How many senses do I possess? Are there more than five? Is there a sense I haven’t discovered yet? Is poetry a sense, or simply a literary form? That is to say, is language an antenna, or a ganglionic mass of syntax and nerves?
If I had another sense, wouldn’t I simply sense it? I don’t think about touch, I touch. Don’t think about hearing. I hear. Don’t think about seeing. I see. Don’t think about tasting. I taste. If Ismell a rose I smell a rose. I don’t think about smelling a rose. I don’t think, smell a rose, then smell a rose. I simply smell a rose. None of these things are cerebral. They just occur. Happen.
But what if a sense were so subtle, I didn’t know I was sensing it, even though I was sensing it. Sensing the sense. Without sensing the sense. Because it’s too thin, too delicate, too ethereal.
But that doesn’t make any sense. How would I not know I was sensing something? Something not touch, or sound, or sight, or taste, or smell? Something ineffable. Something beyond the scope of language. Something I felt but could not say what I was feeling. Or that I could not affirm that what I sensed corresponded with something in the outside world. In the same way that something wet and sweet on my tongue is translated into a cherry, or an unpleasant quality on the skin is interpreted as cold, or something liquid and black and bitter to the taste can be identified as coffee.
Charles Olson did mention something about a proprioceptive sense. This is the sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body. The cavity of the body in which the organs are slung. Lungs, stomach, kidneys, intestines. All that gooey gooshy slimy convolution. Blood moving and moving through the veins, pumped by a muscle, the heart. The body of us as object which spontaneously or of its own order produces experiences of depth. A position, as being seated in front of a computer, a movie screen, cockpit of an airplane, or dentist’s office, someone, man, young woman, is bending over, concentrating heavily on our open mouth. They have latex gloves on their hands, and the radio is so low it can barely be heard. There are mountains on the ceiling. And a bright fluorescent light, for which the dentist has kindly provided sunglasses.
It gets to be a story. The senses combine to bring us the world, and it is delivered all at once, which makes it hard to organize in a paragraph. Poetry is more adept at this sort of thing.
Consciousness as ego, followed by judgment. Judgment has, of late, acquired a negative flavor. People often say: don’t judge me. Or, it’s so nice to be around friends who don’t judge you. That’s stupid. These aren’t friends, these are morons. I’m friends with people because they have judged me. They have judged me worthy to be a friend. And so there is friendship.
But’s matter for another discussion.
So let me ask you: do you have passions beyond your understanding? Beyond your control? Beyond the bounds of polite society? If civilization were to disappear tomorrow, would you miss it?
I would miss running water, electricity, and cellophane, but not much else. I imagine myself sometimes as living in harmony with the world, with nature, as a Laplander, a Sioux, a Choctaw, a Mongol shepherd or Celtic farmer circa 800 B.C. I could deal with that. No salt for my meat and vegetables, no place to shit except outside, behind a bush, but that’s no big deal. I would do that in exchange for a planet. Because the planet cannot sustain the kind of technology we have imposed on it for transport, houses, TV, computers and energy. The oceans are dying, the bees are dying, the planet itself is dying. I wonder if there will be enough protein left to begin another species. But how will they survive the radioactivity?
Certainly none of this makes sense.
And how do we know what is sensed is real? I have had my share of hallucinations. Hallucinations are fairly easy to identify. They’re like cartoons, all full of color and goofiness. Monsters, angels, phenomena not commonly found in the external world. But what of delusions? Beliefs that turn out to be false? Is there a surefire way to discriminate between what is real and what is not? If there is, I haven’t found it.
Let’s say you believe in God and one day a tornado comes along and blows your house away and kills your pets and spouse and children. Or leaves your pets and spouse and children safe and sound. But your house is gone. And you have no insurance or place to live, except the high school gymnasium, where the Red Cross has provided some blankets and a cot. Do you thank the same God who made the tornado for selecting you, out of all those other people, for saving your life? Or do you get pissed like Job, and say what the fuck, I was pious and prayed and went to church, and this is how you repay me? Destroy my house? My job? My friends and family?
Spinoza cautions us about language: Again, since words are a part of the imagination --- that is, since we form many conceptions in accordance with confused arrangements of words in the memory, dependent on particular bodily conditions, --- there is no doubt that words may, equally with the imagination, be the cause of many and great errors, unless we keep strictly on our guard. Moreover, words are formed according to popular fancy and intelligence, and are, therefore, signs of things as existing in the imagination, not as existing in the understanding. This is evident from the fact that to all such things as exist only in the understanding, not in the imagination, negative names are often given, such as incorporeal, infinite, &c. So, also, many conceptions really affirmative are expressed negatively, and vice versa, such as uncreate, independent, infinite, immortal, &c., inasmuch as their contraries are much more easily imagined, and, therefore, occurred first to men, and usurped positive names. Many things we affirm and deny, because the nature of words allows us to do so, though the nature of things does not. While we remain unaware of this fact, we may easily mistake falsehood for truth.
It’s so easy to slip up, and assume that an idea has weight, and substance, when, in fact, it is less substantial than a palace of vapor floating over Düsseldorf.
I believe, right now, this minute, that what I am sensing is summer, moderate warmth, about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and the lingering taste of coffee, and fingers on a keyboard, dancing, making these signs, pixels, words, and if I want a boat, I will make a boat, write boat, and a boat exists, at least in my imagination, though in actuality, there is a boat in my future, assuming the future is real, which it is not, it is always a fiction, a ball of myriad possibilities, rolling toward the void. Where there is life and potential. And assurances and oceans. Floating a boat of the future on a suffusion of words.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Warm-Blooded Dreams
Symposium on the Body’s Left Side, poetry by George Kalamaras
Shivastan Publishing, 2011
Imagine the warmth of a single life, a column of smoke, great crane migrations over the Ural mountains or the perfume of a Civet cat imprinted on handmade, Nepalese lokta paper in Kathmandu, Nepal, and you have a virtual approximation of the chapbook that is Kalamaras’s Symposium on the Body’s Left Side.
