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.

A friendly Valentine's

Had an extra friend-ly Valentine's Day, since Ashley & I have a pretty good time the rest of the year, ate at Carraba's, etc. One thoughtful friend, whose work I greatly admire, gave me an artistic digital Valentine (below). At the moment, I was inspired to respond with a work of art, myself; mind you, the poem was conveyed via facebook as it is merely appropriate to our century's manifestation of personal correspondence. Granted, I'm cheating the ephemeral vagary of time/chance by publishing it here, however, it's only fair that my first digitally composed poem (I write everything on paper) finds a home on my oft-neglected weblog. It is a short eulogy to the work of a friend. Please bear in mind that my premature, unformulated poetic approach (and that of any writer, for that matter) insufficiently refers to/describes the artist and/or her work, which it commemorates. You can learn more about the artist and her work by clicking: Kasey Lou Lindley.



for Kasey Lou Lindley


poems are for suckers
as is love (they say
conditional—
can't be but so
(parenthesize apostrophe t
& willing to bet
like is too
like this reply
like everything
guess I shd comment
/compliment
the weather
/you,
do something spontaneous
less redundant
flagpot girdquill
ghana(dia)rrhea
discograflaccid bricolava
hailmary fullofgrace
afresh to the sense
your art's
a continent a
an aphor-disiac
that's not to say: platitude
a poem almost
that feels new (always?
now that can't be
can't but be
—conditional
like those cats
& the date
I'm
hap: pee
(vale, 'n, time

"Old men write books about cataclysms," therefore heroism and mortality

Philip Roth discusses his new Nemesis and what he intuits is the decline of the novel in the wake of the lit-digerati. This is undoubtedly an old codger's take on "those darn things," though few would deny that questions of concentration (both the attentive and process of pure cognitive consumption sort) linger in most everybody's mind at the merest mention of e-texts and alternative reading (or should it go by another name) practice. Is the tradition of holistic mental engrossment via alphabetic print justified? What are the benefits/disadvantages of our tuning-out capacities? Isn't reading an archaic and wasteful distraction? Is a return to primarily oral/aural/visual transmission desirable? Hasn't television and new media already supplanted that musty literary medium? Is there a use for history/values-based cultural conditioning? The ultra-capitalist answer is simple. My own, however, is not. But, half-ironically, I don't have time to divulge that now. This blogging business leaves too many openings for hyperlink-sensitive absorption and confusion/obfuscation of sources and their legitimacy. And anyway, that grad. school personal statement isn't going to finish writing itself.

Rather than an acute sense of the responsibilities of the reader, there's always room for that on those of the writer; which Philip Roth succeeds:

"'Writing a book is solving problems,' he said. 'You don't think about your place in this or that, or prizes, or reviews, or anything. It's the last thing that's on your mind, it's the work that is on your mind.'"

Writing as revelation

INTERVIEWER: "So [writing]’s quite unlike preaching?"
BALDWIN: "Entirely. The two roles are completely unattached. When you are standing in the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what you’re talking about. When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway."
BALDWIN: "I don’t know, I doubt whether anyone—myself at least—knows how to talk about writing. Perhaps I’m afraid to."
INTERVIEWER: "Do you see it as conception, gestation, accouchement?"
BALDWIN: "I don’t think about it that way, no. The whole process of conception—one talks about it after the fact, if one discusses it at all. But you really don’t understand it."

Paris Review: The Art of Fiction No. 78 (Interview with James Baldwin)

Blindly co-opted, complicit Barthesian, or too lazy (impatient) to explain why so?

"Nobody will deny that there is such a thing, for instance, as a writing typical of Esprit or of Les Temps Modernes. What these intellectual modes of writing have in common, is that in them language, instead of being a privileged area, tends to become the sufficient sign of commitment. To come to adopt a closed sphere of language under the pressure of all those who do not speak it, is to proclaim one's act of choosing, if not necessarily one's agreement with that choice. Writing here resembles the signature one affixes at the foot of a collective proclamation one has not written oneself. So that to adopt a mode of writing—or, even better, to make it one's own—means to save oneself all the preliminaries of a choice, and to make it quite clear that one takes for granted the reasons for such a choice. Any intellectual writing is therefore the first of the 'leaps of the intellect'. Whereas an ideally free language never could function as a sign of my own person and would give no information whatsoever about my history and my freedom, the writing to which I entrust myself already exists entirely as an institution; it reveals my past and my choice, it gives me a history, it blazons forth my situation, it commits me without my having to declare the fact." -Roland Barthes, "Writing Degree Zero"

(The real excuse is that Roland Garros devours more of my attention at the moment)