Disruptive distinctions

Sometimes (well, oftentimes, and with the semester beginning, oftener-times) I need diversions, stark as a good Onion headline ("Nation's Weirdest Teenager Buys Season One DVD Of 'Murphy Brown'"), but nuanced enough to colonize my interest for several accidental minutes. At once permanent—or for the moment, permanently accessible, as in, wherever there's a WiFi hotspot—and ephemeral—no "object" in the sense of tangibly differentiated space; always remote from "I"—the projections/projectables/projective virtual "things" so far incapable of being possessed, bought (copyrighted?), except through Lindley's temporal act of installation (in this sense, of course, it is owned), or if I permit the temptation to fetishistically stick it to my desktop background; what do I want to say about them? Something simple. Something like, "She does it best." Isn't this the point, by varying degrees of totalizing statement, which art critics arrive at in their praise of a person, or his/her craft? I don't know. I'm happy it isn't my business to be an expert on such questions (for now, at least), but if I could just give a more intelligent, less inherited, sense of what I mean by "transfix," when I say I am trans-fixed (I stand or sit, and I am moved) by these pieces. If I could only inhabit these virtual works besides just within my own mind—but that thinking is illusory. The material, the tempo-real cannot (shouldn't?) be transmuted by the mind (only within its conceptual parameters). Nor can the virtual object coagulate, calcify, inhabit space in a solid, intransigent way; and this is the axiomatic takeaway of the medium itself: nothing, essentially, exists in this way. All is finally subject to corrosion, structural decomposition, liquification, elemental reconstitution.

I'm not nailing this aesthetic definition-thing down. It would be a mistake to think I could even attempt a potent critical investigation of Lindley's craft. And I don't mean for this reverence to lend more autonomy to the work than is due; it is just one of those pieces I would rather (for better/worse) let speak for itself.

"D.2" by Kasey Lou Lindley

Whoso list to punt

Lately I've been producing stuff of a different kind, so I figure now's a good time to let go of the few poems I was hoping to get "published" this year. Of the five or so, I was least fond of "roominations," however I am grateful to the editors at Übernothing for its publication. So without further disparagement, I enter/exit the quixotic threshold of "literary" anxiety and cheerfully present four mediocre pieces of a sort that may look nothing like what I'm currently doing; nor can I expect them to look like themselves 1 in the future:


of plural and obstinate

of plural and obstinate
of cause and affect
of absorption and distress
of authority and love
of home and difference
of opinions and suspicion
of limits and extension
of contents and formed
of motion and continence
of you and our
of lapse and track
of hearing and thus
of quiet and indicative
of life and end
of progress and history
of facts and undeterred
of intention and sense
of being and withheld
of judgment and regardless
of cooperation and contempt
of court and defense
of nation and state
of mind and body
of water and finality
of ambition and slumber
of reading and life
of examination and wastes
of time and where
of which and resisting
of definition and infinitude
of possible and specified
of variable and absolute
of reason and passions
of other and binary
of one and same
of kind and quality
of care and privatization
of wealth and share
of space and occupation
of land and sea
of consciousness and habit
of perpetuum and disruption
of stasis and variation
of use and significance
of relative and general
of particular ands


on time align

beckons back to the gee
ography of it

doesn't appear this
pier's for peering

does & shouldn't be
couldn't would'st

an other's gaze at
quarter to ten

better head back
& meet de pressed

did you set the DVR
such a gift time

brushing trace thru city
grass no mention made

of the water reference no tide
besides

the eye floats itself
surfeited engulfed the point

of reference look out
& see you're observed

speech wears its watch
down the well of inscrutability

a 4-way stop step
forward pacing deliberate a-

cross the walk slows
white pickup each awaiting

the other's halt in
time meted tension

anticipate the steps
observing each climb


speak compared cruelty 2

speak compared cruelty
compared could have
but older which
pity these breakfast for
enemy about existed that forever
families certain rank
privilege including they
had to have
would all me could
had believe get from first
this would axe insult
lightning cemetery
we over that terror
or deserves their reverence
worst ludicrous ever
elect it other a
of and families own
they occurred
could it were asked it
he didn't voluntarily
steal the crimes
myself I to prove
change you to thing
watch they become body
shout of invented
whose is on have
wholesome gov't
not real to extraneous
out the to loyalty was
Connecticut power
founded they alter
their expedient


to thing of

there's no seeing thing
thru barricades

to see
has been seen

or be—their no thing
threw craves

scene of nothing been
to white no

thing alights a bee
whose knees have seeing

that's the matter
of to and/or is

another matter bar-
ricuda undersea

between (these) more &
less parallel beams, mat-

erial batters
being seen to nothing

the mattering of
manners bantered

like light's umbrage
sees there's no matter

to thing of


<#
AMB

1 All my poems tend to undergo variation/transmutation in the act of revision, in the presence of new poems/ideas, and esp. in the labor of performance.

2 This poem was constructed via a simple chance-operation using pages from a volume of James Baldwin's collected writings. The (incidental) content/form lends itself to surprisingly justifiable hermeneutic manifestations, particularly when read aloud at various tempos and cadences. I plan to experiment with it more (perhaps using voice-layer technology) at some point. Comes what may.

Missing you, Sarasota <#