Kalamaras is a profoundly physical writer. Constant reference is made to physical sensation: breathing, smelling, touching, hearing, bleeding, healing, gnawing, seeping, tumbling, eating. His imagery abounds in sensual, erotic play: “… say my name sadly as you might the erotic texture of plankton,” “Would you kiss me even if I was not composed of starlight,” “I’ve spent so much time desiring women, I’m tired of my feet,” “I’d drag my paramecium self over the eyelid of certain women I’d one day hope to love.” The eroticism is mingled with celestial longing, with a craving for wisdom, the wisdom of the body, the wisdom of moss, and willow-root, and the heart pumping out blood in its cage of bone. There are numerous references to yogic lore and eastern religion, but the work itself remains true to the puckish instincts of poetry, which thrives on a playful contrariness, a subversive energy calling out constantly to the actualities of life.
It’s as if Kalamaras channeled Bo Diddley and the Buddha simultaneously. At the core of this work is a fabulous disparity, the fundamental paradox of all life: mortality. The inherent ephemerality of all living things. Curiously, this is the crisis that fuels all great art: the awareness that we are always in flux, and that with each ripening there comes a dissipation, fuels a mania for living as passionately and intensely as possible. “Then a sense of perspective frees me also,” observed Robert Duncan, “that I am indeed to die, as you are to die, makes life all mine to live.” The fuller resonance of this means that nothing circumscribes “the flowering of being into its particular forms.”
Symposium on the Body’s Left Side is part of an ongoing work called Bone Sutras.
In Hinduism, a sutra is a form of literary composition based on short, aphoristic statements. The texts were intended to be memorized by students, and so concision was a valued element in their composition.
Kalamaras makes a slightly different use of them; he combines riddles, koans, puzzles and occasional surrealist flourishes. He avoids strict linearity and logic in the service of a higher, more transcendent form of cognition. What Hart Crane described in a letter to Harriet Monroe as an “apparent illogic,” an inflection of language, that “operates so logically in conjunction with its context in the poem as to establish a claim to another logic, quite independent of the original definition of the word or phrase or image thus employed.”
Here, for example, is “Saluting the Bruise,” in which the poet remarks, through a series of puckish contradictions, on what Nietzsche referred to as the “eternal wound of existence.”
As if my heart was the canticle of the Milky Way, I am exact in my
stance.
Yes, I’ve said it before. I am in the business of regressing evermore
forward.
Chess? You require a blue and green board to combat your black
and red regret?
I’ve skillfully hidden the black and blue, and now my strategy might
slip?
How distinct from one another are we, really?
I’ve ordered the mirror, buried the jar of ants in the sand, and still you
speak through me in absolute threes.
As if my heart. As if my canticle. As if my Milky Way where the
healing might begin.
I might be exact as an epaulet, confiscating the shoulder, even, of
every civilian who dares salute the bruise.
This breath wherein the world goes on dying.
This breath wherein the world forever goes.
People tend to have strong feelings about the use of the second person as a literary strategy. Some people hate it. I like it. I like the ambiguity of it: the writer could be referring to the reader (or listener), to a hidden, mysterious identity, to oneself, which gives it an argumentative tinge, or to all of the above, simultaneously.
The line “I’ve ordered the mirror, buried the jar of ants in the sand, and still you speak through me in absolute threes,” speaks to the circumstance of a rite, a ceremony of magic, a shamanistic journey. The combination of mirror and ants is effective; the one an object of reflection, the other a teeming, as of words, picking up pieces of nourishment from the world, and then descending into the ground, into a deeper realm where these articles are digested.
Kalamaras brings with this chapbook a beautifully crafted inclusion in his Bone Sutras series, which in itself offers something unusual to contemporary poets and writers: a sense of the sacred, certainly, but one which is delivered in words that have the juiciness of plums, the tart vivacity of wild chicory, and the spicy warmth of Ethiopian red pepper.
Shivastan Publishing, 2011
Imagine the warmth of a single life, a column of smoke, great crane migrations over the Ural mountains or the perfume of a Civet cat imprinted on handmade, Nepalese lokta paper in Kathmandu, Nepal, and you have a virtual approximation of the chapbook that is Kalamaras’s Symposium on the Body’s Left Side.
Kalamaras is a profoundly physical writer. Constant reference is made to physical sensation: breathing, smelling, touching, hearing, bleeding, healing, gnawing, seeping, tumbling, eating. His imagery abounds in sensual, erotic play: “… say my name sadly as you might the erotic texture of plankton,” “Would you kiss me even if I was not composed of starlight,” “I’ve spent so much time desiring women, I’m tired of my feet,” “I’d drag my paramecium self over the eyelid of certain women I’d one day hope to love.” The eroticism is mingled with celestial longing, with a craving for wisdom, the wisdom of the body, the wisdom of moss, and willow-root, and the heart pumping out blood in its cage of bone. There are numerous references to yogic lore and eastern religion, but the work itself remains true to the puckish instincts of poetry, which thrives on a playful contrariness, a subversive energy calling out constantly to the actualities of life.
It’s as if Kalamaras channeled Bo Diddley and the Buddha simultaneously. At the core of this work is a fabulous disparity, the fundamental paradox of all life: mortality. The inherent ephemerality of all living things. Curiously, this is the crisis that fuels all great art: the awareness that we are always in flux, and that with each ripening there comes a dissipation, fuels a mania for living as passionately and intensely as possible. “Then a sense of perspective frees me also,” observed Robert Duncan, “that I am indeed to die, as you are to die, makes life all mine to live.” The fuller resonance of this means that nothing circumscribes “the flowering of being into its particular forms.”
