Skip to main content

From "thirsty poems"

the annals of robinson crusoe—experiments in form

1: arrival
the weed gets dislodged from the deep;
so lonesome I could weep.

the furry fruits sprout well beyond your reach;
and how I fear the beach.

from the head land razor reefs are all too plain;
I dream of mittle europa, and spain.

2: remembrance
in my father’s house are many wonders
I can taxonomise them still
fabrics culled from the tropics
machinery made at home
porcelains from china
idols of asia minor
religious emblems scraped in rome
curious american hydroscopics
and of course grotesque hookahs from brazil.
evidence of adventurers, traders and their unfair plunders,
how I miss it so.

3: adjustment
I love my goat
who gives me love unconditional
I long for the boat

I hate cats, cats
they perform excess inexcusable
and collude with rats

at first they charmed me seemed
so free and full of such
shenanigans but they give to take away and
I have to keep these rabbits in that hutch
to keep them from being molested as
that oft discovered corpse attested to.

4: maladjustment, psychosis
over the years I see the importance of
leaf migration has allayed my fears and
perturberance of belief in an eventual salvation.
the way they blow across the island face
so exigent and also somehow motivated the flow of
matter into space my hope resurgent invigorated.

yet, in the darkness when tornadoes rape the mangroves
and the leaves become as spectres at my perimeter
fence they are my intimidator the best forgotten stark
ness that hectors my joy like desperadoes who as
thieves descend and occupy the pass in filthy droves.

-----
Note: this was first published in Aabye's Baby

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

For a long time I have felt that poetics has not taken into consideration a great deal written about issues pertaining to difference and repetition to be found in contemporary philosophy. As poetry's whole energy and dynamic is based on a fundamental relation to differential versus repeated units of sense (sense both in terms of meaning and the sensible), any work on difference and repetition would be welcome. That some of the greatest thinkers of the age, notably Deleuze and Derrida, have made both issues core to their whole philosophical systems is so remarkable that poetics is impoverished if it does not fully acknowledge this. Not that I am one to talk. Although I am aware of the centrality of Deleuze's work to postmodern poetry, I have as yet not been able to really address this but in Poetry Machines I began that work at least. In preparation for the few hundred words I wrote there, here are the 10,000 words I annotated in preparation. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Postmodern Poetry (2)

Postmodern Poetry, A Definition Postmodern poetry is an international phenomena of aesthetic multiplicities as is typical of many postmodern cultural products. It also operates self-consciously, even foundationally, within a philosophical and/or ideological context where categorisation and closed definition are rejected in favour of investigation and free play. A definition, therefore, can only ever be of a general nature and it must always be accepted that such a definition is closer to a strategy or better, as it is poetry of which we speak, a pattern into which the rangy, tireless energy of the poetry has settled for an unspecified but limited period of time. I could, at this point, pass the buck entirely and suggest that postmodern poetry exceeds definition but this would not be true for it operates within an environment still constituted by modernist values of summation and fixity for which definitions are essential. If I do not impose a definition some other agency will perha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Frank O'Hara, Collected Poems pp.201-300 Annotated

Frank O’Hara, Collected Poems (Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1995) Pages 201-300 Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection September 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Frank O’Hara “In the Movies”, 206-209 · interesting that this poem has not been picked up by the critics for it is an easy point to indicate the importance of films in O'Hara’s aesthetic indicating the dissolves, cuts and montage effects he has been credited with and whilst I do not like to appropriate analogous terms in this fashion the montage of O'Hara is easily distinguishable form the collage of Ashbery in that here it is the movement from image to image in an attempt at seamlessness, a basic synaesthesia of subject in the now of consciousness. · in addition to the basic aesthetic implications of this use of films there are also certain other issues that he raises here but does not rea...
1 comment
Read more