Page 39 - Litteratteur Redefining World December issue

Litterateur redefining world December 2020

articulation of sound—
memory in the
“ear”—
a substitution
of the

“audible”
for
the
“visible”—

to write this day
to insist
upon it—

NOTES

SOURCES: “It would be necessary...” is from Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the
second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800); the phrase “la brutalité du mot ‘tumeur’”
is from Paul de Man’s last letter to Jacques Derrida and is quoted in Derrida’s
Memoires. Derrida makes much of the pun on tu meurs. A few phrases are taken
from or based on Tàkis Sinópoulos’s Landscape of Death (“The Sea”); the
quotations about sound are from John R. Pierce, The Science of Musical Sound;
Georges Brassens’ great song, “Tempête dans un bénitier,” is from his Philips
album, Don Juan; a few phrases are taken from Craig Williamson’s translation of
Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs, A Feast of Creatures; the ballad snatches are from
English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman
Kittredge; the quotation about “Lucienne” is from Jules Romains, The Body’s
Rapture; “everything / in nature...” is from Roman Jakobson, Six Lectures on
Sound and Meaning; “as the wind turns them (leaves)” is loosely based on Rilke’s
poem, “Herbst” (“Autumn”); the lines about President Reagan are from a S.F.
Chronicle newspaper article; “I tied my drum” is from A.J. Arberry’s Mystical
Poems of Rumi, #197; the passage beginning, “articulation of sound” is based on
phrases from the beginning of Coleridge’s essay, “On Poesy Or Art.” The doggerel
poem, “The Subject Was Rocks,” has a story behind it: Many years ago, a Berkeley

friend of mine was involved in a disastrous love affair. At its conclusion, in despair,
he hurled a rock through a window of his girl friend’s house, damaging the window
but nothing else. Much later, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he met a friend of this
girl friend’s and had a conversation with her. He wrote to tell me, “The subject was
rocks.” My friend would have heard—as I do—a reference to testicles in the word
“rocks.” (Cf. “the family jewels.”)

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