The best housemate ad, I'm moving, brain.
1/31/05
End of January. People are funny-looking, I'm just noticing. Winter's gone, blood is flowing into my fingers and feet. The rooibus's working! I'm alone inside the world of poetry.
The hollow in here is mixed up like something weird happening in the ocean.
Flamenco in transition.
Faith and consequences.
A violet mist. There's an almost unnoticeable difference. Then a tunnel bid on the final deal spices up overlapping metaphors and symbols, adding to the richness. And a blackout for no apparent reason transforms spring rain into holy food.
A song, a love, a life doesn't have a name or shape, lost young men left behind in their rooms like seawater.
The hollow in here is mixed up like something weird happening in the ocean.
Flamenco in transition.
Faith and consequences.
A violet mist. There's an almost unnoticeable difference. Then a tunnel bid on the final deal spices up overlapping metaphors and symbols, adding to the richness. And a blackout for no apparent reason transforms spring rain into holy food.
A song, a love, a life doesn't have a name or shape, lost young men left behind in their rooms like seawater.
1/28/05
More on Padgett's Joe. I like that the chronology (or what I thought was chronology) gives room two-thirds through to un-labored meditations on facials, on Joe's reaching the age of 51, on his doubts at age 37 about being "the person I always thought I was." I say un-labored but that is the soothing affect of Padgett's not-simply-plain style. I like the large off-moments Padgett allows, spaces in which he has nothing in particular to give up about Joe's whereabouts, much less what Joe was doing or thinking. Also, there's Padgett's ability to 'not go there' (Joe's sex life, for example, his giving up oil painting, etc.) without our feeling we're missing something. Then, here are last words of Joe's spoken by his brother, "It might have been: 'I'm so lost,' but I'm not sure," which I'm imagining as, "I'm so lost, but I'm not sure."
1/27/05
1/25/05
(3)
I began my day theorizing about several oversized paintings of the newly constructed neighborhoods of northern Paris. I thought of myself as a painter, as a realist and then a symbolist reworking stills of the adolescent Jeanne Moreau in "Helen at the Scaean Gate." I was clueless as to my purpose so I moved on, considering E. B. White's birdlike monoplane that took flight at early dawn on August 14, 1901 near Bridgeport.
I was having problems visualizing open (off) and closed (on) critique poetics. A thought experiment I initiated goes like this. The switch in a critique was like a drawbridge or myth. When the bridge or myth is open (to let a large gunboat go under it), traffic cannot pass over the bridge or myth. This is similar to when a critique is open or off. The electric current of reader approval (vehicles on the bridge and / or in the myth) cannot move through the critique (go across the bridge / myth). When the drawbridge (myth) was closed, the cars are able to pass. This is similar to when a critique is closed or "on." The electric current of public approval is able to pass over the critique smoothly.
Non-linear progress, implicit co-branding of public domain text, strings (upon strings) of surprise, skilled narrative downgraded to parish bulletins, appropriation and re-assembly lead on these issues, I think this will be my idea, to take it "on." And therefore, I have to prove there's a problem and lay out the coverage. Or cover. Now, to the specificity of which we'll find out, you'll find out with time. Poets, if not critics, have been catching up with politicians, other comedians, that's one part of it. Every sentence now is in media res. Cover? In "Was That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up Yourself?" Robert Creeley observes, "As a poet, at this moment [1974]...I am angered, contemptuous, impatient, and possibly even cynical concerning the situation of our lives in this 'national' place. Language has, publicly, become such an instrument of coercion, persuasion, and deceit." Sure, though keep in mind that that, along with this very sentence, is a set of ad hoc thematic pointers. Text retrieval can be less difficult if we acknowledge and arbitrate some of our convictions.
In the process there is no right or wrong. An orange enters the essay. Gustave Flaubert did not have a computer, and the word 'hysteria' does not occur in the text of Madame Bovary. For his time, how informed he seems in connection with that emergent domain of psychopathology. But now every sentence can be re-assembled into a poem, I think this will be found out. This will be an administration-driven idea. When one who is called to poetry takes to the web, she will tear self apart to entertain and persuade with authenticity and a lack thereof, due to the "logic" that produces the basic hysterias revealed. For example, backstabbing is when you join a team game, and attack your teammates. A Spice Girls reunion looks thankfully off the menu, though, as Mel B is to write a tell-all bitchfest book of poems dishing the dirt on Geri Halliwell and Victoria Beckham. She's determined to tell the world all about what really went on...before and after. Mel sees poetry as a cathartic process. An analogy between poetry and football then would be ridiculous, since there are virtually no similarities -- the poet might be considered the coach, but there is no crushing offense or disloyal defense, no Monday morning quarterbacks -- there is a set script while a football game never goes according to plan.
This is the middle section where Jorge Borges is transported to the introduction setting 'character' to the interfacing, the story of myth in your own words. Form is the script.
The crisis is now. Form is not an object but an activity, an explosion, a channeling, a non-hegemonic pulsating -- and thanks to substitution Allen Ginsberg haunts this. One of his poems originally appeared on subsubpoetics and was written by replacing every 'a' with a 4, every 'e' with a 3, every 'i' with a 1, every 'o' with a 0, every 'g' with a 9, and some other textual substitutions as well. This poem is perhaps more sincere than the other content, perhaps more mundane and commonplace, but all such things should have a home in Sudbury.
