage series published by Generator Press, 1992) and the forthcoming Three of Ten (which includes three ten poem series, H's Journal, Negation, and Displayspace, due out from Chax Press in 1996). As I wrote toward 100 poems, Days gathered its own momentum and joy. In spite of my own misgivings about a mastery of craft (which usually means repetition) and about self-imitation, I continued writing Days beyond even the seemingly indulgent initial one hundred poems. I had also solicited the advice of Jake Berry and Jack Foley (both had heard me read the first twenty poems from Days when Jack visited to give a reading in Tuscaloosa) and a few other poet-reader-friends; they too egged me on. So, why not. Though there is, for me, at some point a crucial ethical (or poethical?) dimension to consider. I value most highly poetry as a kind of heuristics, or, in Charles Bernstein's description, poetry as "epistemological inquiry." I prefer in poetry to think about what I have not thought through. Which for me means, typically, inhabiting a mode of writing for a fixed duration--either in time or in a pre-determined number of a poetic composition (i.e., a set number of poems in a given mode). Then, as determined ahead of time, I abandon one mode of writing to explore and invent some other mode of writing and thinking. That is how I have struck a working agreement which has taken me through most of my poetry writing of the past ten years: Placements, Law-Poems, Compositions, Vert, INTER(IR)RUPTIONS, Negation, H's Journal, Displayspace, and Days. But I must admit that Days has been, for me, the most singularly joyous of experiments. At present, I am still tinkering with Days . Initially, all of the poems were handwritten. I'd often go for several weeks before entering the poems into the computer. Thus, there was always one mode of significant revision: yes, or no. A good many poems were abandoned along the way. I did commit a total of 234 poems to the initial version of Days (one prefatory poem called "Poesis" dedicated to Robert Duncan, and 233 numbered and dated poems). I did not write every day. At times, I went a couple of weeks without a new poem. When I was hot, I'd write as many as six or seven poems in a day. So, while Days does have allegiance to dailiness, to the accounting of a diary or a journal (forms which I've been interested in for at least 25 years, especially the journals, for example, of Henry David Thoreau), the poem-series becomes a record of writing as something other than a daily duty--a graph of when and how I was able to write during a span of a year and a day. During that span of a year and a day, I wrote only one non-Days poem, "redirect," which appears in Juxta #3. Days involves several conflicting impulses. Many of the poems ask to be understood by being voiced, the saying of them being a process of sorting out their multiple syntactical directions, the saying of them being a manifestation of their specific music. Others have key elements that could only be read silently, could only be taken in as part of a print (rather than an oral) culture. There are handwritten elements incorporated in each poem of Days, though in this electronic version I have had to compromise and make do without the handwritten elements. A more elaborate and "faithful" electronic version of ten poems from Days can be found in a chapbook extension in RIF/T #5 (Summer 1995) at the Electronic Poetry Center site (http://wing.buffalo.edu/epc/rift/rift05/), where Ken Sherwood patientlyreproduced the handwritten elements in my poems. I have not settled on a final format for Days, and thus each appearance of portions of it, including this chapbook, allows me to explore different alternatives. I am fairly certain that each poem will have a number at the top (indicative of one kind of sequence) and a handwritten date (indicative of a different sequencing and a different technology of inscription, a partiality to a manuscript culture) to the left of the first line. A number of the poems (but not in this particular set for Experioddicist ) have instances of cross-outs and over-writing, word-substitutions, and Dickinson-like modes of variancy. A good many of the poems also have textual notes or marginalia, usually a reference to a source though, as Jack Foley has recently made me aware, many, even most, of my sources go unacknowledged. The more thoroughly interiorized and absorbed the reference, the less likely that I'll cite it in the margins; if it's a fairly new bit of reading or a passage I might not be able to find easily, I'll cite it. At present, I'm working on another final version of Days, moving it toward a hoped for book publication. I will be eliminating a number of weaker poems, repetitious poems, jokes that aren't very funny after one or two readings, stuff that wears out too quickly, though I am also committed to a variety of writing. Days will not become a greatest hits or best moments sequence, for I also respect the integrity of flatness, of dailiness, even of certain narrative accommodations. Besides, one chocolate eclair might taste good, but who would want to eat ten of them in a row? I expect that this current recasting of Days will leave me with a group of around 200 poems to constitute the (someday) book of Days. I have considered as well an audiotape version of Days, and perhaps will employ some sort of musical accompaniment. Last summer, I worked with advanced choreography students at the Harvard Summer Dance program, and they danced a number of Days and