13 July 2017 Thursday — Robert Crosson, Daybook (1983–86)
Read Robert Crosson’s Daybook, from Otis’s Seismicity Press. Never heard of Crosson, so I sought out his bio.
He published five books of poetry in his lifetime, made a living as a housepainter, handyman, and sometime actor. Strikes me as a man who would have been painting houses all along Charles Bukowski’s mail route — the two of them are brethren.
The best thumbnail is at the Project for Innovative Poetry (PIP) blog, which took me to the Green Integer blog, then to Green Integer Press, and finally to a bio of Douglas Messerli who’s responsible for all three. I can see he affinity: Messerli is an L.A. poet in the Tradition, has ten separate blogs (all of them on Blogger — so much for the idea that Blogger is an irrelevance) and a range of interests that echoes Crosson’s.
It’s funny that I got to Crosson before Messerli. Crosson never broke through — and it’s clear from the daybooks that he either didn’t care or that he didn’t want to care. If Sophie Rachmuhl mentions him, I don’t recall (though A Higher Form of Politics is also without an index). He didn’t make it into Goldstein’s Poetry Los Angeles, and gets three mentions — that’s all they are — in Bill Mohr’s The Holdouts. The men around him — Paul Vangelisti, John Thomas, and Messerli himself get a lot more attention.
Crosson’s daybooks did what daybooks do: preserved two-word, scraps of poetry, cross-references to words and to readings and music (almost entirely classical, late 19th-early 20th). Even the koanic quality typical daybooks is broken into fragments here: this isn’t like reading Joseph Joubert’s Notebooks, probably the last work I read that is anything like Crosson’s. In Joubert, the short sentences cohere around some idea of an aphorism. Crosson just records snippets of conversation, outbursts of disgust, anger, impatience or (rarely) delight; scenes from a life, ordered as though all are equally important: sleeping on a sofa, repairing a door hinge, pissing, leering at a teenage boy’s ass, writing a poem, jacking off to get to sleep; feeling warm, or wet, or drunk.
He says (20):
I never could think straight. I don’t see a straight line. I see curves, kinks and angles. That’s why I could never be a scholar, though they make good company.
And (33):
Surrealism? I didn’t know what that meant… All I saw was the words. I first read Stein she made no sense, after Nin she did. I was a somber kid. Took Patchen, Beethoven and two love affairs to show me I had a sense of humor.
Stein’s almost exactly… audience bothered her; me too. I liked discontinuity — in no rush to “understand.” Patchen taught me that and showed me poetry.
More typical (54):
Door put in.
Ceiling plastered.
Lieder. Fable. Lyric theater.
“The more pastoral acceptance / Of what is Truly Real.”
To read this, I have to follow Crosson’s lead, or Patchen’s: be in no rush to understand, take in the discontinuity. He says that all he saw was the words — that’s all I need to want to see here.
It’s interesting that so many of us let notebooks hook us and reel us in. It makes sense it when it’s Boswell narrating his travels with Sam Johnson, or Knausgård’s relentlessly narrating Min Kamp. There’s coherence and purpose there, even if ceaseless detail, like a wind that never gets tired of blowing. But fine: books like that are windows into other lives so complete that we inhabit those lives fully. Easy to see the appeal.
By why Chamfort? Why Joubert? And why Crosson? Where’s the appeal? Why, in buying or borrowing these books, do we actually take our seats in the theater and listen?
I picked up handfuls of broken terra cotta on a beach in Zakynthos, because it had to be ancient, washed up from some wrecked wine-boat. And at some Nabataean site in Israel, out at the old city’s trash dump, I did the same thing. As Christopher Woodward writes (In Ruins), “immersion in ruins instill… a lofty, even ecstatic, drowsiness” because they induce a “strange sense of displacement when we find that, living, we cannot fill the footprints of the dead.”
Fragmentary writings do that. If their author has died, as has Crosson, then these will be as immediate and intense experience of his mind as we’re going to get, as though we’d spied and he was powerless to stop us. The experience displaces, intoxicates, and fatigues us all at once. And there’s this sense of trespassing which feels illicit. Let’s not forget that.