The origin of critique or orange as a fruit can be broken into segments and reassembled, to draw an analogy to the way words bind together to produce a stanza, and stanzas bind within a poem. The appropriated segments can be divided into equal divisions to establish a movement with hush money and political emphasis, professional subordination and equine coordination like when Pablo Picasso makes linear patterns of Thomas Gainsborough's painterly drapery to create an ending with an origin. The orange pieces can be reassembled into a harmonious whole or something more secular like a poem about a young French woman and a daemonic carrot that reflects distortion and disharmony as compositional forces. Or you could draw the name of a myth out of a hat. That's the Chinese character for the web.
I began my day theorizing about several oversized paintings of the newly constructed neighborhoods of northern Paris. I thought of myself as a painter, as a realist and then a symbolist reworking stills of the adolescent Jeanne Moreau in "Helen at the Scaean Gate." I was clueless as to my purpose so I moved on, considering E. B. White's birdlike monoplane that took flight at early dawn on August 14, 1901 near Bridgeport.
I was having problems visualizing open (off) and closed (on) critique poetics. A thought experiment I initiated goes like this. The switch in a critique was like a drawbridge or myth. When the bridge or myth is open (to let a large gunboat go under it), traffic cannot pass over the bridge or myth. This is similar to when a critique is open or off. The electric current of reader approval (vehicles on the bridge and / or in the myth) cannot move through the critique (go across the bridge / myth). When the drawbridge (myth) was closed, the cars are able to pass. This is similar to when a critique is closed or "on." The electric current of public approval is able to pass over the critique smoothly.
Non-linear progress, implicit co-branding of public domain text, strings (upon strings) of surprise, skilled narrative downgraded to parish bulletins, appropriation and re-assembly lead on these issues, I think this will be my idea, to take it "on." And therefore, I have to prove there's a problem and lay out the coverage. Or cover. Now, to the specificity of which we'll find out, you'll find out with time. Poets, if not critics, have been catching up with politicians, other comedians, that's one part of it. Every sentence now is in media res. Cover? In "Was That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up Yourself?" Robert Creeley observes, "As a poet, at this moment [1974]...I am angered, contemptuous, impatient, and possibly even cynical concerning the situation of our lives in this 'national' place. Language has, publicly, become such an instrument of coercion, persuasion, and deceit." Sure, though keep in mind that that, along with this very sentence, is a set of ad hoc thematic pointers. Text retrieval can be less difficult if we acknowledge and arbitrate some of our convictions.
In the process there is no right or wrong. An orange enters the essay. Gustave Flaubert did not have a computer, and the word 'hysteria' does not occur in the text of Madame Bovary. For his time, how informed he seems in connection with that emergent domain of psychopathology. But now every sentence can be re-assembled into a poem, I think this will be found out. This will be an administration-driven idea. When one who is called to poetry takes to the web, she will tear self apart to entertain and persuade with authenticity and a lack thereof, due to the "logic" that produces the basic hysterias revealed. For example, backstabbing is when you join a team game, and attack your teammates. A Spice Girls reunion looks thankfully off the menu, though, as Mel B is to write a tell-all bitchfest book of poems dishing the dirt on Geri Halliwell and Victoria Beckham. She's determined to tell the world all about what really went on...before and after. Mel sees poetry as a cathartic process. An analogy between poetry and football then would be ridiculous, since there are virtually no similarities -- the poet might be considered the coach, but there is no crushing offense or disloyal defense, no Monday morning quarterbacks -- there is a set script while a football game never goes according to plan.
This is the middle section where Jorge Borges is transported to the introduction setting 'character' to the interfacing, the story of myth in your own words. Form is the script.
The crisis is now. Form is not an object but an activity, an explosion, a channeling, a non-hegemonic pulsating -- and thanks to substitution Allen Ginsberg haunts this. One of his poems originally appeared on subsubpoetics and was written by replacing every 'a' with a 4, every 'e' with a 3, every 'i' with a 1, every 'o' with a 0, every 'g' with a 9, and some other textual substitutions as well. This poem is perhaps more sincere than the other content, perhaps more mundane and commonplace, but all such things should have a home in Sudbury.
The origin of critique or orange as a fruit can be broken into segments and reassembled, to draw an analogy to the way words bind together to produce a stanza, and stanzas bind within a poem. The appropriated segments can be divided into equal divisions to establish a movement with hush money and political emphasis, professional subordination and equine coordination like when Pablo Picasso makes linear patterns of Thomas Gainsborough's painterly drapery to create an ending with an origin. The orange pieces can be reassembled into a harmonious whole or something more secular like a poem about a young French woman and a daemonic carrot that reflects distortion and disharmony as compositional forces. Or you could draw the name of a myth out of a hat. That's the Chinese character for the web.
