putterings. like leaves, like dust
The typewriter has six lines of a poem on ruach.
Dust on the piano. ₁
as if the words, like leaves, like dust
stumbled against a break in the pavement,
congress of weeds and shadow. ₂
after a pause spent in puttering about ₃
puttering in mud with his head down
we enter the area he calls the cropped meadow. ₄
“puttering” and drawing. ₅
as much about concrete as about the woods. ₆
He drew a few lines to indicate the streets
and it looked like the branch of a tree with names standing out in the twigs.
The writing on it had muddled for him. ₇
He stared out of the window and appeared to be watching the clouds above the trees.
Sometimes he closed his eyes. ₈
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sources :
- Julius Horwitz. “The Voices,” in The City (1953) : 184-196 (185) / more at putterings 604
Abstract painting has given dignity to people’s puttering with colors. / 190
- 2901a 20250204
- Helen Van Valkenburgh. “The Little Grey Car.” The Black Cat 21:3 (December 1915) : 32-37 (34) / more at putterings 619
- Hatsy Shields. “In the Garden / Plots and Plans” (on Ken Druse his garden). House Beautiful : 141:5 (May 1999) : 68, (86), 89 / more at putterings 618
- Steven W. Naifeh. Jackson Pollock : An American Saga (1989) : 819 / more at putterings 602
- Susan Glaspell. Ambrose Holt and Family (1931) : 27
borrowable at archive.org : linkHow would he do it — what he had had in mind? Perhaps there would as much about concrete as about the woods; he combined things surprisingly in his poems, using elements one did not expect to find in poetry.
- Anne Ryan. “The Darkest Leaf.” Botteghe Oscure 22 (1958) : 272-306 / paragraphs 34 and 31
transcription at asfaltics 2953_ryan-darkest-leaf.htm - Robert Seethaler. The Last Movement (2020; Charlotte Collins, trans., 2026) : 43
The aphasic patient, with his involuntary use of ready-made sentences unadapted to what he wants to express... ₉
- Th(éophile) Alajouanine. “Aphasia and Artistic Realization,” Brain 71:3 (September 1948) : 229-241 (230)
archive.org : linkquoted in Laura Salisbury and Chris Code. “Jackson’s Parrot: Samuel Beckett, Aphasic Speech Automatisms, and Psychosomatic Language,” Journal of Medical Humanities (2013, 2016) : via Salisbury at academia.edu : link
puutterings | their index | these derivations | 20260601