Symposium on the Body’s Left Side is part of an ongoing work called Bone Sutras.
In Hinduism, a sutra is a form of literary composition based on short, aphoristic statements. The texts were intended to be memorized by students, and so concision was a valued element in their composition.
Kalamaras makes a slightly different use of them; he combines riddles, koans, puzzles and occasional surrealist flourishes. He avoids strict linearity and logic in the service of a higher, more transcendent form of cognition. What Hart Crane described in a letter to Harriet Monroe as an “apparent illogic,” an inflection of language, that “operates so logically in conjunction with its context in the poem as to establish a claim to another logic, quite independent of the original definition of the word or phrase or image thus employed.”
Here, for example, is “Saluting the Bruise,” in which the poet remarks, through a series of puckish contradictions, on what Nietzsche referred to as the “eternal wound of existence.”
As if my heart was the canticle of the Milky Way, I am exact in my
stance.
Yes, I’ve said it before. I am in the business of regressing evermore
forward.
Chess? You require a blue and green board to combat your black
and red regret?
I’ve skillfully hidden the black and blue, and now my strategy might
slip?
How distinct from one another are we, really?
I’ve ordered the mirror, buried the jar of ants in the sand, and still you
speak through me in absolute threes.
As if my heart. As if my canticle. As if my Milky Way where the
healing might begin.
I might be exact as an epaulet, confiscating the shoulder, even, of
every civilian who dares salute the bruise.
This breath wherein the world goes on dying.
This breath wherein the world forever goes.
People tend to have strong feelings about the use of the second person as a literary strategy. Some people hate it. I like it. I like the ambiguity of it: the writer could be referring to the reader (or listener), to a hidden, mysterious identity, to oneself, which gives it an argumentative tinge, or to all of the above, simultaneously.
The line “I’ve ordered the mirror, buried the jar of ants in the sand, and still you speak through me in absolute threes,” speaks to the circumstance of a rite, a ceremony of magic, a shamanistic journey. The combination of mirror and ants is effective; the one an object of reflection, the other a teeming, as of words, picking up pieces of nourishment from the world, and then descending into the ground, into a deeper realm where these articles are digested.
Kalamaras brings with this chapbook a beautifully crafted inclusion in his Bone Sutras series, which in itself offers something unusual to contemporary poets and writers: a sense of the sacred, certainly, but one which is delivered in words that have the juiciness of plums, the tart vivacity of wild chicory, and the spicy warmth of Ethiopian red pepper.
Friday, June 24, 2011
Two By Four
Gallant finger. Nascent oak.
Rain agrees with myth. Visceral rips of rhetoric. Circulated comb invisible fruit. Morning in a taxi.
Intuitive blood. Iron being.
Cloth is living testament. Ravenous oval fireside spoon. Thin oddities mongrel truths. Circus where secrets sparkle.
Holy perspective. Esophageal hose.
Hilly conception in accentuation. Coffee under perpetual construction. Firmament dragging placental perception. Loads of jaunty angels.
Black hills. Startling beige.
Soap excels at tickling. Lobster juggling its scruples. Sunlight flopped on smelt. Romance of jingled adults.
Bistro palette. Splattered sweat.
Red house spitting knives. Language humors a syntax. Burning howling growling grammar. Focussed convocation of ears.
Spectral depth. Storied attitude.
Revelatory highway barked emotion. Staunch taste of outdoors. The sky gets bottled. Fly this into prophecy.
Boiling point. Exhilarating stars.
A spirit strains meaning. Because consonants thunder vowels. And syllables twang infinity. Phantoms pump the tongue.
And hypothesize. Stir tattoos.
Kerosene urges sputtering plausibility. Silver locomotives of art. Sanguine banks of fire. Emotions big as morning.
Restless azure. Eloquent eyes.
The story gets loud. Cemetery held by metaphor. Gloss on Mediterranean shells. Laughter gets algebra unbuttoned.
Ghostly forms. Indigo spirits.
Hammer in a canoe. Tall maples fluttered leaves. Galaxies of clinging pain. Water denies its flimflam.
Because tin. Because erratic.
Formula shouting its chrome. Resilience cocoons stratospheric poetry. Poke this into absorption. The metamorphosis of silk.
Teeming bighorn. Amorous sparrows.
Do anything you want. Be rubber be rubbed. Rubbed rubber ruddy rubble. Rumble in russet rumination.
Swallow circumference. Sip mind.
Hallucinations amaze the air. The lake is lonely. The lake is mosquitoes. The lake is wrinkled.
Fat glitter. Frantic waves.
A man named Tie. A woman named Hypothesis. A boy named Murmur. A girl named Green.
Experience spinning. Shrewdly dangling.
I feel your skin. Your eyes your arms. Your feelings your tumult. Your seething your screaming.
Your anonymity. Your weariness.
Glue eludes its garrulity. Alligators pound the ooze. We listen for France. We hear the sky.
Epidermal cries. Romantic immersion.
The sandstone library twinkles. The books occupy themselves. Poetry sweetens the corner. Paragraphs affirm our alibis.
Rain agrees with myth. Visceral rips of rhetoric. Circulated comb invisible fruit. Morning in a taxi.
Intuitive blood. Iron being.
Cloth is living testament. Ravenous oval fireside spoon. Thin oddities mongrel truths. Circus where secrets sparkle.
Holy perspective. Esophageal hose.
Hilly conception in accentuation. Coffee under perpetual construction. Firmament dragging placental perception. Loads of jaunty angels.
Black hills. Startling beige.
Soap excels at tickling. Lobster juggling its scruples. Sunlight flopped on smelt. Romance of jingled adults.
Bistro palette. Splattered sweat.
Red house spitting knives. Language humors a syntax. Burning howling growling grammar. Focussed convocation of ears.
Spectral depth. Storied attitude.
Revelatory highway barked emotion. Staunch taste of outdoors. The sky gets bottled. Fly this into prophecy.