1/20/05
(2)
Working within a system of gratuitous recklessness, I've tried my hand at mash-up, another cyber-assisted pastiche procedure that, wittingly or not, operates as a type of critique poetics. Mash-up is a term that comes from bootleggers' remixing prospectively incompatible music tracks, The Rascals v. ambient v. hip-hop v. Frank Sinatra, etc. Blending (cobbling?) two or more poets together mash-up style prompts a critical intelligence to review how disparate entities mesh and disconnect. Case in point, last week I posted a set of results, "Seamus Gluck." Here's how it happened. It was easy and fast. As critic maudit and poet pauvre, I turned to a pop house organ of official verse culture, the most recent issue of The New Yorker at that time (January 17), and found two poems, one by Louise Gluck, another by Seamus Heaney. With minimum artifice, changing verb tenses here and there, snipping one or two redundancies, tricking out a few line breaks particularly at the end, I otherwise followed a simple procedure: copy each poem line by line into a remix, odd line to Gluck, even line to Heaney, that is, "my" first line is Gluck's first line, second line is Heaney's first line, third line is Gluck's second line, and so on. (Since Gluck's poem is a little longer than Heaney's I varied line breaks in my last stanzas, pressing final lines from Gluck's poem into my couplet as coda.)
The two poems come together nuptially, as it were. Line 2 in "Seamus Gluck" kicks off "When they..."; Line 3, "When you..."; Line 4, "We lived with them..."; Line 5, "Because you were living…"; Line 7 (from Gluck) speaks of somewhere else; Line 8 (reflective of Heaney's fondness for thickets of physical description) seems to detail this 'somewhere,' "molded verge half skirting, half stockade." Gluck and Heaney, as it happens, are exercising their memories back "When," a scene for each that leads each to outline atmospherics from the past from which they both must retrieve themselves. What seems wicked and compositionally too-convenient for me in the process of fabricating "Seamus Gluck" is that both Gluck and Heaney discursively extricate themselves (their personae) at just about the same point in their respective narratives: Line 28 in "Seamus Gluck" reads, "You realize afterward" (Gluck); while Line 29 continues, "And afterwards rust thistles" (Heaney, of course).
I am not freaked by these results. I'm confirmed in my sense that, evidenced by this latest 'happenstance' of finding work from Gluck and Heaney, New Yorker poetry editors support discursive formulae of the tempus fugit workshop variety, and more, the poetry tastemakers, unlike their counterparts editing fiction, are not the least uncomfortable with verse outfitted with pat closures bow-wrapped with little life supports as object lessons. Heaney's lesson, though integrated within taut descriptive propositions, is as familiar as the blackguard's wain of chestnuts: Here is that 'somewhere' mankind reminisces vaguely as from a past space and past time, space and time like "Dante's wood," "bleached in sun," and now "darkened," but here with us now, "pervasive" in "silence," "deadlit," "languid" as the "sky." Gluck's lesson is false at all levels of my mash-up and analysis, especially when Gluck writes, "You realize afterward / not that the image is false / but the relation is false." The assertion "the image is [not] false" would be closer to a truth if there were an image. We get no closer to imagery in Gluck's poem than the thought that "you" participate in the "stillness" and "immensity" of stars. I digest this as pre-school science, not imagery. Gluck also claims, "You've stopped being here in the world... // a place where human life has no meaning," but this isn't an image, either; it's an opinion, unverifiable. My argument against the claim "the relation is false" requires replay of Gluck's last stanza: "You see again how far away / each thing is from every other thing." In compiling "Seamus Gluck," I find that Gluck's abbreviated code (each thing, every other thing) functions as an idiotically perfect foil to Heaney's geo-botanical elaboration. Thing (afterward) clings to thing (afterwards) in a super-thingy amalgam. Since both Gluck and Heaney operate within similar narrative frames ("that bulwark," "a creature"), working out of parallel formulae ("There is a moment," "When they'd been block-built"), the relation between them is overt, not "far away," and certainly not far out.
I admit this treatment of Gluck and Heaney is easy, just as my mash-up of their two poems is easy. Or was. I'd like to dispense with "Seamus Gluck," and take for granted that points enumerated, above, are evident from reading my poem, without exposition. That is: To get back to the grander topic, speed in amassing complexity and ease of combining are evidently two features of computer-assisted appropriation and re-assembly; with regard to critique poetics, an ideal, which I'll continue to hold as achievable, inappropriate (opposite of appropriate, the verb?) and quick, is to let the poem-object argue through its rush of complexity so that it may begin to liberate-destroy unfabulous lyricism (of the purloined source material) that's framed within a past, a convention (or, better, a convention-set). Rushing along.
Why are we doing these things? I'm sure it has something to do with technologies invading our immune systems. Rationales aside, the news is some poets are doing things that require brighter modes of comprehensiveness. I mentioned that Mohammad's Deer Head Nation expands the field for poem-making (and I should add critique), not because there are lovely neoteric poems to read, but because the book of these poems discloses a wackiness that seems, to me, comprehensive, that is, of a piece of a nascent approach to work. Almost similarly, were one now to rush to print an anthology of mash-ups it might already be too late -- unless the selections were comprehensive, critical in original ways and replete with variatons of comic attitudes. To contradict what I've just said about exposition, perhaps mash-ups with short prose passages above or beneath them would do the trick, as -- much as the short, brilliantly detailed prose pieces that accompany Matsuo Basho's hilarious haiku, many things past brought to mind, the snowfall.