improvised multi-voice reading/singing approaches to several of the poems. I hope that there will continue to be other ways to play with Days. Early on, I had a subtitle in mind: a book of kinships and friendships. But the subtitle eventually disappeared since it amounted to a redundancy. The poems--through imitation, citation, and address--declare those affinities. The overall book is a kind of case study, a sketchbook, a daybook, an homage to workers in the short line. Days allowed me a means to return to a musicality and lyricism that felt very joyous. The tutelage of Thelonious Monk, I hope, kept the writing "wrong" enough to stay fresh, shifting quickly enough to be of interest. For this electronic chapbook, I have decided to do something "extra" with Days : add a commentary to each poem. I have, for a long time, wanted to indulge in an Edmond Jabes-like text & commentary--make my own Talmud or Mishnah--though in this brief instance of it, I confess that it sounds more like what Williams was doing in Kora in Hell. Years ago, David Antin told me that a poet needed to be his own best reader. Initially, I mis-heard David's remark as rhyming with an adolescent kind of self-pity: "alas, no one reads my work, so I must, heroically and compensatorily, be its best reader...." That's not it all. Like most poets I know and admire, I try to write the poems that I need to read as a reader, poems that are not yet in existence. Such writing has little or nothing to do with quality but everything to do with necessity and discovery. (2/1/96) Selected Poems from Days 71 3/3/95 good god bob you're the one of course who made loveable & why the fuck not in such a tight span these twists of thinking specific to an instant commentary : creeley the bob, days in part a case study of thought's torsion, the short line, collisions & collusions possible, the shifts in direction, heavy staccato "good god bob" splat, to sweet assonance, one, loveable, fuck, such, the delight in the twists, a tight span, in instants, the lyric as collision chamber 74 3/11/95 i sing the body eclectic uh defective icing the bawdy directive rodin to young rilke "toujours travailler" all words & no fray makes yack a dull "stable & precarious" rose on licorice er icarus' wings commentary : talk in tongues, trane's sax honks, i sing as icing on the cake, a bellyfull, stammer, stutter, the play's the thing, of course work hard the too earnest though ugh, dad's leukemia woven in everywhere, my young son's mishearing heard it better as rose on licorice wings, and why not 77 4/1/95 her virtues i know thus far verbal which what think you when wind across key principle forms of distance love the reckless irritant settled athwart the hips commentary : days, in part, playing with an erotics of writer/reader relations; last line, the single word "athwart" definitely a whitman-clinker; loving throughout as irritant AND joy; the wind of saying, a poem being taken up and said 81 4/11/95 you put them there & fix their place in blocks & in columns as you will & then they have quite apart from you relations all their own with which you are amused commentary : a compositional practice, you do put them there by hand i know you do, the poem's existence in time, as it becomes necessarily strange to the writer too, possibly amusing, of necessity so as the poem disconnects from its immediacy of compositional inception, is initially placed & put, but then . . . 83 4/15/95 yes & then a little less two blue & white striped chairs & the means of enumerating sudden content ment heart in sists its history is now & thus not history proper commentary : rarely, but here, instance of actual immediate surroundings, two specific chairs, as the first line: often poems in the affirmative (though, "& then"), words broken being both: content, and content-ment; the heart moves in, thus insists, a different site of action than some will allow into "history proper" 84 4/15/95 slow to slogan voracious to veracity amen to mendacity flesh to pleasure legs to legendary costly to apostle mesh to measure & i wake up next to you commentary : by musical extension, made extant, a tent, rolls on & off the tongue, a fleshy pleasure, to be beside you, juxtaposition, awakening to & into that fact, flesh to pleasure, such words so 88 4/21/95 speaking the first law of economy you yawn song sweeps upward & across water's surface not contra which would only be two dictions but each point a hub radiating infinite spokes persons tense in shifting pulse processional commentary : redundant in e-space to point out, hell yes, more than two dictions, thematized older poetries fond of binary structurings, poems now portals multiply open, from any given point an infinity of directions, made so perhaps with some of the energy, energizing, galvanics of early Williams and later Olson's "projective verse" these too "in shifting/ pulse processional," parading by, the radiating, the pulsing, the transfer of energy, instant by instant, for you to say 126 6/22/95 monk's joy & studied exuberant wrong notes infinite rhythmic insistence exactly slapped silences trane's quest question chaotic divine emily's compressed from you (love) crucially direct address commentary : recaps sources & muses, quick riffs, monk the first, the joy of right-wrong, the infinite possibilities of rhythm attended to & heard precisely, not the yay-or-nay of binary dumb metrics stressed or un- (how damned inadequate!), to trane, to emily d, to "you" who must be there, otherwise how to address directly