Boiling point. Exhilarating stars.
A spirit strains meaning. Because consonants thunder vowels. And syllables twang infinity. Phantoms pump the tongue.
And hypothesize. Stir tattoos.
Kerosene urges sputtering plausibility. Silver locomotives of art. Sanguine banks of fire. Emotions big as morning.
Restless azure. Eloquent eyes.
The story gets loud. Cemetery held by metaphor. Gloss on Mediterranean shells. Laughter gets algebra unbuttoned.
Ghostly forms. Indigo spirits.
Hammer in a canoe. Tall maples fluttered leaves. Galaxies of clinging pain. Water denies its flimflam.
Because tin. Because erratic.
Formula shouting its chrome. Resilience cocoons stratospheric poetry. Poke this into absorption. The metamorphosis of silk.
Teeming bighorn. Amorous sparrows.
Do anything you want. Be rubber be rubbed. Rubbed rubber ruddy rubble. Rumble in russet rumination.
Swallow circumference. Sip mind.
Hallucinations amaze the air. The lake is lonely. The lake is mosquitoes. The lake is wrinkled.
Fat glitter. Frantic waves.
A man named Tie. A woman named Hypothesis. A boy named Murmur. A girl named Green.
Experience spinning. Shrewdly dangling.
I feel your skin. Your eyes your arms. Your feelings your tumult. Your seething your screaming.
Your anonymity. Your weariness.
Glue eludes its garrulity. Alligators pound the ooze. We listen for France. We hear the sky.
Epidermal cries. Romantic immersion.
The sandstone library twinkles. The books occupy themselves. Poetry sweetens the corner. Paragraphs affirm our alibis.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Sounds
Clicking of the burner on the stove.
Toby scratching his chin.
Ticking of the red clock behind the TV.
Steady grumble of an airplane, chop chop chop chop chop of a helicopter.
Toby eating: smack, smack, smack, smack.
Hush of water through the pipes going into the washing machine in the laundry room as S comes out to check on his wash. Hushed metal and wood sound of door closing.
Muted, metallic sound of my keys hitting the carpet on the hallway steps as I drop them and prepare to put my running shoes on.
I go for a run. A thirty-something woman walking a black poodle suddenly bursts out yeah! yeah! yeah! as I pass. I see her adjust a gadget hooked to her ear. Bluetooth.
Thud, thud, thud, thud of a heavyset, middle-aged man wearing a sweaty t-shirt that says Texas State.
Spirited exchange of robins in the vicinity of Galer Street and 8th Avenue West.
Dog barking in Bhy Kracke park.
Washing machine in its spin cycle sounds like a helicopter landing in the building hallway. Big rattle and rumble. Fury and force. As if it were about to burst apart like a self-destructing Jean Tinguely sculpture.
K running the power wash, hosing the parking lot and sidewalk, the hiss and splash of water accompanied by the rapid-fire, angry murmur of the pressurizer.
Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump of rock ‘n roll drums coming from the CD player in the upstairs apartment.
My pen and glass case hitting the solid wood surface of the coffee table as I undress for bed.
Cat toy in the shape of a fish that makes a gurgly-burbly sound, like water bubbling in a cartoon aquarium.
Goofy, evacuative sounds of the plastic barbecue sauce bottle as Roberta squeezes out sauce for our beans and muffin cowboy dinner.
My heel burbles. I feel a lump under my foot. I am standing on Toby’s toy.
The owner of the house next door, a solidly built, muscular man in his early to mid-60s with white, short-cropped hair and the look of a seasoned warrior, runs some sort of power tool that makes an extremely abrasive sound, an electrical whir followed by a spinning blade grinding stone, or metal.
Sound of a small paring knife slicing through an orange, muted thunk, thunk, thunk as each piece drops to the wooden bread board.
Out running, I hear busy little scratchy sounds and see a dozen or so squirrels flow down the trunk of a tree. It looks like a squirrel waterfall.
Warm, mellow June evening: the distant hush of a jet fades into the sky.
Toby scratching his chin.
Ticking of the red clock behind the TV.
Steady grumble of an airplane, chop chop chop chop chop of a helicopter.
Toby eating: smack, smack, smack, smack.
Hush of water through the pipes going into the washing machine in the laundry room as S comes out to check on his wash. Hushed metal and wood sound of door closing.
Muted, metallic sound of my keys hitting the carpet on the hallway steps as I drop them and prepare to put my running shoes on.
I go for a run. A thirty-something woman walking a black poodle suddenly bursts out yeah! yeah! yeah! as I pass. I see her adjust a gadget hooked to her ear. Bluetooth.
Thud, thud, thud, thud of a heavyset, middle-aged man wearing a sweaty t-shirt that says Texas State.
Spirited exchange of robins in the vicinity of Galer Street and 8th Avenue West.
Dog barking in Bhy Kracke park.
Washing machine in its spin cycle sounds like a helicopter landing in the building hallway. Big rattle and rumble. Fury and force. As if it were about to burst apart like a self-destructing Jean Tinguely sculpture.
K running the power wash, hosing the parking lot and sidewalk, the hiss and splash of water accompanied by the rapid-fire, angry murmur of the pressurizer.
Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump of rock ‘n roll drums coming from the CD player in the upstairs apartment.
My pen and glass case hitting the solid wood surface of the coffee table as I undress for bed.
Cat toy in the shape of a fish that makes a gurgly-burbly sound, like water bubbling in a cartoon aquarium.
Goofy, evacuative sounds of the plastic barbecue sauce bottle as Roberta squeezes out sauce for our beans and muffin cowboy dinner.
My heel burbles. I feel a lump under my foot. I am standing on Toby’s toy.
The owner of the house next door, a solidly built, muscular man in his early to mid-60s with white, short-cropped hair and the look of a seasoned warrior, runs some sort of power tool that makes an extremely abrasive sound, an electrical whir followed by a spinning blade grinding stone, or metal.