Working within a system of gratuitous recklessness, I've tried my hand at mash-up, another cyber-assisted pastiche procedure that, wittingly or not, operates as a type of critique poetics. Mash-up is a term that comes from bootleggers' remixing prospectively incompatible music tracks, The Rascals v. ambient v. hip-hop v. Frank Sinatra, etc. Blending (cobbling?) two or more poets together mash-up style prompts a critical intelligence to review how disparate entities mesh and disconnect. Case in point, last week I posted a set of results, "Seamus Gluck." Here's how it happened. It was easy and fast. As critic maudit and poet pauvre, I turned to a pop house organ of official verse culture, the most recent issue of The New Yorker at that time (January 17), and found two poems, one by Louise Gluck, another by Seamus Heaney. With minimum artifice, changing verb tenses here and there, snipping one or two redundancies, tricking out a few line breaks particularly at the end, I otherwise followed a simple procedure: copy each poem line by line into a remix, odd line to Gluck, even line to Heaney, that is, "my" first line is Gluck's first line, second line is Heaney's first line, third line is Gluck's second line, and so on. (Since Gluck's poem is a little longer than Heaney's I varied line breaks in my last stanzas, pressing final lines from Gluck's poem into my couplet as coda.)
The two poems come together nuptially, as it were. Line 2 in "Seamus Gluck" kicks off "When they..."; Line 3, "When you..."; Line 4, "We lived with them..."; Line 5, "Because you were living…"; Line 7 (from Gluck) speaks of somewhere else; Line 8 (reflective of Heaney's fondness for thickets of physical description) seems to detail this 'somewhere,' "molded verge half skirting, half stockade." Gluck and Heaney, as it happens, are exercising their memories back "When," a scene for each that leads each to outline atmospherics from the past from which they both must retrieve themselves. What seems wicked and compositionally too-convenient for me in the process of fabricating "Seamus Gluck" is that both Gluck and Heaney discursively extricate themselves (their personae) at just about the same point in their respective narratives: Line 28 in "Seamus Gluck" reads, "You realize afterward" (Gluck); while Line 29 continues, "And afterwards rust thistles" (Heaney, of course).
I am not freaked by these results. I'm confirmed in my sense that, evidenced by this latest 'happenstance' of finding work from Gluck and Heaney, New Yorker poetry editors support discursive formulae of the tempus fugit workshop variety, and more, the poetry tastemakers, unlike their counterparts editing fiction, are not the least uncomfortable with verse outfitted with pat closures bow-wrapped with little life supports as object lessons. Heaney's lesson, though integrated within taut descriptive propositions, is as familiar as the blackguard's wain of chestnuts: Here is that 'somewhere' mankind reminisces vaguely as from a past space and past time, space and time like "Dante's wood," "bleached in sun," and now "darkened," but here with us now, "pervasive" in "silence," "deadlit," "languid" as the "sky." Gluck's lesson is false at all levels of my mash-up and analysis, especially when Gluck writes, "You realize afterward / not that the image is false / but the relation is false." The assertion "the image is [not] false" would be closer to a truth if there were an image. We get no closer to imagery in Gluck's poem than the thought that "you" participate in the "stillness" and "immensity" of stars. I digest this as pre-school science, not imagery. Gluck also claims, "You've stopped being here in the world... // a place where human life has no meaning," but this isn't an image, either; it's an opinion, unverifiable. My argument against the claim "the relation is false" requires replay of Gluck's last stanza: "You see again how far away / each thing is from every other thing." In compiling "Seamus Gluck," I find that Gluck's abbreviated code (each thing, every other thing) functions as an idiotically perfect foil to Heaney's geo-botanical elaboration. Thing (afterward) clings to thing (afterwards) in a super-thingy amalgam. Since both Gluck and Heaney operate within similar narrative frames ("that bulwark," "a creature"), working out of parallel formulae ("There is a moment," "When they'd been block-built"), the relation between them is overt, not "far away," and certainly not far out.
I admit this treatment of Gluck and Heaney is easy, just as my mash-up of their two poems is easy. Or was. I'd like to dispense with "Seamus Gluck," and take for granted that points enumerated, above, are evident from reading my poem, without exposition. That is: To get back to the grander topic, speed in amassing complexity and ease of combining are evidently two features of computer-assisted appropriation and re-assembly; with regard to critique poetics, an ideal, which I'll continue to hold as achievable, inappropriate (opposite of appropriate, the verb?) and quick, is to let the poem-object argue through its rush of complexity so that it may begin to liberate-destroy unfabulous lyricism (of the purloined source material) that's framed within a past, a convention (or, better, a convention-set). Rushing along.
Why are we doing these things? I'm sure it has something to do with technologies invading our immune systems. Rationales aside, the news is some poets are doing things that require brighter modes of comprehensiveness. I mentioned that Mohammad's Deer Head Nation expands the field for poem-making (and I should add critique), not because there are lovely neoteric poems to read, but because the book of these poems discloses a wackiness that seems, to me, comprehensive, that is, of a piece of a nascent approach to work. Almost similarly, were one now to rush to print an anthology of mash-ups it might already be too late -- unless the selections were comprehensive, critical in original ways and replete with variatons of comic attitudes. To contradict what I've just said about exposition, perhaps mash-ups with short prose passages above or beneath them would do the trick, as -- much as the short, brilliantly detailed prose pieces that accompany Matsuo Basho's hilarious haiku, many things past brought to mind, the snowfall.
1/18/05
Critique Poetics (1)
Poetry comp is reeling with cyber-fed appropriation and re-assembly. One reason for this is a communal need to break the mold, to work ironically within a neo-tradition of surprise as necessity. From last century the French surrealists and then a range of postwar poets, starting with John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Jack Spicer, for three examples, demonstrate how fascinating it is to substitute, that is, to paste in, the unexpected phrase in order to compress and even undermine narration and to trigger the displaced, unsettling emotion or charmingly unwarranted idea.
