{"id":3961,"date":"2010-07-02T06:16:27","date_gmt":"2010-07-02T11:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=3961"},"modified":"2010-07-02T06:16:27","modified_gmt":"2010-07-02T11:16:27","slug":"oracles-of-things-seen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/oracles-of-things-seen\/","title":{"rendered":"Oracles of Things Seen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Having been asked about important poetry benchmarks of 1971 by Rachel Levitsky, the first two things that popped into mind were the death of Paul Blackburn, and the publication of a book that, for me, was a major entrance\u00a0 into the poetry and poetics of Robert Kelly, namely FLESH DREAM BOOK<\/strong> (Black Sparrow Press, o.p.). I pulled the book off the shelves to check the date and it was indeed published in 1971. I opened it randomly & came to the poem called “Oracles of Things Seen” \u2014 which immediately struck as I was sitting home in Brooklyn looking out over the Narrows as I started reading it. So here it is:<\/p>\n

Oracles of Things Seen<\/strong>\n\nBrooklyn\nover\nWater,\nman taste of city water          \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \/mensk<\/em>, what men do, are\n                                                                                         :cultura humana\nfrom the ground\nup)\n          From the stroke of eight the well-rig\npounding away at the red clay hill,\nBrooklyn down across water\u2014\n\nbeech trees (fouteaux<\/em>, fuck trees)\nshielding the hill me\neye from the evening\npewter of the harbor\n\nfour times in five seconds\nthe drill slams down,\nthe Narrows bridge\n                                    (\u201clike the bowe new bent in heaven\u201d\n\n                                    but the folio has Theseus saying now\n                                    bent in heaven,\n                                    this bow of men against the spaces,\n19th<\/sup> century romanza,\nthe\u00a0 b r i d g e s \/\n\n                                    Now the water of New York comes far\n                                    & rises freely in the rusting pipes\n(or is it red clay of the hill,\nor is it new<\/em> that Shakespeare says,\n                                                                this new bridge\njoining unbearable suburbs\nwith the burning city,\n                                         river of living silver\nflow between man & woman\ndying into their act\n(Montaigne tells how his dumpy daughter\nlearned the syllables of the sacred name,\nfouteaux<\/em>, her reading-book says, \u2018beech trees,\u2019\nwould not have learned it faster deeper\nthan from the embarrassed nursemaid skipping\nthe word in the aching book\n                                                       (book of water)\n\nBut Montaigne says it is the center, the target,\ntoward which each man lifts his arrow\n                                                                       (or is the woman bow,\nnot target?\n                     notched to the bowstring the arrow\n                     conjugate with the curve of bow,\n                     leaps from his shape and her energy\ntowards the inconceivable\nTarget this\n                    well-rig pounds away all day at\nin its turn\n                   (Staten island, book of water, book of the\nwater of cities,\ngive the child into the keeping of language.\n\nII.\n\nIt is not well\nwho would dig\non the hilltop,\n                           I looked for water & found\na pile-driver pounding steel into red clay\nabove the bay,\n                           I should have known from the location,\nI should have known from the cycle,\n                                                                   well into bedrock?\nno wells in the city,\n                                    all the streams & rivers\nburied under,\n\n                            but I was dumb\n                                          in the ways of water\n\n& all the while the trees\n                       carried each specific meaning of the earth\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Having been asked about important poetry benchmarks of 1971 by Rachel Levitsky, the first two things that popped into mind were the death of Paul Blackburn, and the publication of a book that, for...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,91,1],"tags":[324,645],"class_list":["post-3961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brooklyn","category-poetry","category-uncategorized","tag-flesh-dream-book","tag-robert-kelly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3961"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3961\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}