Sound of a small paring knife slicing through an orange, muted thunk, thunk, thunk as each piece drops to the wooden bread board.
Out running, I hear busy little scratchy sounds and see a dozen or so squirrels flow down the trunk of a tree. It looks like a squirrel waterfall.
Warm, mellow June evening: the distant hush of a jet fades into the sky.
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Two From Burning Deck
Four Cut-ups, or The Case of the Restored Volume, poetry by David Lespiau, translation by Keith Waldrop
Burning Deck, 2010
engulf - enkindle, poetry by Anja Utler, translation by Kurt Beals
Burning Deck, 2010
Four Cut-ups, or The Case of the Restored Volume, may be the only book of poetry to indicate the method of its production in the title. This suggests a kind of baldness, an open declaration of strategy, and poetic philosophy. It is like entering a building before it is fully constructed, so that the beams, anchor bolts, and butt joints are exposed. There is the smell of freshly sawn wood and plaster. Voices echo. Buckets and stepladders punctuate the space.
Four Cut-ups has four sections. The poems are untitled. Vocabulary and imagery suggest shared source material for each section, which are titled “Alan, Benjy, Billy…,” “The reproduction of the seascape is unsigned,” “Iris & Bang-Utot,” and “Sucre in French is not sugar in English.”
“The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years,” observes William Burroughs in The Third Mind, “And used by the moving and still camera.”
In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passerby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents… writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit -- all writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point -- had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and across the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4… one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page.
“thought sugars” begins the poem on page 18 of the first section.
thought sugars
the storm / not
water, cognitive
discomfiture of
the bait in place
and position of
fact, after all o-
range is orage save
for n letters in a fine
rain of blue silk
- the gentle rain
its contour
orage, in French, means storm. The poem’s disjunctive structure is an analogue for the chaos of a storm. There is an acute feeling of velocity and turbulence tearing at the poem’s structure, as if the force within were almost too great for the poem’s containment. Disjunction both arouses and defies coherence. The poem’s subject is identical to its structure. Syntax rattles like a can of nuts and bolts. The action of the poem is under high compression. It could explode at any minute.
The poem on page 25, in the second section, presents a calmer climate. The subject is the seashore.
twice at the surface
of the sea and its waves
the representation
of water’s color
is bad. Shot of calm
sea. Slices. Fish
The other noises, voices
across the room
start up again. Lemon, housefly
glass egg raring
to reproduce
verisimilitude
This is a meta-poem whose subject is the nature of representation itself, summed up nicely in the last pretty word, verisimilitude. It’s modesty of size and minimalist bareness belie a richness of information. “Twice at the surface” alludes to Heraclitus and his famous axiom about never being able to step into the same river twice. “Water’s color” refers both to the actual color of the water, but also the rather tame watercolors we often find adorning the walls of motel rooms. “Slices” refers both to slices of fish and the poem’s method of production. Two simple words, lemon and housefly, generate an entire milieu: a room in which someone is squeezing, or just squeezed, a lemon, which has drawn a housefly. We see the room clearly, like a painting by Jean Baptiste Chardin, or Fairfield Porter. It’s a calm scene, which is duplicated in a glass egg, a piece of egg-shaped glasswork, perhaps, reflecting the objects in the room, and so producing a verisimilitude, a world doubled by reflection.
I was startled the first time I opened Utler’s engulf -- enkindle. The work is so elemental. Utler’s poems are highly similar to Lespiau’s, they are small, fragmented, disjunctive, with no apparent subjectivity, though she makes no open declaration of her method of construction. She is a trifle less minimalistic, giving us a bit more description, a few more adjectives, and there is a peculiarly romantic flavor. Romantic in the sense Schiller intended it: underlying beauty is the sublime, which is a force of terrific power, too great for our mortal senses, and contends against reason while leading us to a higher, moral sense of the universe. Here, I am in danger of reading too much into Utler’s poetry, or misinterpreting it altogether, but this I do know: it is full of turbulence. The lines halt and burst and fracture because of the tremendous energy underlying its production.
In the margin to the immediate left of the poem on page 16, are two words: encounter: escape. These serve, like a chapter heading, to suggest the circumstance of the poem.
but feel only: stagger, well, murmur -- a murmuring
stream, so it’s called - not to know, just
to: plunge down towards finally
to: trickle to drip start to spill over
pinechoked till: deep in the lowland
- the gullet, it’s called - as if: sluiced
from the: spit- to the streambed - run-
off - exuded, poured out into
pitching flowing, meandering veins
fray - towards: waterstop - jugal dam,
gurgle and sticks stutters catches: on snares of
hornwort, toothed, flooding the: clearcut mouth
One can feel the poet in a state of considerable excitement struggling to put this scene in words that have the same immediacy and rawness with which the senses apprehend it. The sublime is apparent in shreds, stumbling, in images coming so fast the poet cannot get them down on paper fast enough. One feels the water on one’s skin, the sparkle of it, the turbulence, the ferocity of water cascading down a mountainside.
German would seem to be the perfect language for this rough, woodland ecstasy. I wish I knew German. I have heard enough German to be familiar with its sounds, and German sounds like earth and water in play and contention with one another. Elemental.
“sibyl - poem in eight syllables,” (Utler prefers lower case letters in all instances), has a vatic intensity. It is both violent and sensual. It begins with an epigraph, on the opposing page, by Marina Tsvetaeva: “Sibyl in cinders, Sibyl: a trunk. / The birds incinerate, but God has come.”
The word ‘sibyl’ comes (via Latin) from the Greek word ‘sibylla,’ meaning prophetess.
Syllable, in German, is Silbe, which sounds more like ‘sibyl.’