Methods for substitution include straightforward word shifts within a given word-processed text -- intra-textual cuts and pastes, say -- as well as extra-textual processing of found passages, especially digitized texts, and hybrid processing of churned-out products from web-crawling and search-engines, often intermixed with other kinds of writing, found or 'authored.' Computer-assisted cuts and pastes from simple word-processing are rarely scrutinized as such, today, for they have become over some time quite an ordinary means, the sine qua non for effecting, to use Tom Stoppard's term, the miracle of compression. More recent methods of substituting whole passages of digitally purloined material nicely disrupt received notions of intra- v. extra-text, found v. authored. Meantime, to employ terms like 'authored' or 'intra-text' is to risk not paying enough attention to the larger point that cut-and-paste pastiche has evolved into a staple, generative methodology for disruption.
Poem-objects of the last decade or so continue, thank goodness, to foul up methods and standards. One direction that looks promising is genre-swapping, appropriating and incorporating large chunks of critical discourse into verse, Juliana Spahr's Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism, for example, or vice versa, Charles Bernstein's A Poetics, which sings tunefully about "official verse culture," among other meta-critical things, in verse-like stanzas. A thoroughgoing, book-length exemplar of critique poetics, let's call it, is K. Silem Mohammad's Deer Head Nation, a collection of more than 50 ludic pastiches that stare down any reader's conceptions about genre or about the divide between poetry and meta-poetry. There are ample, facile word substitutes: "I hate it when people stick a flag on their car / that had the total IQ of monkey"; there's a "Dear Head Suite" of more than 20 poems nominally addressing 'surprising' topics such as "11:04 pm Feeling Evil" and "The Internet Makes You Stupid," each topic elaborated by long lists of Google-derived non-sequiturs like these for "Home Decor": "...millennium clock / ...hand chair, wasp room / ...personal refrigerator"; and then there are pieces that address poetic topics per se, which for reasons of space I'll indicate by way of their titles: "Objectiwe: A Poeics," "La Belle Deer Tattoo Sans Merci," "Wallace Stevens," "Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)," and so forth. In fabricating a poetics that enacts ludicrous juxtapositions, Mohammad creates a recklessness as critique, a credible counter to conventional constraints upon lyrical form and discourse, one that both enlivens what we may call subject matter and hugely expands the potential for poem-making.
[More soon]
Poetry comp is reeling with cyber-fed appropriation and re-assembly. One reason for this is a communal need to break the mold, to work ironically within a neo-tradition of surprise as necessity. From last century the French surrealists and then a range of postwar poets, starting with John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara and Jack Spicer, for three examples, demonstrate how fascinating it is to substitute, that is, to paste in, the unexpected phrase in order to compress and even undermine narration and to trigger the displaced, unsettling emotion or charmingly unwarranted idea.
Methods for substitution include straightforward word shifts within a given word-processed text -- intra-textual cuts and pastes, say -- as well as extra-textual processing of found passages, especially digitized texts, and hybrid processing of churned-out products from web-crawling and search-engines, often intermixed with other kinds of writing, found or 'authored.' Computer-assisted cuts and pastes from simple word-processing are rarely scrutinized as such, today, for they have become over some time quite an ordinary means, the sine qua non for effecting, to use Tom Stoppard's term, the miracle of compression. More recent methods of substituting whole passages of digitally purloined material nicely disrupt received notions of intra- v. extra-text, found v. authored. Meantime, to employ terms like 'authored' or 'intra-text' is to risk not paying enough attention to the larger point that cut-and-paste pastiche has evolved into a staple, generative methodology for disruption.
Poem-objects of the last decade or so continue, thank goodness, to foul up methods and standards. One direction that looks promising is genre-swapping, appropriating and incorporating large chunks of critical discourse into verse, Juliana Spahr's Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism, for example, or vice versa, Charles Bernstein's A Poetics, which sings tunefully about "official verse culture," among other meta-critical things, in verse-like stanzas. A thoroughgoing, book-length exemplar of critique poetics, let's call it, is K. Silem Mohammad's Deer Head Nation, a collection of more than 50 ludic pastiches that stare down any reader's conceptions about genre or about the divide between poetry and meta-poetry. There are ample, facile word substitutes: "I hate it when people stick a flag on their car / that had the total IQ of monkey"; there's a "Dear Head Suite" of more than 20 poems nominally addressing 'surprising' topics such as "11:04 pm Feeling Evil" and "The Internet Makes You Stupid," each topic elaborated by long lists of Google-derived non-sequiturs like these for "Home Decor": "...millennium clock / ...hand chair, wasp room / ...personal refrigerator"; and then there are pieces that address poetic topics per se, which for reasons of space I'll indicate by way of their titles: "Objectiwe: A Poeics," "La Belle Deer Tattoo Sans Merci," "Wallace Stevens," "Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)," and so forth. In fabricating a poetics that enacts ludicrous juxtapositions, Mohammad creates a recklessness as critique, a credible counter to conventional constraints upon lyrical form and discourse, one that both enlivens what we may call subject matter and hugely expands the potential for poem-making.
