Noose and Hook

Notes

59 notes “My Life” is an imitation (in Lowell’s sense of that word) of a scene from the Gawain poet’s long poem Patience in which Jonas is swallowed by the whale. The Ted Hughes quotation is from Crow, Harper & Row Publishers, 1971. “Into the clearing of . . . ” was haunted by this quotation from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas: “But . . . those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that for three years and more I have been sitting on my side of it wondering whether it is any use to try to speak across it.” I am grateful to Maggie Anderson for bringing Woolf’s sentence to my attention. And for so much more. “Stone them into niceness . . . ” in “Dogg of Warr” is from Draft : Doggerel by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2007; “Life iz borin tho we must not say so,” in “How Dogg Got Its Name” is adapted from John Berryman’s “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so,” in The Dream Songs, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964. The quotation from Baudelaire’s prose poem, “The Faithful Dog,” “Prends-moi avec toi, et de nos deux misères nous ferons peut-être une espèce de bonheur,” is translated by Louise Varèse, Paris Spleen, New Directions, 1970. The Beckett quotation is from Waiting For Godot. In “Hello, Mallarmé” I am indebted to David St. John for the anecdote about Mallarmé. The installation described in “These days, Ou sont les neiges d’antan? I often wonder” is inspired by Bill Viola’s work “The Sleepers,” and “even the power to be lost . . . ” is inspired by a poem by Rae Armantrout. emmanuel noose i-62.indd 59 1/4/10 4:32 PM 60 In “I told my student Kimber Lester if you cannot actually write,” “Vagueness is personal” is from Up To Speed, Rae Armantrout, Weslyan University Press, 2004. In “April 18, the 21st Century,” the Margaret Atwood quotation about Raymond Chandler is: “He knew that furniture could breathe . . . not as we do but in a way more muffled, like the word upholstery.” It can be found in Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, edited by David Lehman, Scribner Poetry, 2003. Maxime Du Camp is quoted by Benjamin in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet In The Era Of High Capitalism, Verso Editions, 1983. In 1940 when France fell to the Germans, the German literary critic Walter Benjamin fled south with the hope of escaping to the United States via Spain. One hypothesis about his death is that Benjamin committed suicide by swallowing an overdose of morphine, after being informed by the chief of police at the town of Port-Bou on the FrancoSpanish border that he would be turned over to the Gestapo. A second hypothesis is that he was killed by the Nazis. emmanuel noose i-62.indd 60 1/4/10 4:32 PM ...