The poem is divided into eight small stanzas. Here is the seventh, penultimate stanza:
sibyl here: head swims, she: breaks in the swirling heat: whispers,
she whirs: sump, slough slick thighs the: reed belt she wets she en-
girds herself tongues gurgles - adder - she slips off and: sisses
The sibilants here, which I am guessing are in the original German, suggests both the hiss of a fire burning through moist wood, and the sound and movement of a snake. In this instance, an adder, which is deadly. One is reminded that beauty in nature is never without a threat of some sort, at least to our mortality. There is no sense of evil, but of forces too great for human consciousness. This is the sense that Kant and Schiller wrestled with. Human reason, on the one hand, and the higher, transcendental sublime of the external world.
This is a marvelous language, and one that I have not seen before. Gerard Manly Hopkins comes to mind. Sound and sense are so fused, so incorporate, as to produce a language that convulses with elemental intensity.
Burning Deck, 2010
engulf - enkindle, poetry by Anja Utler, translation by Kurt Beals
Burning Deck, 2010
Four Cut-ups, or The Case of the Restored Volume, may be the only book of poetry to indicate the method of its production in the title. This suggests a kind of baldness, an open declaration of strategy, and poetic philosophy. It is like entering a building before it is fully constructed, so that the beams, anchor bolts, and butt joints are exposed. There is the smell of freshly sawn wood and plaster. Voices echo. Buckets and stepladders punctuate the space.
Four Cut-ups has four sections. The poems are untitled. Vocabulary and imagery suggest shared source material for each section, which are titled “Alan, Benjy, Billy…,” “The reproduction of the seascape is unsigned,” “Iris & Bang-Utot,” and “Sucre in French is not sugar in English.”
“The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years,” observes William Burroughs in The Third Mind, “And used by the moving and still camera.”
In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passerby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents… writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit -- all writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point -- had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and across the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4… one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page.
“thought sugars” begins the poem on page 18 of the first section.
thought sugars
the storm / not
water, cognitive
discomfiture of
the bait in place
and position of
fact, after all o-
range is orage save
for n letters in a fine
rain of blue silk
- the gentle rain
its contour
orage, in French, means storm. The poem’s disjunctive structure is an analogue for the chaos of a storm. There is an acute feeling of velocity and turbulence tearing at the poem’s structure, as if the force within were almost too great for the poem’s containment. Disjunction both arouses and defies coherence. The poem’s subject is identical to its structure. Syntax rattles like a can of nuts and bolts. The action of the poem is under high compression. It could explode at any minute.
The poem on page 25, in the second section, presents a calmer climate. The subject is the seashore.
twice at the surface
of the sea and its waves
the representation
of water’s color
is bad. Shot of calm
sea. Slices. Fish
The other noises, voices
across the room
start up again. Lemon, housefly
glass egg raring
to reproduce
verisimilitude
This is a meta-poem whose subject is the nature of representation itself, summed up nicely in the last pretty word, verisimilitude. It’s modesty of size and minimalist bareness belie a richness of information. “Twice at the surface” alludes to Heraclitus and his famous axiom about never being able to step into the same river twice. “Water’s color” refers both to the actual color of the water, but also the rather tame watercolors we often find adorning the walls of motel rooms. “Slices” refers both to slices of fish and the poem’s method of production. Two simple words, lemon and housefly, generate an entire milieu: a room in which someone is squeezing, or just squeezed, a lemon, which has drawn a housefly. We see the room clearly, like a painting by Jean Baptiste Chardin, or Fairfield Porter. It’s a calm scene, which is duplicated in a glass egg, a piece of egg-shaped glasswork, perhaps, reflecting the objects in the room, and so producing a verisimilitude, a world doubled by reflection.
I was startled the first time I opened Utler’s engulf -- enkindle. The work is so elemental. Utler’s poems are highly similar to Lespiau’s, they are small, fragmented, disjunctive, with no apparent subjectivity, though she makes no open declaration of her method of construction. She is a trifle less minimalistic, giving us a bit more description, a few more adjectives, and there is a peculiarly romantic flavor. Romantic in the sense Schiller intended it: underlying beauty is the sublime, which is a force of terrific power, too great for our mortal senses, and contends against reason while leading us to a higher, moral sense of the universe. Here, I am in danger of reading too much into Utler’s poetry, or misinterpreting it altogether, but this I do know: it is full of turbulence. The lines halt and burst and fracture because of the tremendous energy underlying its production.
In the margin to the immediate left of the poem on page 16, are two words: encounter: escape. These serve, like a chapter heading, to suggest the circumstance of the poem.
but feel only: stagger, well, murmur -- a murmuring
stream, so it’s called - not to know, just
to: plunge down towards finally
to: trickle to drip start to spill over
pinechoked till: deep in the lowland
- the gullet, it’s called - as if: sluiced
from the: spit- to the streambed - run-
off - exuded, poured out into
pitching flowing, meandering veins
fray - towards: waterstop - jugal dam,
gurgle and sticks stutters catches: on snares of
hornwort, toothed, flooding the: clearcut mouth
One can feel the poet in a state of considerable excitement struggling to put this scene in words that have the same immediacy and rawness with which the senses apprehend it. The sublime is apparent in shreds, stumbling, in images coming so fast the poet cannot get them down on paper fast enough. One feels the water on one’s skin, the sparkle of it, the turbulence, the ferocity of water cascading down a mountainside.
German would seem to be the perfect language for this rough, woodland ecstasy. I wish I knew German. I have heard enough German to be familiar with its sounds, and German sounds like earth and water in play and contention with one another. Elemental.
“sibyl - poem in eight syllables,” (Utler prefers lower case letters in all instances), has a vatic intensity. It is both violent and sensual. It begins with an epigraph, on the opposing page, by Marina Tsvetaeva: “Sibyl in cinders, Sibyl: a trunk. / The birds incinerate, but God has come.”