[More soon]
1/14/05
Seamus Gluck
There is a moment after you move your eyes away
When they'd been block-built crisscross and four-squared
When you forget where you are
We lived with them and breathed pure creosote
Because you were living it seems
Until they were laid and landscaped in a curb
Somewhere else in the silence of the night sky
A molded verge half skirting, half stockade
You've stopped being here in the world
Soon fringed with hardy ground cover and grass
You're in a different place
But as that bulwark bleached in sun and rain
A place where human life has no meaning
Our gravel darkened and a tarry pus
You're not a creature in a body
Imagined yet pervasive, reeked and ran
You exist as the stars exist
Like the breathing, bleeding bad in Dante's wood
Participating in the stillness, their immensity
Unsettling, bearing forward to the garden
Then you're in the world again
What I couldn't hear in the forties when I lay
At night on a cold hill
Listening for what might come down the line
Taking the telescope apart
Each deadlit, boarded languid clanking wagon
You realize afterward
And afterwards rust thistles
Not that the image is false
Silence, sky
But the relation is false
You see how far away each is from every other thing.
There is a moment after you move your eyes away
When they'd been block-built crisscross and four-squared
When you forget where you are
We lived with them and breathed pure creosote
Because you were living it seems
Until they were laid and landscaped in a curb
Somewhere else in the silence of the night sky
A molded verge half skirting, half stockade
You've stopped being here in the world
Soon fringed with hardy ground cover and grass
You're in a different place
But as that bulwark bleached in sun and rain
A place where human life has no meaning
Our gravel darkened and a tarry pus
You're not a creature in a body
Imagined yet pervasive, reeked and ran
You exist as the stars exist
Like the breathing, bleeding bad in Dante's wood
Participating in the stillness, their immensity
Unsettling, bearing forward to the garden
Then you're in the world again
What I couldn't hear in the forties when I lay
At night on a cold hill
Listening for what might come down the line
Taking the telescope apart
Each deadlit, boarded languid clanking wagon
You realize afterward
And afterwards rust thistles
Not that the image is false
Silence, sky
But the relation is false
You see how far away each is from every other thing.
From Basboll's Transparency III: "The thing to pay attention to here is the way [Nabokov's] crystogram uses body parts (a hand, a mouth) and gesticulations (shaking, thrusting) as preconditions (a priori conditions) for the solidity and soullessness of things (a matchbox, a cigarette)." This seems a fruitful way to approach an analysis of narrative and, perhaps, poetry. Follow through to the other two posts on transparency and "The Rain-sparkling Crystogram."
1/13/05
Bob D. Thomas
A poem is a naked person, the force
that through the green fuse drives the flower.
Some people say that I am a poet.
A hero is someone who drives my green age;
who understands the responsibility that comes
with the roots of trees.
The fallen blood shall calm her sores.
I have dined with kings
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
I've been offered wings.
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
And I've never been too impressed.
A poem is a naked person, the force
that through the green fuse drives the flower.
Some people say that I am a poet.
A hero is someone who drives my green age;
who understands the responsibility that comes
with the roots of trees.
The fallen blood shall calm her sores.
I have dined with kings
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
I've been offered wings.
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
And I've never been too impressed.
Lorenzo Thomas Dylan
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days,
Waiting for the day, arms weakened,
After the birth of the simple light
Not exactly somewhere, but a certain place.
Now I know old age is cruel, now
As I was young 'n easy under apple boughs
There is a hazard in the morning sun,
The night above the dingle starry
It brings fears I never knew
In the sun that is young once only,
The birth of a regret all Americans are losing
I was huntsman and herdsman, the cows
With the fear of being alone, I was
Young 'n easy in the mercy of his means
Still, in the world going nowhere
Or the blossoming of a sorrow --
Their minds are going crazy
Though I sang in my chains like the sea
So well behaved and mild, shyly, patiently
I should hear him fly with the high fields.
You may finally sort everything out, figs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass
These passions make your life last longer.
The cock on his shoulder: it was all shining!
Time let me play and be the sky gathered again
This happy corner, sucking up hard-boiled eggs
The tunes from the chimneys, it was air
A thirty percent chance this day will pass.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days,
Waiting for the day, arms weakened,
After the birth of the simple light
Not exactly somewhere, but a certain place.
Now I know old age is cruel, now
As I was young 'n easy under apple boughs
There is a hazard in the morning sun,
The night above the dingle starry
It brings fears I never knew
In the sun that is young once only,
The birth of a regret all Americans are losing
I was huntsman and herdsman, the cows
With the fear of being alone, I was
Young 'n easy in the mercy of his means
Still, in the world going nowhere
Or the blossoming of a sorrow --
Their minds are going crazy
Though I sang in my chains like the sea
So well behaved and mild, shyly, patiently
I should hear him fly with the high fields.
You may finally sort everything out, figs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass
These passions make your life last longer.
The cock on his shoulder: it was all shining!
Time let me play and be the sky gathered again
This happy corner, sucking up hard-boiled eggs
The tunes from the chimneys, it was air
A thirty percent chance this day will pass.
1/12/05
Is this a spray or cat or poo? [pg bk]
Then spake, to whom thro' the garbage [pg bk]
But don't waste good mascara! [pg bk]
Seize the fey! [pg bk] [pg bk]
I fear fiber is never glad, my blossom dead [pg bk]
Too courteous, are you a circus? [pg bk]
The cruel give us confidence. [pg bk]
Dex wooden leg plus spaz. [pg bk] [pg bk]
Spin doctors' talk had pierced our Father [pg bk]
-- There you go -- huh? [pg bk]
House by house, blocked by gravity, do you span [pg bk]
To silence the unenvying nightingales?
Then spake, to whom thro' the garbage [pg bk]
But don't waste good mascara! [pg bk]
Seize the fey! [pg bk] [pg bk]
I fear fiber is never glad, my blossom dead [pg bk]
Too courteous, are you a circus? [pg bk]
The cruel give us confidence. [pg bk]
Dex wooden leg plus spaz. [pg bk] [pg bk]
Spin doctors' talk had pierced our Father [pg bk]
-- There you go -- huh? [pg bk]
House by house, blocked by gravity, do you span [pg bk]
To silence the unenvying nightingales?
Everyone needs a secret life. You're still a little off.
A cheer for the emotional piano, check out the 9 comments or so for the full lyric.
Now you're catching on.
A cheer for the emotional piano, check out the 9 comments or so for the full lyric.
Now you're catching on.
1/11/05
Gary Snyder
In steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country
Ashbery looks at me like I'm the most pathetic excuse for a human being.
I pull out your blouse, warm my cold hands on your breasts.
Through slide-aspen and talus, to the east end,
I feel this rush like I'm gearing up for one of those "print" versus "web" discussions.
I know you personally,
The Daughter is the Great Mother
Who, with her father/brother Matter as her lover --
I don't want to flatter you.
How well articulated! How neat!
"Meat" means "You don't touch me."
"Unanswering machine." [Laughter.]
When creeks are full the poems flow,
What about corporate sponsorship?
To my amazement, Ashbery's quite interested to hear about it.
We'll lean on the wall against each other, stew simmering on the fire.
I recognize Brendan Lorber and Karen Weiser, and again I feel enraged.
Quail chicks freeze underfoot, color of stone --
It makes sense to me that Ashbery is there with his wife and daughter
As the Cat swung back the arch piss-firs falling
I'm now sitting talking to him, to John Ashbery.
Matter makes it with his mother
Because it suddenly becomes apparent that if I tell him
Exactly at midnight from a ship about the blue ones
-- A delivers remarks in a staccato tenor --
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know,
I'm wandering around looking for Nada
These poems, people, lost ponies
Deer trails slide under freeways slip into cities.
This is actually quite a beautiful city, and I've
Slept. Right. Right. Yeah. The manuscripts.
Eyes pop out. Disappointed I can't think of its name.
Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts.
"Yeah," he says
I look up through the Guggenheim's spiraling
Lay down these words before your mind like rocks
Of peanuts as they fuck.
True or false: All important works of art
Go ants and pebbles, a writer applies,
The cows get thin, the milk tastes funny.
I just happened to bring along a list
A big rock weatherd funny, old tree trunks turned stone,
I lift my cup and flowers sleep
Night rain flicking the maples.
I no longer know where I am.
I met A in a coffee place on Broadway
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
I'm living in my studio
Yes! of course it is!
I saw Phil Whalen with a load of groceries.
The others stood and looked
-- Their child is Matter.
Right. Ah, no.
I was simply not offered enough money.
Kyoto born in spring song
Meat & blood & hair & fatty tissue
All the hills trying to throw
Nike and Phillip Morris sponsored the show.
Let's get back to the truck
Earth (mortality)
You laugh and shudder peeling garlic by the hot iron stove.
My guest today is Kristoff.
Gives birth to the Mind.
Now I'm really frustrated.
Two flesh persons changing
Bong. Water.
In steep gorge glacier-slick rattlesnake country
Ashbery looks at me like I'm the most pathetic excuse for a human being.
I pull out your blouse, warm my cold hands on your breasts.
Through slide-aspen and talus, to the east end,
I feel this rush like I'm gearing up for one of those "print" versus "web" discussions.
I know you personally,
The Daughter is the Great Mother
Who, with her father/brother Matter as her lover --
I don't want to flatter you.
How well articulated! How neat!
"Meat" means "You don't touch me."
"Unanswering machine." [Laughter.]
When creeks are full the poems flow,
What about corporate sponsorship?
To my amazement, Ashbery's quite interested to hear about it.
We'll lean on the wall against each other, stew simmering on the fire.
I recognize Brendan Lorber and Karen Weiser, and again I feel enraged.
Quail chicks freeze underfoot, color of stone --
It makes sense to me that Ashbery is there with his wife and daughter
As the Cat swung back the arch piss-firs falling
I'm now sitting talking to him, to John Ashbery.
Matter makes it with his mother
Because it suddenly becomes apparent that if I tell him
Exactly at midnight from a ship about the blue ones
-- A delivers remarks in a staccato tenor --
Rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know,
I'm wandering around looking for Nada
These poems, people, lost ponies
Deer trails slide under freeways slip into cities.
This is actually quite a beautiful city, and I've
Slept. Right. Right. Yeah. The manuscripts.
Eyes pop out. Disappointed I can't think of its name.
Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts.
"Yeah," he says
I look up through the Guggenheim's spiraling
Lay down these words before your mind like rocks
Of peanuts as they fuck.
True or false: All important works of art
Go ants and pebbles, a writer applies,
The cows get thin, the milk tastes funny.
I just happened to bring along a list
A big rock weatherd funny, old tree trunks turned stone,
I lift my cup and flowers sleep
Night rain flicking the maples.