The word ‘sibyl’ comes (via Latin) from the Greek word ‘sibylla,’ meaning prophetess.
Syllable, in German, is Silbe, which sounds more like ‘sibyl.’
The poem is divided into eight small stanzas. Here is the seventh, penultimate stanza:
sibyl here: head swims, she: breaks in the swirling heat: whispers,
she whirs: sump, slough slick thighs the: reed belt she wets she en-
girds herself tongues gurgles - adder - she slips off and: sisses
The sibilants here, which I am guessing are in the original German, suggests both the hiss of a fire burning through moist wood, and the sound and movement of a snake. In this instance, an adder, which is deadly. One is reminded that beauty in nature is never without a threat of some sort, at least to our mortality. There is no sense of evil, but of forces too great for human consciousness. This is the sense that Kant and Schiller wrestled with. Human reason, on the one hand, and the higher, transcendental sublime of the external world.
This is a marvelous language, and one that I have not seen before. Gerard Manly Hopkins comes to mind. Sound and sense are so fused, so incorporate, as to produce a language that convulses with elemental intensity.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Personal Poem #2
It is 1:13 p.m. Friday afternoon in Seattle
Queen Anne hill to be more exact
I’m in the living room sitting here
in front of the computer typing this
which will one day be in all the literary textbooks
like an ode by John Keats
I will be famous and make appearances on Oprah
except that Oprah’s show ended
so this would have to be a fantasy Oprah
similar in kind to the fantasy of having a poem displayed
on the glossy pages of a literary textbook
for young students with literary inclinations
who all dream of having an enduring work
displayed on the glowing screen of an iPod
this is stupid
I just put earplugs in my ears
because Lewis is next door making a lot of racket
with his power tools and rake and leaf blower
he looks like a Vietnam vet at war with grass and dead leaves
wandering back and forth with grim determination
a gas-powered machine on his back
he will never be famous like John Keats
if he carries on like this
he should just sit down and lean and loaf observing a spear
of summer grass
which would be a lot quieter
at 10:00 this morning I ate a slice of cherry cheesecake
and watched a documentary about life on Saint Hélène
a tiny island in the south Atlantic
after breakfast I began plunging into books
Imagine the task of mounting 10 Saint Pauls
without the convenience of Staircases
John Keats wrote to his brother Tom
August 3rd, 1818, on climbing Ben Nevis
the highest mountain in Great Britain
the whole immense head of the Mountain
is composed of large loose stones
chasms 1500 feet in depth
turn one giddy if you choose to give way to it
We tumbled in large stones and set the echoes at work in fine style
Sometimes these chasms are tolerably clear
sometimes there is a misty cloud which seems to steam up
and sometimes they are entirely smothered with clouds
Queen Anne hill to be more exact
I’m in the living room sitting here
in front of the computer typing this
which will one day be in all the literary textbooks
like an ode by John Keats
I will be famous and make appearances on Oprah
except that Oprah’s show ended
so this would have to be a fantasy Oprah
similar in kind to the fantasy of having a poem displayed
on the glossy pages of a literary textbook
for young students with literary inclinations
who all dream of having an enduring work
displayed on the glowing screen of an iPod
this is stupid
I just put earplugs in my ears
because Lewis is next door making a lot of racket
with his power tools and rake and leaf blower
he looks like a Vietnam vet at war with grass and dead leaves
wandering back and forth with grim determination
a gas-powered machine on his back
he will never be famous like John Keats
if he carries on like this
he should just sit down and lean and loaf observing a spear
of summer grass
which would be a lot quieter
at 10:00 this morning I ate a slice of cherry cheesecake
and watched a documentary about life on Saint Hélène
a tiny island in the south Atlantic
after breakfast I began plunging into books
Imagine the task of mounting 10 Saint Pauls
without the convenience of Staircases
John Keats wrote to his brother Tom
August 3rd, 1818, on climbing Ben Nevis
the highest mountain in Great Britain
the whole immense head of the Mountain
is composed of large loose stones
chasms 1500 feet in depth
turn one giddy if you choose to give way to it
We tumbled in large stones and set the echoes at work in fine style
Sometimes these chasms are tolerably clear
sometimes there is a misty cloud which seems to steam up
and sometimes they are entirely smothered with clouds
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Gasoline
We live in a world of gasoline. Everything depends on gasoline. Food, childbirth, furniture, jewelry, appointments, vacations, wars, exhibits, construction, exploration, diplomacy, clothing, cologne, haircuts and rock concerts. Gasoline.
The food on your table travels an average of 1,500 miles to get there. There is even a term for it: Food Miles.
The word in French is ‘essence.’ I prefer essence. There is philosophy in the word ‘essence,’ and fumes. Fumes of power. Fumes of thought. In one manner or another, there is essence in everything.
One fuels cars. The other is a problem without a solution, but fuel for endless discussion.
The word ‘gasoline’ reeks of chemicals, sinister refineries in Texas and Alabama, eyes burning with hydrocarbons, lungs straining for clean air.
I’m nervous around gasoline. You can smell fire in it. The perfume of death. The fumes are potent. They penetrate the olfactories, permeate them with the latent crackle of violence and revolution. The roar of explosion. The smell of anarchy. Molotov cocktails. Window panes blown out of a store.
I will postpone a trip to the gas station as long as possible. Sometimes (in fact, all too often) until the needle is on empty. I know it’s risky, but in some ways it is strangely pleasurable. I am daring fate, risking the loss of power in the midst of traffic. It’s weirdly exciting, but also stupid. One of these days I am going to pay for that peccadillo. I mean, what’s the big deal?
I hate self-service gas stations. It is one of the reasons I enjoy driving in Oregon, where self-service is illegal. You are guaranteed that someone will come out and pump gas for you.