I no longer know where I am.
I met A in a coffee place on Broadway
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
I'm living in my studio
Yes! of course it is!
I saw Phil Whalen with a load of groceries.
The others stood and looked
-- Their child is Matter.
Right. Ah, no.
I was simply not offered enough money.
Kyoto born in spring song
Meat & blood & hair & fatty tissue
All the hills trying to throw
Nike and Phillip Morris sponsored the show.
Let's get back to the truck
Earth (mortality)
You laugh and shudder peeling garlic by the hot iron stove.
My guest today is Kristoff.
Gives birth to the Mind.
Now I'm really frustrated.
Two flesh persons changing
Bong. Water.
1/7/05
Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler
William Corbett, Editor
Turtle Point Press 2004
Reasons to love these letters (for starters). James Schuyler, we learn, relished scanning the real estate adverts in English Country Living. His signatures to John Ashbery, including Cynthia Westcott, (Mrs) Birdsey Youngs, Theodore Besterman [Voltaire biographer], The Supremes. To Fairfield Porter: "I can't work up any strong feeling about Connecticut; it's very bushy." In his letter to Ron Padgett regarding Schuyler's selections for An Anthology of NY..., for a salutation, Schuyler writes, "Dear Dr. Molnar: Is it harmful to eat frost that gathers in the refrigerator?" Then later: "I hope, by the way, you aren't going to bear down too hard on The New York School (or use that term). It sounds, uh, insular, and somehow isn't altogether true." Correspondence that revolves around cuisine! "The desserts sound formidable"! Schuyler taking in On the Waterfront, Flesh, Cage aux Folles, The Wages of Fear, The Fireman's Ball, Les Biches. He loved Roman flower stands. Salutation to John Ashbery: "Dear Beany Bacon Dip." The solace of knowing some of Schuyler's reading matter: a Benedictine tome on herbs, also The Victorian Fern Craze, A Gardener's Book of Plant Names, Intellectual Life in Gay Colonial New England, A Reader's Handbook to Proust, all kinds of mysteries and comix, including Steel Penis Farming. Lewis Warsh has the same birthday as Schuyler, Nov. 9. Salutation to Tom Carey: "Dear Boychick." Schuyler ate cucumber sandwiches. He watched Hill Street Blues. Generosity proffered to David Trinidad: Schuyler advised Trinidad to contact his French translator, "send 1 copy of book, with brief card or note, 'sent at suggestion of JS ... (don't ask questions, do it)"; ditto to Howard Moss at The New Yorker. In a boilerplate solicitation letter for Broadway co-signed by Charles North: "so send your best poem." We read that Eileen Myles wore leather at the preview of the Alex Katz retrospective (1986) at the Whitney. Though Nest of Ninnies "bombed" commercially, Ashbery and Schuyler, we're told, "made a surprising amount of money out of it." In a letter to Trevor Winkfield: "...they don't seem to allow women to prostitute themselves in Venice, just men. I think it's a way of honoring Lord Byron." Last line in last published letter, a PS: "I thought of offering to trade apartments, but decided I'd best stick with my perilous elevators --"
1/6/05
1/2/05
I can't recall a turn to the new year that holds so little to be hopeful of. I say this despite upswings for me and my concerns. Pantaloons, Inc. has been ushered into the Merry Fortune 500 as a must-get cultural namedrop. (Maybe I should initiate invitation-only cheese-tastings and start hauling my maus-weight around the fiefdom.) My investments are going according to plan. Thanks. And the publishing end is "marble like cheese," too. Faux Press will be releasing a set of books featuring witty, wry, even celebratory poetry, some accompanied by original graphics that are horrifyingly timely as well as supportive of the texts they converse with. Two or possibly three lines of writing, for me, are proceeding without interruption, and case in point, I'll be reading new poetry (that's one of the lines) next Sunday, the 9th at the Zinc, 90 W. Houston St., corner of LaGuardia Pl., along with Mairead Byrne, starting at 7:00 pm. (In deference to Mairead, I'm planning to downplay my Irish and feminine sides.)
Still constraints and catastrophe from the outside, the things we can't do much about at a "personal" level, loom larger than they should. I left a Thai lover on Phuket four years ago. He's fine, but many friends did not survive, and his design business is in ruins. The fair conceit of Thailand as a possible future seems less imminent, for sure. The lovely lands I've visited or almost-visited, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka are truly in shreds. Had I even half the resources required, I would take off for several months of helping and healing that would lead directly to self-repair.
(I would like to hold this as a possible direction, for me, still.)
American politics seems more and more an impure source for storytelling. So much of value is from elsewhere or better done elsewhere; beside science we only have our power of language and legend-making to recommend us.
Still constraints and catastrophe from the outside, the things we can't do much about at a "personal" level, loom larger than they should. I left a Thai lover on Phuket four years ago. He's fine, but many friends did not survive, and his design business is in ruins. The fair conceit of Thailand as a possible future seems less imminent, for sure. The lovely lands I've visited or almost-visited, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka are truly in shreds. Had I even half the resources required, I would take off for several months of helping and healing that would lead directly to self-repair.
(I would like to hold this as a possible direction, for me, still.)
American politics seems more and more an impure source for storytelling. So much of value is from elsewhere or better done elsewhere; beside science we only have our power of language and legend-making to recommend us.
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