The place we usually go to get our gas now is a mini-mart called the Plaid Pantry at the bottom of the hill at the intersection of Valley and Taylor Streets. There are four pumps. Quite often, all pumps will be in use. If there is still, say, a quarter tank left in the car, I’ll go back at another time. But if the needle is on empty, it means waiting.
I have often wondered about the disappearance of gas stations. There used to be one on every corner. Now, there is only one within a radius of 5 miles, and that’s within a city. It seems paradoxical. The more cars there appear to be on the road, the fewer gas stations there are to provide them with gas.
Of course, no gas stations at all should be the norm. No cars. A modest fleet of trucks, buses, and trains should be all that we need for transportation and the delivery of goods. But this is Utopia. The actuality is far different, and more intractable. The world teeters on apocalypse. Conferences convened to solve the problem of climate change end in abject failure.
The use of petroleum is nothing less than insane. Pumping oil out of the ground, or the floor of the ocean, destroys the ecology and is just plain ugly. But the real menace is the carbon that it produces. 350 parts per million of CO2 is as high as carbon emissions in the atmosphere can go without destabilizing the climate. Atmospheric CO2 reached 390 ppm in 2010. The results have been catastrophic. Between April 25 and 28 of this year, over 300 confirmed tornadoes culminated in 317 fatalities. 41 people were killed in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Hospitals filled to capacity. People with broken bones were told not to go to them. In Birmingham, a tornado produced by the same supercell, was so huge that television reporters could not zoom their cameras out far enough to get the entire funnel into the frame.
In May of 2010, while BP’s underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico was hemorrhaging millions of gallons of oil per day, Roberta and I stopped driving as much as we could. We are aware that this little modification in our driving habits won’t change a damn thing, but driving just doesn’t feel right. It’s like trying to drink again after a few visits to AA. The spirit sickens behind the wheel. One turns the ignition key feeling an acute sense of toxic decadence.
I bought some gear at REI so that I could run small errands, pick up books at the library or medicine at the Safeway pharmacy, while I was out running. Seattle’s public transit system is decrepit and dirty, but we live close enough to downtown to either walk or grab a short ride on one of the buses to get to an exhibit at the art museum or restaurant or movie. A short ride on the bus is tolerable, although the best option is the monorail. It only goes a mile, but it’s a blast. One has the sensation of flying through the city on a magic carpet.
The food on your table travels an average of 1,500 miles to get there. There is even a term for it: Food Miles.
The word in French is ‘essence.’ I prefer essence. There is philosophy in the word ‘essence,’ and fumes. Fumes of power. Fumes of thought. In one manner or another, there is essence in everything.
One fuels cars. The other is a problem without a solution, but fuel for endless discussion.
The word ‘gasoline’ reeks of chemicals, sinister refineries in Texas and Alabama, eyes burning with hydrocarbons, lungs straining for clean air.
I’m nervous around gasoline. You can smell fire in it. The perfume of death. The fumes are potent. They penetrate the olfactories, permeate them with the latent crackle of violence and revolution. The roar of explosion. The smell of anarchy. Molotov cocktails. Window panes blown out of a store.
I will postpone a trip to the gas station as long as possible. Sometimes (in fact, all too often) until the needle is on empty. I know it’s risky, but in some ways it is strangely pleasurable. I am daring fate, risking the loss of power in the midst of traffic. It’s weirdly exciting, but also stupid. One of these days I am going to pay for that peccadillo. I mean, what’s the big deal?
I hate self-service gas stations. It is one of the reasons I enjoy driving in Oregon, where self-service is illegal. You are guaranteed that someone will come out and pump gas for you.
The place we usually go to get our gas now is a mini-mart called the Plaid Pantry at the bottom of the hill at the intersection of Valley and Taylor Streets. There are four pumps. Quite often, all pumps will be in use. If there is still, say, a quarter tank left in the car, I’ll go back at another time. But if the needle is on empty, it means waiting.
I have often wondered about the disappearance of gas stations. There used to be one on every corner. Now, there is only one within a radius of 5 miles, and that’s within a city. It seems paradoxical. The more cars there appear to be on the road, the fewer gas stations there are to provide them with gas.
Of course, no gas stations at all should be the norm. No cars. A modest fleet of trucks, buses, and trains should be all that we need for transportation and the delivery of goods. But this is Utopia. The actuality is far different, and more intractable. The world teeters on apocalypse. Conferences convened to solve the problem of climate change end in abject failure.
The use of petroleum is nothing less than insane. Pumping oil out of the ground, or the floor of the ocean, destroys the ecology and is just plain ugly. But the real menace is the carbon that it produces. 350 parts per million of CO2 is as high as carbon emissions in the atmosphere can go without destabilizing the climate. Atmospheric CO2 reached 390 ppm in 2010. The results have been catastrophic. Between April 25 and 28 of this year, over 300 confirmed tornadoes culminated in 317 fatalities. 41 people were killed in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Hospitals filled to capacity. People with broken bones were told not to go to them. In Birmingham, a tornado produced by the same supercell, was so huge that television reporters could not zoom their cameras out far enough to get the entire funnel into the frame.
In May of 2010, while BP’s underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico was hemorrhaging millions of gallons of oil per day, Roberta and I stopped driving as much as we could. We are aware that this little modification in our driving habits won’t change a damn thing, but driving just doesn’t feel right. It’s like trying to drink again after a few visits to AA. The spirit sickens behind the wheel. One turns the ignition key feeling an acute sense of toxic decadence.
I bought some gear at REI so that I could run small errands, pick up books at the library or medicine at the Safeway pharmacy, while I was out running. Seattle’s public transit system is decrepit and dirty, but we live close enough to downtown to either walk or grab a short ride on one of the buses to get to an exhibit at the art museum or restaurant or movie. A short ride on the bus is tolerable, although the best option is the monorail. It only goes a mile, but it’s a blast. One has the sensation of flying through the city on a magic carpet.
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